How Much Elbow Room Do You Have? Dallas, Fort Worth Rank High Nationally in Lot Sizes

Maybe you’ve had relatives or friends who look at your suburban home and tell you that your home is nice, but they certainly wouldn’t live this close to their neighbors because they don’t want to “reach out and touch them.”

But, hey, as a consolation, they like the size of your front and back yards.

When folks like that come over, you now have data on your side. Yes, Texas has big lots, some of the nation’s largest by average.

STORAGECafé, an online platform that provides storage unit listings across the nation, churned data on the nation’s 20 largest cities to discover urban hotspots where residents enjoy the most space around their homes.

Dallas ranks fifth with lot sizes on average of 8,194 square feet. Indianapolis has the biggest lots at 9,191 square feet. In Texas, Austin ranked third with 8,629 square feet. Fort Worth lots average 7,096 square feet. Philadelphia has the smallest lots at 1,089 square feet.

Dallas has a median house size of 1,581 square feet, a house-in-lot ratio of 21.6 percent. STORAGECafé found that the decade-to-decade evolution of lot sizes in Dallas showed little variation. The median lot size was around 7,500 square feet in the 1920s, reaching a 10,000-square-foot peak in the 1960s, and going back to roughly 7,500 square feet in the last decade. Meanwhile, the median home size increased by more than 76 percent over the same period, to over 2,400 square feet now, resulting in an increase in lot usage from 18 percent to 32 percent.

Residential developers have been giving a lot of thought about lot size, both outdoor and indoor, in the pandemic era as residents find themselves looking to find elbow room for a backyard patio or kids’ playscape. STORAGECafé found that new single-family homes are now built larger whereas lot sizes are getting smaller.

James Tate, Texas A&M University assistant professor for landscape architecture and urban planning, believes lot usage in new homes will grow on a national level and the country’s largest cities.

“I believe this will continue both within the central established cores of the country’s cities with populations over 500,000 and in the metropolitan periphery,” Tate said in the report. “If anything, what we’re seeing happen in the Texas Triangle is the urbanization of a massive territory, a megaregion.

“At this point, Austin-San Antonio-Waco — like Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston-The Woodlands-Katy — are one continuous metro. These once disconnected cities have merged in large part because Texas is built through the proliferation of single-family detached subdivisions.”