Decimal-Acre Reference / Sheet 0.08
0.08 Acres = 3,485 sq ft
Eight hundredths of an acre, the Chicago Bungalow Belt standard. The lot dimension that built tens of thousands of brick bungalows on Chicago's Northwest, Southwest, and Far South sides between 1910 and 1940. The math is exact: 0.08 multiplied by 43,560 equals 3,484.8 square feet.
Square Feet
3,484.8
international ft2
Square Metres
323.75
m2
Hectares
0.0324
ha
Derivation: 0.08 acres × 43,560 sq ft per acre = 3,484.8 sq ft, exactly. International acre, 1959 IYPA standard.
Sheet 02 · The Bungalow-Belt Standard
Where 0.08 acres anchors the urban grid
0.08 acres is the lot dimension that scaled American homeownership to the working class in the early 20th century. Where the Craftsman bungalow on a 0.07-acre lot was the dominant West Coast and Atlanta pattern, the Chicago Bungalow at 0.08 acres was the Midwestern equivalent. The Chicago Bungalow Belt, a roughly C-shaped band of neighbourhoods running from Bridgeport northwest through Garfield Ridge, Portage Park, Edison Park, and back through North Park and Albany Park to West Ridge, was platted between 1910 and 1940 with consistent 30-by-125-foot lots. The Chicago Historical Society estimates that 80,000 brick bungalows survive in the Belt today, the largest concentrated American historic-housing typology.
Outside Chicago, the 0.08-acre lot recurs in the Minneapolis American Foursquare neighbourhoods of Powderhorn and Longfellow, in the Detroit Boston-Edison historic district, in the Cleveland Detroit-Shoreway and Tremont neighbourhoods, and in the Long Island starter-home subdivisions built by Levitt and other developers in the 1947-1955 wave. A typical Levittown house on 0.07 to 0.10 acres is in the same lot-size class. The standardisation served a financial logic: FHA mortgage underwriting in the 1934-1968 period favoured lots in the 4,000 to 7,500 sq ft range with detached single-family houses, and 0.08 acres sits comfortably in the lower end of that bracket.
For contemporary buyers, a 0.08-acre lot represents a useful balance of yard space and house size. After accounting for a typical 1,200 sq ft house footprint, a 240 sq ft detached single-car garage, 200 sq ft of driveway, and 200 sq ft of walkways and landscaping rocks, a 0.08-acre lot has approximately 1,650 sq ft of usable yard. That is enough for a substantial vegetable garden (300 to 400 sq ft), a small lawn area for children to play (500 sq ft), several mature shade trees, and a perimeter of foundation plantings and shrubs. The ratio of building footprint to yard is about 40:60, which most landscape designers consider the lower bound for a comfortable suburban feel.
The trade-off is privacy. With 5-foot side setbacks and 30-foot wide lots, neighbouring houses are 10 to 12 feet apart at the closest point, which is too close for visual privacy without window placement, fencing, or vegetation screening. The classic Chicago bungalow design used a high garden wall along one side and most of the windows on the other side to manage this constraint. Contemporary infill builds on 0.08-acre lots typically use the same approach: minimise side-wall windows, place the kitchen and family room toward the rear yard, and use the front porch as the main outdoor space.