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When it comes to housing, we have always maintained it should be people first and cars second. So, when housing affordability becomes an issue, how about eliminating the garage all together? Is this the obvious way to reduce construction costs staring us in the face?

Certainly, living without a garage is not unheard of. An estimated 44 million households live without a garage. Of course, if those households are in a city with public transportation, there are often no cars to put in the garage. Approximately 63% of renter-occupied units or apartments live without a garage.

We are currently designing affordable housing for sale without a garage or carport. While this does lower the overall cost of the unit, it does create a variety of challenges for the land planning, the architecture, and the buyers of those houses.

Land Planning Without Garages

Unless you are building in an urban area with mass transit, eliminating the garage does not eliminate the cars. So where do the cars go? A massive parking lot with a sea of cars in front of the homes sounds delightful – NOT. Many older neighborhoods in the south had strip driveways leading to a parking area behind the house, allowing for limited guest parking along the street in front of homes. Keeping the cars behind the houses often created a better streetscape that was more pedestrian-friendly.

While this may be one approach, it does require a bigger lot with room for the driveway down one side along with space to park the cars behind the home. These larger lots then become a challenge to affordability. Another approach is to have a rear alley behind the homes for residents to park, allowing the lots to be narrower, a better streetscape – but it does require more infrastructure to build both the alley and the street.

Architectural Issues

Designing a house without the garage has its pros and cons. From a street perspective, designing a house without the garage dominating the front could mean a better-looking house. Perhaps a charming front porch can be the focus instead. 

This is especially powerful if the parking areas are adequately screened allowing a view of the front of home.

But it also means we need to find room inside the home for the things we normally stick in our garages. This includes water heaters and water softening units. As designers, we like sticking those things in the garage because they aren’t very attractive and if they leak, they will spill water on the garage floor and not ruin our wood floors or ceilings if stored on the second floor or attic.

But if you look in most people’s garages, you will find a lot more than just cars and water heaters inside – usually things that you wouldn’t want to store inside the home like garbage and recycling cans and yard maintenance equipment. Then there are things like bikes and outdoor sporting equipment. Some people store their barbecue grills in the garage and wheel them out onto the driveway when it’s time to use them.

Turns out, Americans like to store a lot of stuff in their garages – so shouldn’t a house without a garage include an outdoor storage component? If storage is not provided, can you picture a sea of storage sheds popping up in every backyard?

Resident Challenges

There are a number of conveniences that a garage affords a homeowner. Keeping a car out of the weather is a giant convenience, especially in places like Arizona in the summertime or Wisconsin in the wintertime. Scraping frost or snow off your car can be miserable especially when it is cold and windy. What about adding trees surrounding the parking area? The shade from the trees would be welcomed in the summer but could create other challenges like dripping sap or dropping leaves and branches.

Lastly, a car parked inside a garage is less likely to get stolen or broken into than a car left parked outside overnight.

So, while we design houses for people and not their cars – garages do provide the people who live in those houses a lot of benefits and convenience. But as we often see, providing a too small garage means the cars are stored outside after all – but at there is a place for our excess stuff.

What do you think?