Texas has some of the smallest home lot sizes in the country, study shows
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Texas is full of wide open spaces, but apparently not when it comes to the size of your backyard.
The state ranks among those with the smallest lot sizes, according to a study by home services website Angi.
The study looked at almost 400,000 home listings on Zillow to determine the median lot sizes in each state and more than a hundred metro areas.
Texas has the fifth-smallest median lot size, at around 9,500 sq. ft., or about 0.22 acres. Illinois, Arizona, California and Nevada are the only states with smaller median lot sizes.
In Nevada, the average lot size is 7,405 sq. ft., the smallest of any state.
Meanwhile, several New England states have the largest lots in the country, with Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine ranking in the top three.
The median lot size in Vermont is more than 78,000 sq. ft., or 1.8 acres. That's 8 times the size of the median lot in Texas, or more than an entire football field larger.
One explanation for the much larger lot sizes in New England is zoning laws. According to the Angi study, many municipalities in Vermont have minimum lot sizes to protect natural habitats and keep land open and available for agriculture and forestry.
Maine — which has the third-largest median lot size in the country — has a statewide zoning law that requires any lot with a septic tank to be at least 20,000 sq. ft.
When it comes to metro areas, several Texas cities rank near the bottom of the list among those included in the study. Angi included 107 metro areas, all of which had at least 500 Zillow listings.
El Paso ties with San Francisco for the smallest lot sizes in the entire country, with the median lot covering 6,098.4 sq ft.
Corpus Christi and San Antonio ties with Pittsburgh for the ninth smallest lots, at 7,405.2 sq. ft.
The median lot sizes are 8,174 sq. ft. in Houston, 8,712 sq. ft. in Dallas-Fort Worth and 8,929.8 sq. ft. in the Austin metro.
Beaumont-Port Arthur has the largest lot sizes of any Texas metros, at 13,939.2 sq. ft., or about a third of an acre.
Despite being the largest in Texas, that's still a third of the size of the median lot in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which boasts the largest lots of any metro in the country. The median lot size there is 43,560 sq. ft.