Here is a statistic that stopped me. In 2023, two out of three new homes built in America had a front porch. In Texas and the three states next to us, it is 42 percent — the lowest rate of any region in the country. One region east of us, it is 81 percent. The hottest big state, with the oldest tradition of sitting outside, builds the fewest porches.
There is a reason, and it is sitting in your attic humming.
The golden age was the second half of the nineteenth century. Industrialization made mass-produced millwork cheap, so ornamental porches came within reach of ordinary houses, and the porch became what the National Park Service calls “an outdoor parlor, a true extension of the house into the landscape” — a transition zone between the private and public worlds that allowed discreet social contact.
Which is a formal way of saying: it was the room where you could talk to someone without letting them into your house.
The future president Rutherford B. Hayes, writing in 1873 about a house he owned:
“The best part of the present house is the veranda. But I would enlarge it. I want a veranda with a house attached.”
A small vocabulary note, because the words are all over old listings. A colonial covered entry became a piazza in the late 1700s, from the Italian for an open public space. A stoop is Dutch, from stoep. A veranda came by way of India and Portugal. Americans have never been able to agree on what to call the thing.
Before refrigerated air, a Texas house was itself a cooling device, and the design decisions were not decorative.
The dog-run house — two cabins under one continuous gabled roof with a ten-to-fifteen-foot open passage between them — was, per the Texas State Historical Association, “a common type of house in Texas at the middle of the nineteenth century.” The purpose of that breezeway was “to cool the house by providing shade and catching the breeze.” It was also storage, and the favorite sleeping place of the dogs, which is where the name comes from.
Spanish and Mexican builders used thick masonry walls with a closable opening in each of the four walls, so that at night the whole house could be opened to a cross breeze. German farmers in Central Texas worked out evaporative cooling for their milk and then applied it to their houses.
Some lost Texas vocabulary from that era, which I think is worth preserving: an ice card in the window showing what size block you wanted — twelve and a half pounds, twenty-five, or fifty. A steamer trunk buried in sand with ice wrapped in wet burlap. Buckets of ice set in front of electric fans. Wool rugs swapped for straw in summer. Cardboard church fans. And shadetrees — a word for trees planted for shade rather than for looks, which tells you how seriously people took the problem.
Most of what is written about the death of the porch traces back to one article: Richard Thomas's “From Porch to Patio,” published in 1975 in the State Historical Society of Iowa's journal. It is worth naming that, rather than pretending there is a large literature. Thomas's central observation is the one that has stuck:
“The patio was an extension of the house, but far less public than the porch. It was easy to greet a stranger from the porch but exceedingly difficult to do so from the backyard patio.”
The National Park Service gives the same causal list with a government seal on it: the automobile made outdoor socializing less necessary, the telephone replaced in-person visits, postwar suburban design prioritized backyard patios, and air conditioning and television drew people indoors. Together those “brought the golden era of the American porch to an end.”
| Year | United States | The South |
|---|---|---|
| 1955 | under 2% | — |
| 1960 | — | 18.2% |
| 1980 | over 50% | — |
| 1990 | — | over 90% |
| 2020 | about 90% | — |
Under two percent to over half in twenty-five years. And the region that adopted it fastest, in both 1960 and 1980, was West South Central — Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas. Several Texas metros were above 90 percent by 1980.
Texas was early twice over: the Rice Hotel in Houston was among the first air-conditioned hotels in the country in 1922, and the Milam Building in San Antonio was the first air-conditioned high-rise office building in America in 1928.
The historian Raymond Arsenault put the architectural consequence plainly: by the 1970s air conditioning had made the porch, the attic fan and the movable window largely obsolete.
The Smithsonian traveling exhibition Patios, Pools & the Invention of the American Backyard dates the shift to the 1950s — it wasn't until then, its curators write, that Americans began treating the back yard as an extension of the home, driven by the baby boom, a growing middle class, do-it-yourself culture and a jump in homeownership. Wartime aluminum and concrete capacity converted neatly into patio furniture, grills and swimming pools.
Pair that with the Thomas line about greeting a stranger, and you have the whole story. Leisure moved from the front of the house to the back, and took the neighborhood with it.
| Year | New homes with a porch |
|---|---|
| 1994 | 42% |
| 2004 | 52% |
| 2022 | 66.4% |
| 2023 | 67.7% |
2023 was the first year above two-thirds. And buyers want them: in the NAHB's What Home Buyers Really Want survey, 81 percent said they wanted a front porch.
