Sideways subdivision: Sin City homebuilders find new ways to pack ‘em in.

The predictability of a post-1950s subdivision in most of suburban America almost renders it impervious to analysis.  After all, there’s nothing exotic about a middle-class home with 3-4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and a two-car garage.  Most Americans encounter such houses on a daily basis, if they don’t already live in one.  And the prevalence of these middle-class fiefdoms achieves an ever greater level of banality in a city like Las Vegas, which barely even existed before post-war suburbanization.  At the time of the 1945 Potsdam Conference, Vegas was little more than a big town of 15,000 people (Reno was the state’s biggest city); over 97% of its population growth occurred at a time when the average household already owned at least one vehicle.  Virtually no other major metro is as post-war as Vegas; even some of the other Sun Belt boomtowns (Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City) surged relatively soon after suburbanization (1950s and 60s).  Meanwhile, all though Las Vegas exploded at that time as well, it only went from “tiny” to “small”: its dot on the average map only grew significantly by the 1980s.  Most houses throughout Clark County (which encompasses Vegas and all its suburbs) are less than forty years old.  Demand to live in greater Sin City has prompted an explosion of mass-produced housing, emphasizing expediency over individuality, though this also has apparently elicited a quirky phenomenon I’ll call the “sideways subdivision”.

Sideways subdivision is a provocative term that doesn’t make sense at first blush, and certainly the photo above doesn’t reveal anything that justifies it.  Frankly, the image looks like quite a bit of suburban tract housing built in the last twenty-five years; apart from some of the Spanish colonial stylizations common throughout the American Southwest (faux-adobe building material, barrel tile roofs) one might encounter the physical form just about anywhere.  These homes fit on parcels that are typically twice as deep as they are wide, and, as suburbia goes, are quite small—well under one-tenth of an acre.  Driveways are minimal, and the two-car garage sits tucked within the primary massing of the home, with a bedroom likely occupying the space directly above.  The configuration doesn’t result in a tremendous amount of street appeal or distinction because the garage is so prevalent.  However, I am chary to offer a knee-jerk condemnation of this housing form, because it is incredibly spatially efficient.  And, while we often associate such garage-centric façades with suburbia, a huge portion of middle-class neighborhoods in supremely urban San Francisco also fit this typology.  And people don’t gripe about housing aesthetics in San Fran.

After the completion of the Hoover Dam and the increasing ubiquity of air conditioning, people from across the nation began flocking to this dusty basin in the eastern expanses of the Mojave Desert.  It surpassed Reno as Nevada’s biggest city in the 1960 Census.  Prudent developers recognized the need to conserve land, as the urbanization spread its concrete tentacles to the mountain ranges that surround the basin.  The marketplace’s acknowledgement of diminishing developable land has yielded higher-than-average prices for real estate despite Las Vegas’s sprawling reputation.  Lots need to be small and densely packed for the lower-middle class clientele to afford a little patch of paradise.  And thus, developers give us the sideways subdivision like this one in unincorporated Clark County, Nevada: an area usually referred to as Enterprise, about ten miles southwest of Fremont Street—the heart of Las Vegas’s “historic” downtown.

I’m more cautious than usual at providing strict details about where in metro Vegas these homes are, primarily because I’ve learned that one of the domiciles I feature prominently in this article has opted for Google Street View’s “blurred house” feature.  I wish to respect this household’s privacy.  That said, the photo above at least offers a hint as to why this is a sideways subdivision.  Any ideas?  Check out the homes on the left of the photo.

Fundamentally they are no different from the ones on the opposite side of the street, except with a twist! 

The layout reapplies the normal tenth-of-an-acre archetype, but the homebuilder basically uses the “rotate” tool in AutoCAD, SketchUp, or Revit.  And thus I brand it the sideways subdivision, even if the majority of the homes don’t follow this scheme.  Two homes do, and therefore, from the road, I was staring at the side of the house; that’s enough for me.

About the only other aspect of the home that needed to adapt is the routing of the driveway.  In these two sideways homes, the cars must enter the garage by twisting sharply at a right angle.  It’s probably initially tricky entering or exiting the garage in this fashion, but people can adapt to the extent that their vehicles’ turning radii will allow.  The other somewhat jarring feature to homes in a sideways subdivision is the aesthetics:

Fundamentally, this is the side of the house yet also the front based on the conventions to which we apply rules for “front yard” and “side yard”.  It minimizes the notion of these homes having a true front with curb appeal, and yet, since everything in this subdivision is nearly identical, minus a few window ornaments or cantilevered second floors, does it really matter that visitors stare directly at the side of these two homes?

Why do this anyway?  A map reveals the reasoning, and it isn’t rocket science.  (Again, I deliberately blurred out street names to protect privacy of one of these sideways homeowners.)

A zoomed-in Google map shows enough parcel detail to reveal the exact nature of the subdivisions necessary to achieve this configuration.  I placed a purple box around what I imagine to be the original parcel—or, at least, the parcel as it existed prior to this development.  I suspect it was a residual parcel after other iterations immediately to the east and west for further tract housing developments like this one.  The “parent” parcel was sufficiently deep along the y-axis to fit a number of homes on narrow lots, all of which use a newly created cul-de-sac for access.  But road width requirements—partially shaped through regulation and partially though market demand—only allowed enough space for a row of eight homes on the west side.  The east side wasn’t big enough to form a mirror image.  (If this cul-de-sac street had bisected the parent parcel, then neither side would have been able to fit an adequately sized conventional lot for the tract homes.)  As it stands, given the current configuration, the available space on the east side had room for exactly two homes, but if and only if rotated 90°, so that the side of the house is the closest to the curb.

The sideways subdivision phenomenon here creates an unusual and—I’d wager, by many people’s perspectives—an uncomfortable arrangement.  The home in the foreground, opening the front door and looking out, stares at the back of the home in the background.  With privacy walls, this matters less.  But it begs the question: why not create a tiny stub street, like I outlined in orange on the Google map, by which both homes could branch off their driveways and at least offer the sense of looking at one another’s façades, and of having public road access to the front of their home?  I’ve ruminated on residential stub streets before; in many instances they serve as a placeholder for potential future development.  I suspect the developer avoided this layout for two primary reasons: it would cut into the available land for each of the two private lots (which are already small enough to have minimal front/back yards), and it would create that much more burden in the form of a right-of-way that Clark County Public Works must maintain.

Okay, sure: it’s only half of a sideways subdivision.  But it’s hard not to contrast these two homes with the more conventional layout on the opposite side of the street:

Do homes that address the street with a traditional front and back have more value?  I did a quick scan on trulia.com and, to my surprise, on this date of publication, at least one of the sideways homes is worth nearly $50,000 more than four of the frontways homes across the street, despite all being nearly identical in square footage.  And all the homes in these photos are worth more than their counterparts would be in almost any Midwestern city, including Alpha City Chicago.  Even as suburbanization stretches closer to rim of this Mojave basin, and even as the bounties of Lake Mead and (especially) the Colorado River come under greater strain, Las Vegas remains one of the hottest destinations (pun intended) for aspiring middle-class homebuyers.

Maybe these skinny-lot sideways subdivisions will be the 21st century’s answer to the cul-de-sac.