Now that’s an interesting way of doing infill housing
The City of Portland, as part of their sensible relaxing of zoning codes to allow people to build houses more densely than the standard suburban 50x100 lot, did a competition a few years back for some dense-pack house designs that could be used (almost) for free on narrow lots. People have been using these plans, and I’ve seen 3-4 of them built up during my ramblings through the east side of the city.
I spotted this one when I was heading home from Hawthorne Blvd this afternoon, so (because I only had the 55mm Super-Tak on my Pentax at the time) I used it as an anchor for an autostitched photo of new housing in the inner city. When I got home and assembled the photo, I noticed that the Vargas on the right, despite being crammed right up against the property line, had a very expansive side yard which was bookended by another narrow lot house that was similarly packed up against its property lines.
Brand new buildings, brand new fences.
What I suspect happened is that the developer bought a doublewide lot, split the now 100 ft empty space into three lots, built on the two edge lots (the Vargas and the other new narrow house,) then left the middle lot empty and made it into their own yard. If so, that’s fairly clever – you get a 66 x 100 lot with a nice 40x100 yard which, if you run into very hard times, you can then split off from your house, build another narrow house, and pocket the change. (The aerial photos of the area show the other house and a nice wide treed empty lot, so it looks like the developer didn’t even have to scrape anything (except possibly where the other new house is.))
It’s unfortunate that the standard house designs are set up so that if you put wide sideyard in it looks like someone came and scraped out the house that used to be there. If I was doing development like this, I’d find it very difficult to avoid modifying the Vargas houseplan to take advantage of the view (as well as modifying it to rip out the “master bathroom” (a good place for an office), the two-story-high ceiling in the living room, and the loooong hall leading from the front door to the living room & stairs.)