Tract housing (also known as
cookie-cutter housing) is a style of housing development in which multiple identical or nearly-identical homes are built on a tract of land which is subdivided into individual
lotsLots has several meanings:*Lottery*Drawing lots*Legion , the Gadarene demon, sometimes called Lots*Arabian Parts or "Arabic parts" or Lots, such as the Lot of Fortune, which are astrological points used for prediction*Dice...
. Tract housing developments are typically found in North American suburbs that were modeled on the "Levittown" concept and sometimes encompass large areas of dozens of square miles.
Tract housing development only makes use of a few designs, and labor costs are reduced because workers only need to learn the skills and movements of constructing a limited variety of home designs. In addition, as all homes in the development will be built at the same time, the cost of purchasing and transporting building supplies may be reduced due to economies of scale. Components such as roof trusses, plumbing trees, and stair systems are often fabricated in factories and installed on site. This allows contractors to reduce prices, which in turn can make homes more affordable (and more accessible to a larger percentage of the population) and may also allow contractors to reap higher profits.
Early tract homes were often identical, but more recently built tract homes no longer look identical from the exterior; variations range from mass-produced homes with superficial, cosmetic differences to multiple variations in footprint, roof form, and materials. In addition, floor plans may be reversed or rooms or garage bays added or removed. Builders or buyers of new homes may also be able to specialize custom upgrades.
Alternating reversal of floor plans allows the creation of a "utility side" of the house, with common
drop locations from the street utilities, reducing both cost and visual clutter, with the opposite side more pleasing in appearance. Such reversal often ignores potential beneficial orientation relative to sun, wind, and shade.
The concept of tract housing is occasionally mocked in American
popular culturePopular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture...
as the basis of a sterile and dispiriting
suburbSuburbs are defined in various different ways around the world. They can be the residential areas of a large city, or separate residential communities within commuting distance of a city. Some suburbs have a degree of political autonomy, and most have lower population density than inner city...
ia. Nonetheless, the use of tract housing in new American suburban developments continues to dominate.
Housing Colonies
In Europe the majority of subdivided landstrips are built in the style of
row housingIn architecture and city planning, a terrace or row house or townhouse is a style of medium-density housing that originated in Europe in the late 17th century, where a row of identical or mirror-image houses share side walls...
development areas. The model of tract housing had been used widely in the history of
land reclamationLand reclamation is either of two distinct practices. One involves creating new land from sea or riverbeds, the other refers to restoring an area to a more natural state have made it unusable, though its the former definition for which the phrase is most widely used.-Creating new land:-For...
in the 17th to 19th century, especially in the
NetherlandsThe Netherlands is a country in Northwestern Europe, constituting the major portion of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is a parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy. The Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east...
and inner-European (former)
bogA bog or mire is a wetland type that accumulates acidic peat, a deposit of dead plant material—usually mosses, but also lichens in Arctic climates....
s. Modern tract housing had been used for
company townA company town is a town or city in which much or all real estate, buildings , utilities, hospitals, small businesses such as grocery stores and gas stations, and other necessities or luxuries of life within its borders are owned by a single company...
s in the 19th to 20th century, especially in the areas of
coal miningCoal mining is the extraction or removal of coal from the earth by mining. When coal is used for fuel in power generation it is referred to as steaming or thermal coal. Coal that is used to create coke for steel manufacturing is referred to as coking or metallurgical coal...
which attracted a large number of workers. A tract housing area of this type is colloquially known in German as a "(zechen)kolonie"
(G), and in Flemish Dutch and French as a "cité"
(D)/
(F) or "coron"
(F).
See also
- Housing estate
A housing estate is a group of buildings built together as a single development. The exact form may vary from country to country. Accordingly, a housing estate is usually built by a single contractor, with only a few styles of house or building design, so they tend to be uniform in appearance...
- McMansion
McMansion is a pejorative term used to describe a large house, particularly in the United States, that is rapidly constructed using modern labor-saving techniques in a manner reminiscent of food production at McDonald's fast food restaurants. The term is one of many McWords...
- Ticky tacky
Ticky tacky or ticky-tacky is a colloquial term for "shoddy [poor quality] material, as for the construction of standardized housing".It is famously used in this context by Malvina Reynolds in the song Little Boxes, which was also notably covered by Pete Seeger.The term is American in origin, but...