Take a look at these tiny midcentury houses in a working-class neighborhood of Cambridge, Maryland. Cambridge, in the Eastern Shore region, is a former powerhouse for the canning industry (seafood, but also vegetables.) Those jobs have more or less evaporated, and the city is a mix of retirees, tourists, and relatively poor folks. Cambridge’s poverty rate is double the Maryland average.

These structures are about 600 square feet—no siding, no private outdoor space, very no-frills. But they are, technically, detached houses, and quite likely a step up from wherever their original inhabitants were living when they were first built. We’d call them shotgun houses now, but if they were built today, with modern materials and styling, we’d call them “tiny houses” or “micro-houses,” terms which actually carry some cachet.

Are houses like this, in a modern form, part of the answer to unaffordable housing?

A few blocks away in Cambridge are these houses.

These are popularly known, at least among urbanists on Twitter, as “detached rowhouses”; Houston, Texas is building quite a large number of modern versions of this housing type. They are usually “zero-lot-line,” meaning the structure basically comes up to the edge of the lot itself. (One issue with this is fire access. But large buildings have access issues too, compared to single structures on large lots.)

What do you think of this? Are those few feet of separation between homes silly, or does that separation possibly make a pretty dense pattern more palatable by checking the detached-house box (and eliminating a possibly loud shared wall?)

Here’s one more interesting type of house, from a development outside downtown in Frederick, Maryland.

Apparently, these are known as “villas” in the industry. If the type above is a detached rowhouse, this is basically an attached detached house. I find it odd, but perhaps it’s still preferable to the same structures on much more land. It eliminates the long and narrow floorplan aspect of townhomes which some people don’t like.

What are some other interesting regional or just not terribly well known housing styles that don’t quite fit into the single-family, apartment, or duplex/townhouse categories?

Related Reading:

The Chester Houses

Can An Urbanist Own a House?

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