Daniel Fernandez Pascual recently published on Deconcrete an article as short as interesting about New Orleans' "shotguns houses". In fact, those houses have been shaped by the fact that tax applied on the frontage; by adopting the narrowest form as possible, those houses' owners were paying less taxes.The second reason for such a name "shotgun" is explained by Candy Chang as a house typology that would allow to shoot a shotgun straight through from the porch to the backyard !
Both D.F. Pascual and C. Chang then evoked a similarity with the land ownership along the Mississippi (see the beautiful map below) reduced to its minimum as frontage, just wide enough to be able to load ships.
