American suburbanism is truly wild. When you see how people live outside of the U.S., it’s startling what we’re putting up with here for the wonders of spending hours in a car every week.

It’s technically against the law in my state to make a new neighborhood that doesn’t have an HOA. I live in a neighborhood without an HOA because it was built before the law was passed. No one’s running a tavern but we’ve got one neighbor who grows vegetables in a patch of their front yard. Another neighbor has a bunch of chickens and also a rooster. We’re technically not allowed to have roosters but who’s going to tell on them? Not me, for sure.

Newer suburban housing often depresses me. You have these large, lovely homes, but they’re crammed together so tightly that you could reach out of your kitchen window to turn on your neighbour’s sink. The front yard is often just a strip of dry grass with a single crabapple sapling, and the back yard is a box the size of a small bathroom, devoid of both foliage and privacy from the eight other houses overlooking it, and serves largely as a box with air to place your dog in. This could be remedied if the developers weren’t complete cunts and sacrificed a house or two per block to space the homes out a bit. But they can’t waste an inch.

I certainly don’t mean to throw shade at anyone who has purchased a home like this and enjoys living there. Everyone deserves a place to feel happy and comfortable. It just sucks that anything built in the last twenty years is erected with no privacy or quality of life in mind. It’s just housebox. As long as you don’t peer outside, you won’t notice you’re trapped in housebox. This is extremely common here in Alberta, and it’s the reason my wife and I wound up buying an older home (1960s-70s) in a mature neighborhood. Most newer places we looked at felt as though they were missing a soul.

Just kind of gets to a point where the whole “detached home” thing doesn’t really mean anything. May as well connect the walls into row housing and drop the price 100k.

My own property is being extensively reworked to produce a majority of our vegetables. We have already put about 185m² 2,000ft²) under direct cultivation in the back yard, and intend to wrap that garden around the entire property to the full 400m² (4.300ft²) available.

In the end, I don’t expect to have a single blade of grass on the property. It’ll all be flowers, fruiting trees and canes and bushes, and vegetables. All done in a modified Ruth Stout method, with a variation of flat-ground Hügelkultur thrown in.

Let’s just say that Bylaw is already pissed off with me, and I’m not even halfway done yet.

1. As a kid I would play street hockey with my friends although nowadays I don’t see kids outside much. Sometimes kids are unlikely and live in an area with no other kids their age around.

2. Yes. Lobbying by oil and car companies

3. see above.

4. See above.

5. See above.

tbf I do know many suburban families that grow a lot in their backyard, although I’m sure there are places with more strict rules around that.

otherwise very valid questions.

Since I found out about the neighborhood association, I’ve been rather suspicious of this land of the free.

I moved to a suburb in a country with unbearable heat yet because of how the suburbs are designed, I still walk more than when I did in the US. Everything from barbershops and grocery stores, to pharmacies and bakeries are within a 10 minute walk. Though I usually wait until night fall to do so.

The front and back yards are there to increase pervious cover. That’s it.

I work in municipal development and have worked in dense areas, suburbs, and now work in an enclave for the ultra-rich (average new house is about 7 million dollars in the city where I work). Every single developer wants to level all the trees and build as much on the lot as possible with zero pervious cover anywhere, and they don’t give the smallest fuck about flooding the downhill neighbors.

As a non driving eastern European, living a few months in a Colorado suburb was literally one of the most depressing times of my life.

I am interested in the replies

The answer to all questions is racism. We don’t have public transportation because it became illegal to forbid African Americans access, we don’t have public parks and services, because you can no longer have ‘‘whites only’’ signs up, we don’t have stores in these areas because you can’t stop immigrants from owning stores that whites see as ‘beneath them’ to work in, farming your own yard is trashy, because slaves were only allowed to farm food for themselves in small plots right next to the shacks they were allowed to sleep in, and why do we have remote single housing areas you can only access with cars that are over priced? To get away from the black people they could no longer red line to prevent living near them, and to create school districts non whites couldn’t be zoned for as they were priced out of the districts, and then they adjusted school funding so it was based on land value effectively creating whites only schools with high funding. As the white racist mom in the 70s who was upset about bussing said ‘‘if you let your kids grow up around theirs, eventually they’ll all start to mix’’

The more resources you waste publicly, the better. It indicates that you can afford it and brag about it.

Think about jewelry, expensive purses, sneakers, flashy cars, unused lawns, Halloween/Christmas/whatever decorations, etc.

Can’t grow anything but grass because they stripped off all the topsoil from the land that used to be a farm.

If you want a garden you need to buy soil

Out where I live there are whole neighborhoods built and owned by rental companies. Rows of duplexes, blocks of single family residences built through the 70s and 80s. All rentals for decades, with some houses being sold off variously. And even then many of the buyers in the last 20 odd years were landlords themselves.

The guy I bought my house off of still owned 150 some houses in his direct name in my county, not counting what his business owned or his partners and associates owned directly in their network.

Tenants don’t exactly have a whole lot of choices of what they can do on the property, and many can only stay a year or so. It isn’t like they invest in the land: so grass.

So we can mow the grass silly.