Spec houses built on small lots on newly-developed tracts of land. A vast amount of housing being built all at once by developers seeking to make better margins by utilizing economies of scale. Often in such a scenario, custom options are quite limited, and due to the extreme production schedules there is a lot of opportunities for quality to suffer.
Casey

Wikipedia is useful for this type of question.

"Tract housing (also known as cookie-cutter housing) is a style of housing development in which multiple identical or nearly-identical homes are built to create a community. Tract housing developments may encompass dozens of square miles."
More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tract_housing

I think of the old song "Little Boxes" that Pete Seeger (and my mother) used to sing:

"Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same."

Spec houses are different from tract houses. A spec house is a house a builder puts up without a particular buyer in mind. It might be a 250k house or a 3m house. A tract house is as the person above defined it, a house where there are many built that are all identical or similar, or just a few different styles (no custom houses). In the town I grew up in there were several subdivisions of 50-250 houses where there were only 2-4 styles per neighborhood (ranch, split, colonial). Often the cheaper house (ranch) was phase 1, split was phase 2 and colonial was phase 3. As these "tract" subdivisons age they change. Some ranches are made into colonials, colonials are added onto, etc. The later era tract neighborhoods (80s to present) had more of the "mini-McMansion" houses - "colonials" with all kinds of bumpouts and gables to fancy them up. Tract neighborhoods also tend to be very datable - you can easily tell the age of the subidivion by the style of the houses. 60s and 70s houses tended to have roofs pitched too low, for example.

In my area it means....One or 2 builders in a development (maybe 3)...you pick the house you want off the bulletin for a few available floor plans and elevations. You are not usually able to customize, structurally, anything from your neighbors houses.

a few tract/track builders in my area would include: Pulte, MI, Ryland, and others that are more local to my area

Eeeew! Doesn't that picture look like something growing in a Petri dish?

Nothing wrong with tract homes -- they allowed the masses to move out of tiny city apartments and row homes into the single family homes. A little front yard, a little back yard, garage or car port -- voila! The suburbs were born.

They have a different cache now -- now that the original tract homes are 50-60 years old and small by today's standards, we look at them as small, "cookie-cutter", etc.

maureeninmd

My exact thought when I saw the thread, it's the theme from Weeds (which I find hilarious).

Tract housing sprung up after WWII when there was a need for a LOT of new, affordable, single family homes. They were often not lovely or well built, but for the returning GIs, they were the fullfillment of the American Dream.

If you can afford something nicer and more custom, count your blessings-- but don't do so while looking down your nose at the less fortunate. That Pete Seeger would choose to do so is [sadly] not surprising. It's part and parcel of the whole anti-suburb mentality. The working class can be so gauche...

That song was written by Malvena Reynolds. And she lived on Parker street in Berkeley. She also wrote a song about that- "I'd rather live on Parker St. than dance in the heavens where the angles meet"...

However, I think she is most famous for:

"Where are you going, my little one, little one,
Where are you going, my baby, my own?
Turn around and you're two,
Turn around and you're four,
Turn around and you're a young girl going out of my door.
Turn around, turn around,
Turn around and you're a young girl going out of my door. "

(And Harry Belafonte sang that one.)

The song was written in 1962 not the 1950's. Reynolds' inspiration for "Little Boxes" was housing more akin to the opulent gated communities of today (the only major difference from post war tract housing is really scale). I would also argue that the way it is used in Weeds captures the intent of the song which is not a criticism of the working class or affordable housing but of the constraining social conformity of the middle class.

"And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same."

Here is a link that might be useful: bio for Malvina Reynolds

"Track house" is AMERICA BABY! LOL! If you ask them to change up something : they roll their eyes at you and look at you like you are an alien. I have bought 3 track house! 2 in florida and 1 in texas! You get what you pay for! (Almost designed and built our house once in gainesville florida: 1/2 acre lot: my dad was going to build it! We had to move and lost our down payment on land!!!!!!! sad times!!!!!)

My Father designed and built custom homes in Florida and Oklahoma for 20 years! He let the client have whatever they wanted! He build 2 million on down: and we lived in great houses!
It's a blessing to have a custom built house: My Father knew "tricks" /specials things that he would do to build a better house. He knew how to do everything it took to build a house : down to making his own cabinets from scratch.

Funny Post!

The inspiration for the song was those rows of pastel colored houses perched on the hillside in Daly City, south of San Francisco. I don't believe those were "gated" communities. Just rows of tract homes.

