Why? (lot sizes)

[Haaheo okole puka]

From the history I've read and the stories from the WWII vets I've talked with. The personal account stories flooded the states shortly after WWII of the beautiful exotic Hawaiian islands. People of those time had a different vision of what would happen in Hawaii. A decade later it isn't really surprising a major land development went in. Speculation was high on what might happen here. The lot shapes were also part of that speculation, as I said previously, those elongated lot shapes formed many of the current single family lots we see across the nation today. Was it cheaper to cut a narrow lot and save a couple roads cuts, yes but how practical is this theory when applied in a real development situation? Would going 3 acres square lend to what a single family lot was back in those days? Take three acres square for example 361.87' an oddball number, then punch a 40' right of way down the middle. That leaves an oddball 160.935 foot deep lot on each side of the new right of way and now divide the remaining length of 361.87 by 50' and you get an oddball 7.2374 of subdivided parcels with really oddball dimensions if stretched out to 7. When you're land developing in unrestricted circumstances you try to foresee future evolution of the area and try to keep things as uniformly simple for your surveyors as is possible. Housing development is whole different thing altogether and not like land development.
So continue with that comparative and now try to form a rectangle that jives with whole number re-subdivisions of your larger land development. Then make your result fit into the said tract repeated and see what happens. The end result when divided up by the development engineer is a product that reduces road cut costs and lends to a conducive re-subdivision for the future all fitting into the original tract. It's that simple, there is no collusion or attempt to save big bucks, it was a matter of practicality for then and the future as they envisioned it.