Much of the credit goes to New Urbanism. Seaside, Florida, developed between 1979 and 1984 by Robert Davis with Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, wrote a code that gave every house “a porch and picket-fenced garden facing the street” — explicitly to define the boundary between a homeowner and a neighbor. Duany and Plater-Zyberk were two of the six founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism in 1993, and the idea spread.
Often, no. And there is a way to judge.
There is no national standard for how deep a porch must be to work. What exists is the practice of the people who write codes specifically to make porches usable again. Phoenix requires a minimum depth of eight feet for a porch frontage element. Iowa City requires a porch to project a minimum of six feet beyond the front facade and run at least half the width of it, under a rule whose stated purpose is usable porches.
So: six to eight feet is what the specialists set as the floor. Take a tape measure to any porch you are being sold. Four feet of concrete under a gable is an entry, not a porch. You cannot get two chairs and a small table on it and still walk past.
A porch in Texas is not nostalgia, it is shade. A deep porch on a south or west elevation keeps direct sun off your windows and your door, which reduces solar gain on those openings — a real benefit in this climate, separate from whether you ever sit on it.
And if you do want one you will actually use, look for three things: at least six feet of depth, a roof that covers the whole of it, and an orientation that is not baking at five in the afternoon. A west-facing porch in a Texas July is a decorative object.
The houses around here that got this right were mostly built before 1950, which is a large part of why I keep pointing buyers toward older neighborhoods. The people who designed those houses did not have the machine, so they had to be clever instead.
The most-cited explanation comes from Richard Thomas's 1975 article 'From Porch to Patio' in the State Historical Society of Iowa's journal, and the National Park Service gives the same list: the automobile made outdoor socializing less necessary, the telephone replaced in-person visiting, postwar suburban design prioritized backyard patios, and air conditioning and television drew people indoors. Air conditioning is the biggest single factor. Fewer than 2 percent of American homes had it in 1955; more than half did by 1980. Thomas's key observation was social rather than technical: it was easy to greet a stranger from a front porch and exceedingly difficult to do so from a backyard patio, so moving leisure to the back of the house changed the neighborhood.
Less often than anywhere else in the country. In 2023 data, the West South Central region - Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas - had the lowest porch share of any division at 42 percent of new single-family homes, against 81 percent in the East South Central region, 80 percent in the Pacific and 67.7 percent nationally. The likeliest explanation is that Texas adopted air conditioning earlier and more completely than any other region, leading the country in residential AC adoption in both 1960 and 1980, with several Texas metros above 90 percent saturation by 1980. The state that needed porches most replaced them first.
There is no national standard, but the codes written specifically to make porches functional again put the floor at six to eight feet. Phoenix requires a minimum depth of eight feet for a porch frontage element. Iowa City requires porches to project at least six feet beyond the front facade and extend across at least half its width, under a rule whose stated purpose is usable porches. As a practical test, a porch shallower than about six feet will not hold two chairs and a side table while leaving room to walk past the furniture to the door. Check local requirements with your municipality before relying on any figure for a build or remodel.
A screened or partly open porch used for sleeping in hot weather, built mostly between 1900 and 1920 - and it began as medicine rather than comfort. Germ theory produced the fresh-air cure for tuberculosis, and Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau opened the first American TB sanatorium at Saranac Lake, New York in 1885 with cure porches where patients rested outdoors even in winter. In 1917 the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis published Sleeping and Sitting in the Open Air. They faded in the 1920s as medical opinion shifted, and most were later glassed in or lost to re-siding. The Texas version typically had windows on three sides.
Two cabins under one continuous gabled roof, separated by an open passage of ten to fifteen feet. Per the Texas State Historical Association it was a common house type in Texas in the middle of the nineteenth century, built of horizontally laid hand-hewn logs with clay-and-stick chinking, dirt or split-log floors, and few windows because glass was scarce. The purpose of the open passage was to cool the house by providing shade and catching the breeze. It also served as storage, and as the favorite sleeping place of the dogs, which is where the name comes from.
Looking for a house with a real porch? They exist around here, mostly in the older neighborhoods, and I know where. Tell me what you are looking for and I will point you at the streets worth driving — and save you from the four-foot slab of concrete that gets marketed as a covered front porch.
Tell me what you're looking forChecked September 2026. Where sources disagree I have said so in the text rather than quietly picking one. Laws, rates and standards change — verify anything you are relying on with the relevant agency or a licensed professional.
REALTOR® · BHHS PenFed Realty Texas
I help buyers and sellers across the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex — Fort Worth, Burleson, Crowley and Keller, and the surrounding Dallas area. I write these because they are the questions I answer on the phone every week, and most people never get a straight answer to them. If you have one I have not covered, ask me — I will probably turn it into the next post.