-Babka

Oruboris - you have a point about affordable housing for GI's returning from WWII. My father is one of those lucky ones that ended up with a college education and an affordable house. Yet my parents were never happy in the suburbs, living a life mirrored by those around them - same house similar salary, same cars. My mother, coming from a small town where everyone mixed together, found it very difficult and never fit in. My father, from a big city and having no sense of direction, felt uncomfortable in the twisty suburban streets.

caryscott - I don't get HBO, maybe I should rent Weeds, I need some laughs.

Has anyone ever read "Mr. Pine's Purple House"? I probably first read it when I was four, but it made an impression on me. It's supposed to amuse young readers, but I found it very disturbing because Mr. Pine can't figure out which house is his because THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME! Whenever he tries to add something to his house to distinguish from his neighbors, the neighbors copy him. It's actually very scary!

Heh, I used to live a couple of blocks from Parker Street in Berkeley....and it's worth noting that even in Berkeley and the surrounding "streetcar suburbs," there are lots of neighborhoods where the houses are identical---they were built in some cases by early bungalow developers who used the same idea, buying a swath of land and developing a few different floor plans on it (often on spec). Not thought of as tract housing since it was of a different era, but you can still pick out the matching ones. (Our 1915 home is a mirror image of the one next door---the family saved money by just drawing up the plans once and then flipping them to build two houses. Same rationale!)

I think tract housing got its somewhat negative reputation because of the sheer volume of housing developed in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Some of it was quite good, some of it quite bad....and most of it somewhere in the middle.

I lived on the corner of College and Parker for a semester while I was in high school when my mom was getting her masters. In fact I lived there when Patty Hearst was kidnapped a few blocks away.

I grew up in a tract house (split level) and went to HS in the original Levittown. Small backyard, yes, and very small house. But kids have big imaginations. It never felt small, it felt like a whole world full of magical places was contained within our property.

I laughed at the conformity comment. It seemed even to us that everyone else was the same. My family was the strange one. Our house stuck out like a sore thumb because my parents danced to the beat of a different drum. I was always embarrassed by it, but now I realize that it was a lot more interesting than the others. I'd never want to live in that neighborhood now, but it was a great place to grow up.

LOL! My son attends college at UCSF. It's on the side of San Francisco close to Daly City. (Parking tickets are cheaper in Daly City than in San Francisco. Don't even ask me how I know this. DS doesn't have his Prius down there anymore. Mom is driving it.)

I can't even pass this area without singing the lyrics to the song... "Little boxes on the hillside..."

FWIW - the notion of tract housing has been around since the earliest cities. They may have been made of mud brick instead of ticky-tacky, but master planned communities in what can be likened to tract housing existed in the ancient Near East 4000 years ago. The following is an except from the LA Times:

Archive for Thursday, September 25, 1997
Urban Planning, Circa 2500 BC

By Thomas H. Maugh II
September 25, 1997 in print edition B-2

Call it Irvine by the Euphrates.

Its actual name is Titris Hoyuk, it is in Turkey, not California, and it is more than 4,000 years old. But this city of 10,000 souls bears more than a passing resemblance to Irvine and Long IslandÂs even more famous Levittown.

Like those two cities, Titris is a planned community whose founders sat down and drew up detailed blueprints before the first shovel of dirt was turned. It may very well have been the worldÂs first planned community, emerging in the Bronze Age as civilization spread throughout the Near East.

But despite its age, Titris would seem familiar to a Long Islander or an Orange County resident. Its streets are regular and evenly spaced, its dwellings could have come from a cookie cutter and its population was homogeneous.

"Evidently, the conception of what was urban in 2500 to 2200 BC was not all that different from what is considered urban today," said archeologist Guillermo Algaze of UC San Diego, who leads a team that has been excavating Titris.

terriks, how funny! I lived across the street where the SLA was hiding (Oakland) and arrested. They may have kidnapped in your neighborhood, but they lived across the street from me. I'll never forget that day. I managed the large apartment complex across the street. I didn't know them but spoke as neighbors. I managed "The Frederic" at 530 41st St., a glorious building that was then beautiful and now more beautiful. I was almost raped there (while showing apartments available for rent) and discovered/recovered lots of thefts - back in the day.

Today, it looks like really a nice neighborhood. Even if it is next to the freeway.

My mother actually had a friend who was approached by SLA members to join the group!

And all of this comes out of one innocent question... What is a track home? LOL! Only on this forum. Terriks, I'm glad your mother was smarter than that.

"Those were the days, my friend. I thought they'd never end...."

arielitas mom, that's really interesting. I wonder what Hoyuk means. I remember learning about Catal Huyuk in art history class.

I just googled it, it means "mound". Here's a Wikipedia entry with some cool pictures.