I like to watch landscaping design shows. Many of these shows are filmed in eastern states, and I note that next to no one has fences around their backyards.
On the last show, a family wanted their deck area extended further out into the yard “so they could keep an eye on the toddler”. As they spoke, they cut to a shot of their two year old disappearing into the middle distance accompanied by their Yorky. What, so they could keep an eye on the toddler as she ran off beyond the horizon?
What’s the deal? Why do folks from the east not fence in their backyards? And if they don’t, do they have to keep replacing their dogs and children?
Unless you’re in the habit of letting toddlers stay outside untended, a fence is not necessary. I grew up in a fenceless neighborhood, and it was wonderful to be able to run around from one backyard to another (we knew all our neighbors). And no, we didn’t have trouble knowing where our yardlines were. Utility poles were usually planted where the corners of four properties met. The sides of the houses themselves were usually built out to the end of the minimum setback line, so the property line was usually exactly halfway between the houses.
A fenceless expanse of lawn and landscaping is quite pleasing to the end and conductive to openess and neighborliness. Fences draw apart, stop, and isolate.
This is actually a very good question, and I believe it has it’s roots in more than a century ago… Yards and property lines in early New England were routinely marked by rock walls, either of the field stone variety or the neatly contructed tailored walls. There were so many rocks and stones in the fields people truly HAD to use these stones for walls or riparian right of ways even.
However, you will not usually see them higher than 4 or 5 foot tall. There was no need. Peoples properties were so vast in some cases putting a wall or palacade up would have been impractical. I think this mind set carried over into the 20th century to some extend and walled yards were just not the biggest priority. Mind you there are people who have them, many thousands of people in fact in the north east, but not nearly as many as in the west.
So where does this play into the OP? Well it is of my opinion that the walled yards of the sprawled west are do to a latent lack of trust for your neighbor, rather than a property line deliniator.
Is it really an East/West thing? Or have your impressions been shaped by the coincidence of different neighborhoods happening to have been in the East or West?
In the cities, particularly older neighborhood, fences are the rule in the East. The house In which I originally lived in downtown Royal Oak, MI had a fenced yard–as did our neighbors. My grandparents’ and cousins’ homes in Indianapolis had fenced yards. All of my friends living in the city of Detroit have fenced yards.
On the other hand, My brother and sister, each living in older sections of Seattle, have fenced yards as did my cousins living in an older section of Pomona, CA.
In contrast, the Baby Boomer subdivision to which my family moved in Rochester, MI had only a very few fenced yards (usually when the family had a dog) and the subdivision to which we moved in Lake Orion, MI had no fenced yards. Similarly, my cousins who lived in a new tract in Redondo Beach, CA had no fence.
I currently live in an exurban neighborhood built during the 1950s and there are no fences.
I’m guessing that the age of a development has much more to do with the presence of fences than the location.
The house I grew up in (built 1951) had no fences originally. In fact the fence that went up between us and one neighbor was called a spite fence.
The first house we lived in in New Jersey was from at least 50 years before that, and no fences at all, anywhere on our block. The house we bought was from 1980 or so - also no fences. However, when we moved to California, there were fences built with the development, which was done around 1955. (We’re in negotiations with our neighbors about replacing all the fences.) So age seems to have less to do with it than the coast, in these cases.
My back yard is fenced for the simple fact that we have a pool and the township requires the fence for safety reasons. It’s a chain-link fence – that seems to be the most common kind of fence I see out East. I think most folks don’t have fences, though. Newer McMansions are without, though smaller townhomes usually have some tasteful picket fence in the back, to give them a little bit of privacy in their postage-stamp yards.
I remember from my distant childhood in California that block walls or tall wood fences were the norm. Could it be the Spanish influence in SoCal? In many places south-of-the-border, walls and gates around your home are standard, serving a very practical role of keeping ne’er-do-wells out.
I prefer Eastern-style, as others have stated, for the openness.
There is, however, one California housing development which is exemplary of backyards with no fencing (indeed, with common foot-/bike-paths linking backyards): Village Homes, in Davis (maybe an hour and a half or so from where you live, I’m guessing).
Yes. I grew up on the East Coast, but having lived in CA most of my adult life, I’m always shocked when visiting friends and relatives back East and seeing all the unfenced yards. I’ve never seen a single unfenced backyard in CA. And while fencing might be common in all cities, it’s still pretty uncommon in the suburbs in the East. Maybe the bigger yards people typically have in the East make it less practical, and the smaller yards people typically have in the West make it more necessary.
I don’t think it has yet been established that it is an East/West thing.
I grew up outside of Philadelphia and can not think of one home that I ever had personal experience with that did not have a fenced in backyard. That includes homes I myself grew up in in three different counties as far as an hour outside the city of Philadelphia, also friends’ and cousins’ house in additional counties in still more counties of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
This makes me just another poster sharing personal experience of a too small sample group, perhaps. We’re only seeing “in my experience” evidence, which can vary greatly for example: tomndebb mentions an experience of a subdivision in Lake Orion, MI as having no fenced yards. Well, I’ve made many visits to a friend’s house in Lake Orion and many of the houses in her subdivision do have fences.
