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Why Do We Live in Houses, Anyway?A brief history of the home.

By Witold RybczynskiPosted Monday, April 16, 2007, at 11:45 AM ET

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Timothy Noah derided house-flaunting journalists, whom he divided into seven types, and wrote about the summer home he doesn't have. In 2005, Austan Goolsbee explained why the housing bubble wasn't a boon to real estate agents; though, according to Douglas Gantenbein, a loss in realtors would probably help the homebuyer, anyway. Daniel Gross noted that CEOs' house sizes climb as their companies' stock plummets.

In America, as in Britain, row houses were a common feature of 19^th-century industrial cities. Today, about half of all houses in metropolitan Philadelphia are still row houses. However, prosperity has given Americans other options, and the row house, or town home, has fallen out of favor in postindustrial cities. In metropolitan Houston and Los Angeles, for example, only about one house in 10 is a row house.

Ninety percent of single-family houses in the United States are detached (in cities, the proportion is only slightly lower). The advantages of detached houses are many: light and air from all sides; greater acoustic and visual privacy; less danger of fire from neighboring buildings; and being able to pass from the front yard to the backyard without going through the interior. Even if the lot is only slightly wider than the house, the difference in terms of privacy is significant. Typically, buyers will pay a 10 percent to 15 percent premium for a detached house over a row house, even if the floor areas are identical.

Americans are hardly alone in favoring free-standing houses; indeed, they could be said to be typical. The first African town I visited, in 1982, was Makurdi, in south-central Nigeria. This sprawling city on the Benue River had about 100,000 inhabitants. I spent a lot of time walking the unpaved streets, blocked with uncollected garbage, which was the reason I was there—our team of Canadian consultants was advising the government on municipal sanitation. The residential neighborhoods consisted of low, free-standing houses on large lots. Although the houses were surrounded not by lawns and flower gardens but by vegetable plots and chicken coops, the meandering streets were shaded by huge trees.

Cities composed largely of houses are common in sub-Saharan Africa, where, as in America, land is plentiful and population density is low. That is not the case in South Asia. But even there, given a choice, people have opted for houses. In New Delhi and Madras, well-to-do Indians occupy neighborhoods of free-standing villas; the poor live in slums—but in row houses. The same pattern is visible in Manila and Bangkok. In 1986 I visited a recently built housing development in Hong Kong's New Territories. The developer proudly showed me around Fairview Park, 5,000 small, semidetached "garden houses." Hong Kong itself is a city of apartments, but Fairview Park had many of the attributes of an Anglo-American garden suburb: landscaped streets lined by individual homes with garages and private gardens.

During the same trip I visited mainland China. In Shanghai, I was taken around extremely bleak apartment blocks belonging to the university. I asked my host, a professor, if he could show me any privately built housing. We drove to a residential neighborhood at the edge of the city. The owners were prosperous farmers who had invested their earnings in their homes—all free-standing houses. The spacious interiors were much larger than the two-room apartment that my host shared with his family. The economic revolution that would sweep the country was only just beginning. I doubt that the homes of university professors have changed much today, but for the growing entrepreneurial class, housing choices have expanded dramatically and now include American-style suburbs with single-family houses.

Even in countries such as France, Germany, and Russia, where many people still live in apartments, the number of single-family houses is growing. "Polls consistently confirm that most Europeans, like most Americans, and indeed most people worldwide, would prefer to live in single-family houses on their own piece of land rather than in apartment buildings," writes University of Illinois professor Robert Bruegmann.It is the global nature of this desire, as much as the Anglo-Dutch tradition, that explains the popularity of single-family housing in the United States. Fast food, Hollywood movies, and American professional sports are a matter of taste, but most immigrants don't have to be sold on the idea of the individual house. It's a universal preference.