Quote:
Originally Posted by rousseau
That's a perfect case study right there. That's as close as you're going to get between Toronto and Detroit, and yet, they're still very different.
The houses in Detroit are bigger, wider, more muscular looking, and on bigger lots. Streets in American cities are also more monolithic for socio-economic reasons. You don't get great variation in one street or neighbourhood the way you do in Toronto.
Look around that Toronto one: you've got big brick homes on one side, and some semi-detached on the other! They come in all shapes in sizes on that street. You just never see that kind of variation on American streets. They're much more monolithic.
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Yep. It's very rare in Toronto to see streets of identical houses as very little was built speculatively at the turn of the century. Whereas you had entire blocks in American cities built off the same template. Hell I have a book that details the rare occasions where you get an entire street (one side at that) of identical houses built speculatively by a single builder. There aren't many. Interestingly, a lot more in Hamilton, but still not to the same level as in the US.
You also had private transit companies building neighbourhoods in the US using the streetcar as a loss leader. Hence the larger lot sizes. In Toronto and Montreal (probably other cities in Canada too) even public transit systems generally operated on a for-profit basis until after WWII. The TTC was formed in 1922 and only operated lines at a loss in the 1950s with the formation of the metro government. So you really only had extensions after a neighbourhood became dense enough to warrant it. Large lot sizes didn't make sense.