We at New Urban News recently saw an

We at New Urban News recently saw an advertisement for 20-plus home plan books from Home Planners Inc. of Tucson, Arizona. Four of the books looked promising from a neotraditional development standpoint: Affordable Home Plans; 200 Narrow-Lot Home Plans; 200 Small Home Plans; and Victorian Dream Homes. The covers of these books feature houses with no visible garages and that look like they might fit into the narrow-lot proportions of a new urbanist development. Unfortunately, the covers are deceiving. More than 80 percent of the affordable, narrow-lot and small home plans feature very prominent garages. Many of the remaining ones are too wide or had other design problems making them inappropriate for a traditional neighborhood development. The Victorian plan book is somewhat better: the designers are careful to pull garages back from the street. In many cases, the Victorian homes feature detached garages. Still, the attractive cover photograph is somewhat deceiving, because the foundation of the home is raised three feet above the ground, giving the house a nice vertical proportion. Most of the plans inside the Victorian book are comparatively squat and wide. These books, from one of the top publishers of plan books in the U.S., only underscore the difficulty of finding appropriate home designs for a traditional neighborhood development.