If stucco and aluminum siding in the city's housing stock haunt your dreams, the Chart of the Week will help you sleep a little easier tonight.
According to data from the Denver Office of the Assessor, brick is overwhelmingly the face of Denver houses. Just take a look at the map.
Pink dots show where a residence's exterior wall is brick, blue dots show frame houses. (Having trouble picturing a frame house? Think of your typical suburban home with siding.)
Taken in aggregate, the city looks like a mix of mostly blue and pink, with small pockets of concrete, stucco and aluminum house. Even though those small pockets stand out a bit, the street-level view isn't shocking most of the time. Take for instance, this little pocket of concrete block homes:
On the other hand, this block of brick-stucco homes is a bit more unusual:
But at the end of the day, brick and frame houses are 87 percent of all residential structures.
Contemporary homes are more likely to use these newer and sometimes bemoaned materials. Brick may be the dominant type of home, but the average year that all those brick homes were built was 1941. The average year that the city's 13 metal homes were built is 2015.
Even narrowing down to homes built over the last three years, frame homes were dominant.
So next time you see a metal or glass home, perhaps you can appreciate it as something relatively uncommon in the Denver landscape.
