Tract housing
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Tract housing (also known as Cookie-Cutter Houses) is a style of housing development in which multiple identical, or nearly-identical, homes are built to create a community. Tract housing may encompass dozens of square miles of areas. Tract housing developments are typically found in American suburbs, modeled on the "Levittown" concept.
As a tract housing development only makes use of a few designs, labor costs are reduced because the home builders need not be skilled craftsmen. The builders need only learn the skills and movements of constructing a limited variety of home designs, which can be applied to the other tract homes in the development. In addition, the materials used in the home may be ordered in bulk, reducing materials costs, because all of the homes will be constructed during one time period, and almost entirely from the same materials. Increasingly, components such as roof trusses, plumbing trees, and stair systems are fabricated in factories and installed on site. These practices reduce the final price of the homes, and allow greater profits for the developers.
While early tract houses were virtually identical, buyers demanded developers create individuality in their neighborhoods through cosmetic changes. More sophisticated, architect-designed neighborhoods have changed the face of tract housing. Better designed tract houses 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 are reversed or rooms or garage bays are added or removed to increase variety. The newest neighborhoods include so many builder- or buyer-selected options that it becomes difficult to find two homes alike.
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, however the prudent buyer selects a site and plotting which provides the sun and shade orientation which pleases him.
The concept of tract housing is occasionally mocked in American popular culture, as the basis of a sterile and dispiriting suburbia. In spite of this mocking, ever-increasing numbers of Americans choose to reside in tract homes, including single-family, townhomes, even multi-unit condos and apartments built on the same priciples.
