Semi-detached houses... why?

Having grown up in a traditional 1950s 3-bed semi and lived in both terraced and detached houses as an adult, all I can ask is... why?

Terraced houses

Plus points
- lower construction costs and very efficient use of utility connections (which run along the street)
- fewer outside walls, so lower heating costs.
- back garden is a safe space. You can leave your kids to play and they can't wander out onto the street. Burglars can't wander in and pinch stuff.
- you don't need to lock your back/garden door, unless you live near the end of the row. I'm assuming a London-style arrangement where your back garden backs onto somebody else's back garden, not the strange Northern thing with a ginnel down the back.

Minus points
- you can't blast our your music and noisy neighbours on either side can make your life a misery.
- homes are narrower, so on-street parking is very limited* if you don't have a front garden/drive.
- UPDATE, Pensieve in the comments reminds us that if you want to do major garden works, you have to shlepp dirty stuff through the house.

Renovation/decoration is a break even, I like it when each one in a row of terraced houses looks slightly different  but original uniformity is quite OK.

Detached houses

Plus points
- you can blast out your music and noisy neighbours are less of an issue
- homes are wider, and more likely to have space for off-street parking in front (or even at the side).
- you can renovate/decorate as you like and it won't clash with next door. They are supposed to be individual.

Minus points
- higher construction costs and less efficient use of utility connections.
- four outside walls, so higher heating costs.
- back garden is not such a safe space, kids could wander onto the street (unless you have a lockable gate on each side). Those lockable gates aren't much use against a determined burglar.
- you have to lock the back/garden door.

So far so good, now, are semi-detached houses some sort of golden middle optimum..?

Semi-detached houses

Plus points
- lower construction and heating costs, and more efficient use of utility connections, than detached.
- good for on- or off-street parking on the whole.

Minus points
- higher construction and heating costs, and less efficient use of utility connections, than terraced.
- back garden is not a safe space. Kids can wander off and burglars can wander in.
- you have to lock your back/garden door.
- you can't blast your music loud and a noisy neighbour can make your life a misery.
- if one half has been 'renovated' and one not, it looks like crap.

The first plus point and first minus point cancel out, so all you are left with is a plus on the parking and the rest is all net negatives, worst of both worlds.

You can tell that people don't really value the space down the side of a semi-detached house that much - when people extend, they tend to extend sideways. Once everybody has done it, what you end up with is very messy terraced houses.
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What have I missed? Why did we do this to ourselves?
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* I accept that in inner-urban areas, off-street parking is an overall minus, cars are out of place and people should walk or take public transport. I'm talking about outer suburbs and rural areas.

The land use trade-off is not between urban and agricultural, it's between farms and forests.

Taken from Eurostat.

Click to enlarge:



UPDATE: Further to Kj's comment, I have done another chart to show the amount of developed land relative to the adjusted value* of agricultural land.

Click to enlarge:



* I applied relative values of 1 to arable land, 1/3 to grassland i.e. pastoral land and 1/20 to woodland. I excluded water areas, wetland, scrubland and bare land.

** The list excludes Malta, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania.

On the correct design of land-user charges

As we all well know, "shotgun shacks" were not made specifically for storing shotguns, they are so-called because they are narrow, and in theory could be cleared with a single blast of a shotgun. And why are such narrow houses/buildings so common in certain areas of the USA..? From Wiki:

Shotgun houses were most popular before widespread ownership of the automobile allowed people to live farther from businesses and other destinations. Building lots were small, 30 feet (9 m) wide at most. An influx of people to cities, both from rural areas in America and from foreign countries, all looking to fill emerging manufacturing jobs, created the high demand for housing in cities.

The New Orleans housing taxation structure contributed to the design of the shotgun in its region. The shotgun utilized a minimized lot frontage, when taxes were based on lot frontage, then when that was subverted by untaxable second floor additions of space AKA the "Camelback", the tax was shifted to number of rooms, which equalized the taxation per square footage within a property.

Remember: it's the frontage, the access to the road, that is the most important bit; it's important for retail/passing trade and narrow fronts shortens walking distances in residential areas (assuming roads radiate outwards from the centre). So the New Orleans land-user charge system encouraged efficient use of roads (and hence land). Where they went wrong was then charging more for two-storey buildings.

Here's an example of a land-user charge which gets it wrong from The Daily Mail:

Barbara Grace, 62, and partner Alan Sarfas, 57, were outraged when they were told that the ground rent for their hut which they use all year round was set to go up to £787 from £702.

But they found that they could get round the increase by reducing the overall size of their 10ft by 8ft 6ins hut overlooking the North Sea at Felixstowe, Suffolk. Instead of paying the extra cash, they used an electric saw powered by a generator to slice off 18 inches from the rear to reduce its overall floor area.

The whole point about beach huts is that they overlook and have direct access to the beach and an uninterrupted view. Those are the "front row seats" and you cannot increase the length of the beach front; once people have plonked themselves down there, the view is being "consumed".

But quite how the huts extend backward is more or less irrelevant. For example, if your hut is 8 yards wide and 4 yards deep, you are  "consuming" twice as much view as a hut which is only 4 yards wide and 8 yards deep, it would be daft to make both land-users pay the same charge; the wider hut should pay twice as much. So as a result of the badly designed land-user charge, this couple has lost some interior space; the council has lost a bit of income and nobody else has gained anything (i.e. the total number of beach front huts has not increased).

If the council charged per running foot width, then there would be incentive to shuffle the huts closer together, instead of having twenty eight-foot wide huts with two-foot gaps, they'd have twenty-five huts with no gaps, or they could have two blocks of twelve huts and a reasonably wide path down the middle so that the hoi-polloi have easier access to the beach.

Just sayin', is all.

Presumably inspired by The Maginot Line

Identity theft. Not.

Just in case anybody is wondering, I am not "Mark Wadsworth, Case Officer"*, whose name appears right at the end of this fascinating document on a planning application for a waste treatment plant published by the Greater LondON Authority**.

Neither am I the actor from Coronation Street, the musician/percussionist from Manchester, or the chubby geek from Tangent Techologies, California. And so on.

* "Mark Wadsworth" is, as you may have gathered, a two-a-penny name, which is why he jazzes up his email address with an extra "s", presumably his middle initial.

** Not to be confused with the LondON Assembly, of course. Or indeed the LondON Development Agency.