WordNet
n. housing consisting of similar houses constructed together on a tract of land
Wikipedia
Tract housing, also known colloquially in the United States and Canada as cookie-cutter housing, is a type of housing development in which multiple similar homes are built on a tract of land which is subdivided into individual small lots. Tract housing developments are found in world suburb developments that were modeled on the "Levittown" concept and sometimes encompass large areas of dozens of square miles.
Tract housing development makes use of few architectural designs, and labor costs are reduced because workers need to learn the skills and movements of constructing only those designs rather than repeat the learning curve. 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 prefabricated in factories and installed on-site. This allows builders to offer lower prices, which in turn can make homes affordable to a larger percentage of the population.
Early tract homes were often identical, but many tracts since the late 20th century have several designs and other variations in footprint, roof form, and materials, along with options such as garage bays, for a diverse appearance.
The creation of a "utility side" of the house, often on an alley with common drop locations from the street utilities, reduces both cost and visual clutter, with the opposite side more pleasing in appearance. As with other construction, such reversal may take advantage of beneficial orientation relative to sun, wind, and shade.
The concept of tract housing is occasionally mocked in American popular culture as the basis of suburbia; a notable example is the song " Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds. Nonetheless, the use of tract housing in new American suburban residential development remains popular.
Usage examples of "tract housing".
The neighborhoods themselves were comprised almost entirely of tract housing-single-family dwellings thrown up in an era when construction was cheap and the floor plans could be purchased by mail from magazines.
The neighborhoods themselves were comprised almost entirely of tract housing—.
The tract housing started to give way to desert and saguaro cactus.
Nor was it romantic anymore: its sterile silver valleys were becoming domesticated, domed over with tract housing for all the clerks the BLC needed.
Then she was racing north along a county highway that cut across flat, winter-browned fields, a few clusters of tract housing on either side and a factory in the distance, its chimneys spouting gray smoke above the horizon.
These odorous grim industrial barrens interweave elaborately with airfields and showy tract housing developments—.
Not even the general atmosphere of industrial decay, the abandoned mills, some converted to glitzy malls, and the tract housing from the vanished heyday of the textile factories, could depress him.
There were a couple of strips of tract housing, a few examples of the mid-sixties suburbanexplosion, but for the most part Ridgewood's fine homes dated from anearlier, theoretically more innocent time.