[treya]

I'd agree part of the problem is the widespread "buy the most house for the lowest price" phenomenon, which infects many other aspects of our society beyond shopping for homes, but far and away the primary problem here has little to do with architectural issues. The problem is with builders who are trying to maximize their profit - the key being build the biggest house possible on a lot of a given size (or per FAR restrictions). And the same group of builders who go this route tend to have little awareness or real concern for aesthetics - to them architecture is better when you have many rooms, higher foyers, more complicated floor plans and roof planes, and a larger number of different types of building/cladding materials. The appeal of these things has slowly creeped into the general public because tract house builders have adopted lesser versions of this crap for decades.