Why does Ditmas Park have Victorian houses?

Ditmas Park was developed in the early 1900s as one of New York's first planned suburban-style communities, when developers laid out spacious lots and built large freestanding Victorian and Colonial Revival houses with porches, driveways, and yards, a rarity in a city dominated by attached rowhouses and apartments. Much of this housing has been preserved, in part through the Ditmas Park Historic District designation. Those grand wood-frame Victorians give the neighborhood its distinctive, leafy, almost small-town character and are central to its appeal and real estate value today.