This has to do with the cities desiring for “walk-able” neighborhoods. By moving garages to the back you have nicer fronts to homes and can have porches etc. I personally prefer it.

Um, the purpose of the design is to get away from the so-called snout houses, that is, houses where the garages take up 60% of the frontage of the house. The architects and planners are trying to encourage more “neighborly” neighborhoods, picket fences, sipping lemonade of the veranda, and such. They think if we park our cars behind our houses our neighbors will see more of us as we walk around to our front door.

Of course, our side-entry garages still have doorways leading directly into our kitchens, so now our neighbors won’t ever see us.

I think these alley house design are OK if the people who live there are the typical 2 kids and a dog type and the kids are not at the driving age. Imagine what happens if the family is larger and all the kids drives. Where would you park your 4-6 cars? At least with these “snout houses”, there’s drive ways you can park 2 more cars in to keep the street clear. If you don’t have drive ways, the streets will be full of cars and visitor won’t have anywhere to park. That’s one of the reason why I hate alley homes. They’re just big giant condos to me.

IMO water conservation would improve with reductions in back yard landscaping. I don’t know if this was one of the selling points for backyard elimination. The current drought situation is mostly caused by landscape irrigation. I think builders should also be considering local, low-maintenance plant species (flowering cacti for example) rather than the cookie-cutter, green-grass lawns. Hope this isn’t hijacking the thread.

there’s a lack of land and they want to squeeze as much home as they can on the lots. I personally hate the look.

This is a good point. In fact, I’m quite familiar with what happens when neighborhoods are laid out that way. I’m from the south side of Chicago and at the turn of the century up through the 1930s, thousands of bungalow houses were built that had a similar configuration with an alley way. Now, those brick houses still stand, but the streets are hugely congested with parked cars in front of the houses. At the time they were built, no one thought that households would have 2-3 cars in many cases, but I can see where this could happen in these neighborhoods.

I’m kind of indifferent to alley houses. But I do like courtyard houses with central courtyards that are part of the home. You have the courtyard that can be “lived-in.” That’s very appropriate for Southern California and part Spanish/Mexican/Moorish heritage.

I concur with the need to eliminate the green lawn and replace it with hardscape and xeriscape.