According to the USA Census, the level of detached homes has remained fairly consistent. Around 60%. Here is the link for more data. Historical Census of Housing Tables Always best to get accurate sources for info like this.May I ask why you were asking the question?Tracy
In the centre of European cities, pretty uncommon, as space is at a premium & they're pretty crowded!In the suburbs? It varies from city to city, but it's not uncommon.Suburbia in the UK (for example) has rows and rows of semi-detached houses, (two houses in one) that were mainly built in the 1930's but detached places aren't hard to find.The back garden (=yard) might be tiny or non-existent the nearer you get to the centre of the city, but further out, they can be a reasonable size.Closer in, you tend to get terraces of Victorian houses, most had a garden of some description.So, pretty much like the US?
Do americans live in apartment or house?
It's more diverse than that. Americans can live in homes, town homes (imagine something than apartments but smaller than a house and you have to share all the common areas), condos, lofts (huge open spaces), studios (places where you can live but not designed for it: like old factory buildings turned into artists lofts), condos, trailers, boarding houses (1 room per person in a massive old house with 12+ rooms), dorms, mobile homes, cottages (homes totally disconnected Majority, close to 85% of all americans, do live what the rest of the world could consider a suburban dream: house, yard, car. And interestingly enough it isn't that expensive (house = 90,000, car = 25, 000)
We lived like Americans in small private houses before Bolsheviks took power in 1917. Rented-out apartments in block houses in Moscow, St. Petersburg and a few other places began to gain prominence in the late XIX century (remember Dostoyevsky and his characters?), but these were a marginal spots of urbanization in an ocean of a primeval peasant lifestyle.When Bolsheviks took power and prevailed over all their enemies, they decided to put an end to this barbaric lifestyle. The Marxist way of thinking dictates that families must live together, connected with each other in tightly-knit communities where no one is left behind, or left to their own devices.This trend started when the expedited industrialization started in earnest in 1928. The Soviet rulers began shuffling people together into military-style barracks that housed several families in the same room, with shared amenities in the backyard. In large cities, the former rent-out properties were remade into “communal” apartments, where several families shared the hall, the bathroom and the kitchen. Some Soviet and German architects designed more advanced residential solutions, but the scarcity of resources in the pre-WWII Soviet, and the undivided focus on the industrialization postponed the whole thing until the late 1950s.During the Soviet rule, no one even questioned the concept of public housing. This way of thinking is still prevailing. But instead of Marxism, it’s now the dearth and the prohibitive price of property lots inside the cities, and the suburbs, that makes high-rises the only kind of residential property available to willing buyers.Photo: if you live in Moscow, have much money, but your last name is not Putin, this is typically the best property you can afford for your family.
In Finland, I can think about two reasons.Building a house is quite expensive. The orders are very strict and force to build well to the subarctic conditions. The own house is a dream for many, but also out of reach of many.Town planning can be difficult. There is lack of building land in the cities. It’s not that we wouldn’t have land, it’s just in the wrong place, in the forest. We also have hundreds or thousands of abandoned houses: the folks have moved to fast growing cities. The jobs are in the cities and the land is in the forests. Helsinki is suffering from a constant lack of building land and that forces to build apartment houses.I found an article about the dream homes of the Finns’ age 18–30 years:80 % of the Finns wish to live in a detached house. 3% prefers apartments and 3 % rowhouses. Pientaloteollisuus ry - AjankohtaistaSo, the Finnish reality and dreams don’t always meet in the form of living.One solution is that people have summer cottages, they are very popular. Many people who live in the cities in apartment houses own a summer cottage and that is the mental home for them and they spend all their spare time there. So the need for the own house is satisfied by living in two places.Update:Finland started really to urbanize only after WW2. Until then, the majority did live in “detached houses”, mostly on the small farms. The nation has moved to the cities in just few decades. That has caused a huge pressure to build a lot and fast. The solution has been large suburbs with apartmenthouses around the city centers and only few of them are older than 50 years.
Until 2016, china has roughly 200 million cars registered under individuals, with a car ownership of 0.14 vehicles per person and 0.36 per household.On contrast, America has a car ownership of roughly 0.75 per person and 1.9 per household.However, if you visit china in person, the general perception that you get of car ownership would be kind of different than what the statistics have shown since car ownership tends to be much higher in big cities but lower in rural areas.Whereas the ownership of detached houses appears to be the complete opposite.Detached houses are much more prevalent in countryside and pretty rare in urban areas due to the high population density. As a matter of fact, detached houses have been gradually demolished to be replaced by high residential buildings.
Why do most people in Great Britain live in row-houses?
Further to RR's answer, not only do terraced house take up less room, they are also cheaper to build (and cheaper to heat). I would point out that just because houses are 'attached' doesn't mean they are not 'single family' homes. The two terms are entirely unrelated. Most UK terraced houses are single family homes. I grew up in a London street of terraced houses and the house I now own is in a terraced street and (I'm 99% sure) in both cases all the terraced houses were single family homes. When comparing to the US, obviously you need to consider that (as you note) the UK's population density is 660 per sq mile, much higher than the US which has a positively empty 64 people per sq mile. So we have density almost 10x that of the US. Yes parts of the UK are still very rural, but it's policy to keep it that way (and rightfully so in a lot of ways), so it's VERY difficult to get permission to build a new house on rural land.