Housing strategy #1: the far, far suburbs - Special Report: The Endangered Western Home

Sunset, May, 1993 by Peter Fish, Daniel Gregory

"The real estate agent walked in," recalls Charis, "took a look around, and told me, 'Honey, you couldn't get $120,000 for this. Just walk away.'"

That's what the Ortegas did--declared bankruptcy and went into foreclosure. They weren't alone: in California, foreclosures rose 60 percent just in 1992, and on the Ortegas' street alone, three other families are facing the same situation.

Some hopeful news came this spring: Stephen was tentatively offered a good job in Westlake Village, 70 miles away. But the Ortegas aren't sure they can save their house--or if they want to. "We're not going to live for a house again," says Stephen. "The kids thought living off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches was fun. I couldn't tell them it was all we could afford."

LOT SIZE As land prices rise, lot sizes generally shrink. Larry Riggs of Warmington Homes in Costa Mesa, California, notes that land costs became prohibitively expensive in many areas during the 1980s. "The answer was smaller lots. For a while the usual lot size was about 10,000 square feet. Then came the 7,200-square-foot lot, the 6,000-square-foot lot, and so on." Typical lot sizes today range from 5,000 to 7,000 square feet.

HOUSE SIZE Even as lots continued to shrink in the '80s, houses were getting bigger. Today's typical entry-level tract house is larger than those built 30 or 40 years ago. Riggs recalls, "In 1972, we did 1,600-square-foot single-story houses with four bedrooms and two baths. Some of the bedrooms were smaller than 10 by 10. You almost couldn't get a bed and a dresser in the room! As we progressed through the '70s and '80s, rooms got larger and there were more of them."

GROWING UP The L-shaped, one-story subdivision ranch house of the 1950s and '60s flourished in an era of larger lots. On smaller lots, with less room to spread out, the ranch house just didn't fit. The two-story house covered the smaller lot more efficiently. According to Riggs, "The only way to combat the land shrinkage was to create a sense of volume vertically, not horizontally, inside the home. The main thing was to attract attention upward toward the ceiling." As a result, vault and cathedral ceilings became popular.

CHANGING BUYERS With the help of focus groups and neighborhood surveys, developers have become more sophisticated in addressing the changing needs of the buyer. "Thirty years ago we were designing for Ozzie and Harriet and two to four children," explains Randall Lewis of Lewis Homes in Upland, California. "Now we are building for a variety of markets. There might be 40 market segments with different design implications. For a family with two toddlers, you need to keep the bedrooms next to the master bedroom. If the family has teenagers, the bedrooms need to be away from the master bedroom--parents don't want to hear all the rock music. And teenagers need more room for all their stuff, so you steal a little space from the master bedroom. If the kids are in college, you want the space back in the master bedroom, and you put some space back in the den."