Visual story

How big the houses really are

Seen from above, a house is its roof. Each ridge is a county’s house-sized buildings, from a 400-square-foot cottage to a 5,000-square-foot estate, piled up by size: a ridge leaning right is a county of big houses. Ocean’s typical footprint is 1,900 sq ft; Union’s 1,300 sq ft. Town by town, Saddle River borough’s houses are the biggest and Seaside Heights borough’s the smallest.

The dot on each ridge is the county’s median footprint.

Biggest houses

Saddle River borough · Bergen3,551 sq ft
Franklin Lakes borough · Bergen2,981 sq ft
Upper Saddle River borough · Bergen2,897 sq ft
Alpine borough · Bergen2,784 sq ft
Watchung borough · Somerset2,700 sq ft
Mendham township · Morris2,683 sq ft
Chester township · Morris2,656 sq ft
Old Tappan borough · Bergen2,646 sq ft

Smallest houses

Seaside Heights borough · Ocean1,097 sq ft
Bogota borough · Bergen1,106 sq ft
Roselle Park borough · Union1,132 sq ft
Keansburg borough · Monmouth1,134 sq ft
Ridgefield Park village · Bergen1,139 sq ft
Lake Como borough · Monmouth1,144 sq ft
Perth Amboy city · Middlesex1,164 sq ft
Downe township · Cumberland1,166 sq ft

Microsoft’s US Building Footprints, traced from aerial imagery by a neural network, available under the Open Database License; the figures here are offered under the same licence. A footprint is the roof outline, so an attached garage or porch is part of it and a two-storey house counts once; rows of attached houses can trace as one long shape and fall out above 6,000 square feet. Buildings between 400 and 6,000 square feet are taken as house-sized, which takes in some shops and leaves out most sheds. Each ridge is scaled to its own peak. More visual stories →