We live in a small neighborhood of "urban homes" -- 1600 to 2400 sq. ft. homes on small (3500 to 4500 sq. ft.) lots. We live close to downtown and have a large home by central Austin standards. But to get this at Austin's prices, we had to give up a real yard. That was a good trade for us. We knew we wouldn't use a yard very much, and it would be a headache to keep up. We care more about the interior space.
Not everyone shares our preference. That's fine with me. But my neighbors obviously do. And I've always thought there were probably lots of others who would make the same trade if they could.
Here's empirical evidence that our preference for interior over exterior space may not be that weird. (h/t Matthew Kahn.) These UCLA anthropologists followed 24 Los Angeles families around for four days to study how they use their house space. Most of the them ignored their yards:
Although the back yard is a purported center of family leisure, enjoyment, and privacy, the tracking data from Families 1 to 24 reveal limited uses of back-of-home spaces by family members, despite the fact that every sample included many weekend daylight hours and some afternoon and evening daylight hours, and the weather was generally mild and pleasant enough to be outside on most days. The most salient trend in the data is that 13 of the 24 families did not spend any leisure time (neither kids nor parents) in their back yards during the four days per family available for review. . . . In quite a few of these cases, no family member so much as stepped into the back yard. Sporadic activities in other cases were confined to non-leisure chores such as taking out trash or briefly feeding dogs or washing off chairs.
The yards seemed to function mainly as status symbols. On the other hand, most of the families had converted their garages into storage rooms or extra living space.
The fact that most households in this sample––and millions visible throughout the U.S.—have converted their garages to spaces not focused on car storage signals a changing need of middle-class families. Families living in average-sized homes (1500–2000 sq ft), as most of these are in our sample, simply do not have enough living and storage space for all of their possessions, and they value garages more for these purposes than for housing cars.
It sounds like many of these families would be willing to trade exterior space for interior space, too. Like I said, if you want a house with a big yard, that's fine with me. I think Austin could use more neighborhoods like mine, though; there's probably plenty of demand, even among families with children.
