This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.“When I was nine or ten and lived in a dark fourth-floor apartment in a building that had seen better days, I fantasized mansions that were more suited to my romantic nature,” Linda Lewis wrote in The Atlantic in 1978. In adulthood, she got only more covetous—of friends’ gorgeous houses, of French castles, of architectural marvels such as Monticello and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West.As a fellow house envier, I sympathize. I feel, as Lewis did, that I “behave differently in different kinds of rooms”; that I’m “powerfully influenced by shapes and sizes, light and color, by degrees of privacy and security and beauty.” But I’ve never wanted a mansion, let alone a Monticello. I own a row house, and when I fantasize about something more suited to my romantic nature, what I’m picturing is a slightly bigger row house in a neighborhood with more restaurants.This is very Millennial of me. My generation of Americans is the first in decades to collectively abandon the dream of a big house. In part, that’s likely a concession to reality: Real estate is so expensive that homeownership is, for many, a fantasy. But it also reflects changing ideas about what makes a good house and a good life, for both renters and owners. According to the National Association of Realtors’ most recent survey of American housing preferences, the majority of Millennials and Gen Zers would rather live in smaller homes in more walkable communities than larger ones in less dense areas. As a country, though, we aren’t building accordingly.In 2012, the architect Daniel Parolek coined the term missing middle housing. What’s lacking in America is the “middle scale of buildings between single-family homes and large apartment or condo buildings,” he argued in his 2020 book. Row houses, which are built in a continuous line and tend to be smaller than the average single-family detached home, are emblematic of the missing middle. Although they’re in high demand, they represent less than 20 percent of new construction, according to the National Association of Home Builders. In part, this is due to zoning issues: Parolek’s book notes that many cities’ codes for house construction usually call for “minimum lot sizes that are too large, densities that are too low, [and] parking requirements that are too high” for attached homes.Row houses have a prestige issue, too. Before the advent of car ownership and the suburban lifestyle it facilitated, row houses were popular with families of many classes and backgrounds; once more families began migrating farther from cities in the 1910s and ’20s, row homes were usurped by detached houses with lawns. As the latter became emblematic of comfort and success, the former came to be seen as down-market or second-class. Meanwhile, “over the course of the 20th century, government policy, the invention of cheaper, mass-produced building materials, marketing by home builders, and a shift in how people regarded their houses—not just as homes, but as financial assets—encouraged ever larger houses,” Joe Pinsker wrote in The Atlantic in 2019. The architect Witold Rybczynski observed in this magazine in 1991 that the average new single-family house had grown by more than a third from 1963 to 1989. From 1989 to today, it has grown even larger, now averaging around 2,100 square feet.Rybczynski considered this increase in home size a mistake. In his view, row houses are an ideal design. Dividing one of them into multiple apartment units, or into mixed-use living and retail, is easy; their thick shared walls can reduce heating and cooling costs because fewer exterior-facing facades means less exposure to the elements; and they use less land than single-family homes, which means they’re usually more affordable. Of course, not everybody likes the trade-offs. Plenty of home buyers still want more backyard space, more rooms, more parking, more to show for their expensive mortgage.Size aside, there are the matters of darkness and noise. Detached houses get more sun because they generally have windows on all four sides, and not everyone wants to rely on a white-noise machine, as I do, to drown out my neighbors watching Bravo on the other side of the wall. But with those annoyances comes what Rybczynski calls “the gregariousness of living in relatively close proximity.” Encountering a single block of row houses in isolation is rare; more frequently, they make up whole neighborhoods. As Parolek told me, the dream neighborhood is “the American dream house for a majority of American households now”—and they’re happy to live smaller, and deal with some secondhand Housewives, to get there.When I asked Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, an urban planner and a professor at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture, about her vision of the ideal American home, she brought up a development called Kentlands, a townhouse-centric development in Gaithersburg, Maryland, roughly a 45-minute drive from downtown Washington, D.C. The community is designed to be walkable, with plenty of shared space, meaning that “the entertainment portion of the house” is effectively outside the home, she explained.At first I couldn’t quite imagine what she meant. Then I thought about the neighborhood restaurant where I met with a parents’ group when my daughter was an infant. I thought about the playground where we see friends weekly, the public picnic grove where we hosted her most recent birthday party. I have easy access to those places because, like Kentlands residents, I live in a dense and walkable area. The reason my fantasies don’t extend beyond a bigger row house is, I think, because I don’t want to lose that kind of access. What’s more, it strikes me as entirely possible that if I hadn’t been raised in the ’90s era of big American homes—in a country and culture that gave me the expectation that, as a grown-up, I’d have a guest room and a yard to mow—I’d never think about moving out at all.