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One Home Per Lot Please

By Matt Goyer May 29, 2014

Just stumbled upon the site, One Home Per Lot, which does an excellent job chronicling new housing construction around Seattle and the contortions that developers go to in order to squeeze a home into a space it probably shouldn’t belong.

Of course I’m torn. I’m very pro-development. And I’m lazy. I don’t want a yard to mow. But I do agree, it looks terrible. However, the market is voting. People are selling their lots and people are buying em. And frankly, in many turn around neighborhoods, I’d take a new construction home over what was there any day.

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4 responses to “One Home Per Lot Please”

Michelle says:

May 29, 2014 at 8:18 pm

I really dislike this. I’m seeing it everywhere and it looks wrong. In every case it’s obvious a house was built where it didn’t belong. I don’t care how great and mod the new house is it looks out of place – and sad in this case to see so many beautiful shrubs gone. I bet the hummingbirds are sad.
ninaf says:

May 29, 2014 at 8:51 pm

I love all the modern houses and I am too lazy to do yard work also. If we want to be a large city, we are going to need to make more dense housing. It seems like everyone wants their sfh with a huge lot. That isn’t going to work at this pace. The only problem I have with these new houses is that they are not very accommodating to disabled/older folks since they are built up with a lot of stairs.
Michael F. says:

May 30, 2014 at 10:20 am

One thing that stands out is the size of each of these infill homes. In many cases, we’re seeing 2000+ SF. homes built on these 1/2 lots, when people could easily be developing 12-1500 sf. homes that might seem much more in-scale with the rest of the neighborhood. They could also be less dependent on vertical circulation, as another commenter pointed out.

I’m all for single-family home ownership, and its great to see new, modern infill housing stock. But if you’re maxing out the building footprint both in height and area, you really are depreciating many of the intangible qualities of the surrounding properties (natural daylight, private open-space, neighborhood views), only exacerbating a race to tear down and rebuild the highest perch property in the neighborhood. I don’t know if that’s the right solution for all of Seattle’s inner-ring and 2nd ring suburbs (i.e.: Greenwood, Crown Hill, Phinney Ridge, etc.)
phil says:

June 1, 2014 at 1:06 am

That picture doesn’t tell the real story. Looking at it on Google, you’ll see that the surrounding houses all have big footprints and are close together. You can even see one looming in the background of the before picture.

It would have been better if that little house had been knocked down and two new ones built. That is most likely the future for the older house.

The new one is ugly, but taste is hard to regulate.

One Home Per Lot Please

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