Somewhere between now and 1950 (or thereabouts) something went wrong with American housing. Back then, car-fueled sprawl hadn?t yet driven people so far from city centers. At 983 sq ft, the average home was just about right sized for the average household size of 3.54 people (277 sq ft/person). Architect Jonathan Tate told Fast CO.Design said this is what went wrong:

Houses morphed from a consumer good into an investment commodity, which in turn led to developers building cookie-cutter starter homes based on what they deemed to be the most likely to appreciate in value. Houses became more expensive to purchase and maintain, their sizes ballooned, and they were increasingly located in areas far removed from established neighborhoods since it was less expensive to buy greenfield land.
This morph made homes prohibitively expensive to large swaths of the population, evidenced by a 48 year low in homeownership rates in 2015. Tate and developer Charles Rutledge recently launched the Starter Home* project as a response to the commodification of homes, designing and developing housing around how people live.

The first Starter Home* recently went up in New Orleans. It?s 975 sq ft, but its actual footprint is only 473 sq ft. Even with setbacks and some outdoor space, it can fit onto a very small 16.5? x 55? lot. The compact proportions make the house ideal for urban infill development, using lots that might not support conventional homes. This has the benefit of allowing the d...