History and Distribution
In pre-industrial societies most people live in multi-family dwelling for most of their lives. A child will live with their parents from birth until marriage, and then generally move in with the parents of the man (patrilocal) or the woman (matrilocal), so that the grandparents can help raise the young children and so the middle generation can care for their aging parents. This type of arrangement also saves on the effort and materials used for construction and, in colder climates, heating. If people had to move to a new place or were wealthy enough, they could build or buy a home for their own family, of course but this was not the norm.
The idea of a nuclear family living separately from their relatives as the norm, is a relatively recent development related to rising living standards in North America and Europe during the early modern and modern eras. In the New World where land was plentiful settlement patterns were quite different from the close-knit villages of Europe, meaning many more people lived in large farms separated from their neighbours. This has produced a cultural preference in settler societies for privacy and space. A countervailing trend has been industrialization and urbanization, which as seen more and more people around the world move into multi-story apartment blocks. In the New World, this type of densification was halted and reversed following the Second World War when increased automobile ownership and cheaper building and heating costs produced suburbanization instead.
Single-family homes are now common in rural and suburban and even some urban areas across the New World and Europe, as well as wealthier enclaves within the Third World. They are most common in low-density, high-income regions. For example, in Canada according to the 2006 Census 55.3% of the population lived single-detached houses but this varied substantially by region. In the Ville (city) of Montreal, Canada's second most populous municipality, only 7.5% of the population lived in a single-detached house, while in the City of Calgary, the third most populous, 57.8% did. Note that this includes the "city limits" populations only, not the wider region.
The term "single-family detached" describes how a house is built and who lives in it. It does not indicate size, shape, or location. Because they are not surrounded by other buildings, the potential size of a single-family house is limited only by the budget of the builder and local law. They can range from a tiny country cottage or cabin or a small suburban prefabricated home to a large mansion, aristocratic estate or stately home. Sizes in real estate advertising are given in area (square feet or square metres), or by the number of bedrooms or bathrooms/toilets. The choice in materials used or the shape chosen will depend on what is common to the vernacular architecture of that region, or the lasted trends in professionally-designed tract housing. A traditional log and plaster hut, a timber frame and drywall North American starter home, or a European-style concrete-and-slate house are all equally varieties of single-family detached housing.
Read more about this topic: Single-family Detached Home
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