> The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own.

And then you put them inches away from one another, lined up in perfect rows!

I don't get it, looking on (mainly through TV/film) from the UK, what makes detached houses desirable is almost entirely lacking from North American streets, they frequently seem to look like a terrace that's been chopped up. Is it perhaps because timber framing makes noise more of a problem in terraces/semis; so that becomes the prime motivator for detached?