So, you’ve got tomndebb and I citing two different subdivisions in a very small town and we’re getting different data.
I can’t give any examples of fenceless neighborhoods in the West, though I have lived in California for six years. Still, there is certainly no short of fenced neighborhoods in the East.
I’ve seen few completely unfenced yards in the East. I’ve seen yards with one fence on each side of the house, with the back left open. I’ve seen yards fenced only across the back, yards with both sides and the back fenced and an open driveway leading to the front of the house, and yards where bushes and trees serve the function of a fence.
Everyone on the western side of my neighborhood has a fenced-in yard. Everyone on the east does not.
Until I moved from the western side to the eastern side and promptly erected a fence. Skewed the whole thing!
(I say western and eastern to avoid saying “west side” and “east side” lest you thing my neighborhood is anything more than just 50 little boxes on the hillside made of ticky tacky.)
Yeah, but you’re on Lawn Guyland. Out in the distant suburbs away from NYC, fences are pretty much the exception. (I’d bet that bienville’s friends live in one of the older developments along Lake Orion, Judah Lake, or Long Lake. I can’t think of any “fenced” neighborhoods along Lapeer Rd., Joslyn (other than Judah Lake), Indianwood, Baldwin, or Orion Rd. and there are no “fenced” neighborhoods in Bainbridge Twp, Auburn Twp, or Troy Twp in my neck of exurbia.)
Fencing may be more prevalent than I realized out West (which is why my first post was a question). It just seems odd to think of larger unfenced lots being more prevalent back in the overpopulated East than in the expansive West.
I grew up in suburban Virginia and everyone had a fenced in backyard. I thought the no fence thing was part of the new Mcmansions, large houses on small plots of land. If you don’t have a fence, how do you keep your dog from crapping in your neighbor’s yard?
A lot of east coast subdivisions are carved out of forests, so developers use the woods for demarcation (even if a little blurry) between properties, especially in the back. Even if the woods are somewhat sparse they create enough of a boundary to satisfy most.
Where subdivisions are created from farm, desert, or grassland, the natural demarcations don’t exist, so if you want explicit boundaries you need fences.
Another thing is, the minute you finish putting something up in a humid environment that’s made of exposed wood, it’s attacked by all manner of rot. So I suppose there’s a high maintenance/not unless it’s absolutely necessary aspect to east coast fences.
Proper training. When I moved from my tiny little, fenced-in, first-tier suburban lot to my non-fenced, not-quite-exurb, decent sized lot, we just reinforced her training so she would only do her business in her own lot. As is, she’ll only leave our lot if she spots a rabbit – at that point she just forgets all of her education.
In the fenced in yard, she was becoming quite an escape artist. She just couldn’t stand to be caged in. Now that we have the bigger, unfenced yard, she’s quite content in staying in the yard with no desires to wander (except for the delicious animals, that is).
I know here in Middle Tennessee, the rule seems to be the well-to-do live in subdivisions with restrictive covenants against fencing, while the less-afluent have fewer restrictions. In my mother’s subdivision, for example, fences aren’t allowed. One neighbor had to petition the Homeowner’s Assoc. for permission to put up a fence because they had a daughter with Down’s syndrome and she was a wanderer. Those people with dogs, like my mother, have invisible fencing. My sister lives in Pheonix. It seems the rule there that backyards are fenced, maybe because of the prevelance of pools.
Growing up in Michigan, our house and yard took up 1/2 a city block and wasn’t fenced. our neighbor had 1/4 of the rest of the block, and they had a palisade fence only between them and the riff-raff of 4 houses who lived on the 1/4 of the block.
I’ve lived in various suburban neighborhoods in southern and northern California, and backyards were always fenced, so to me it is the norm. If I lived on one of those blocks where everyone’s backyards ran together, I’d feel like I lived in the middle of a public park - no privacy whatsoever.
We were once contemplating moving to Boulder, Colorado, and flew out there to look at some housing. They had the no-fenced-backyards deal going in a lot of the new neighborhoods we looked at, and the foreignness of that was one of many factors which made us decide against the move.
Well, mostly I was kiddding, but as a serious answer I would guess far enough out that incorporated cities do not share common boundaries. (Although In Michigan, we frequently find open yards in Birmingham and West Bloomfield and Franklin and a bunch of others that are all adjacent. And while those are sort of “tony” neighborhoods, there are plenty of either unfenced or mixed neighborhoods in working class Warren or middle class Sterling Heights. The same is true here in NE Ohio. My brother lives in the “poor” section of a “tony” neighborhood with no fences on their postage stamp lots, (although his city is only bounded by other cities on three sides, with open fields to the South), and there were no fences in the middle class neighborhood where he lived in city-surrounded Willoughby, previously.)
Perhaps it is an East/West thing. I wonder what is the geographic extent for the locales that have no-fence housing?
(I have never lived with a fenced yard since leaving Royal Oak in 1956.)
I suspect in the Northeast it has more to do with urban vs suburban vs rural areas. I grew up in Connecticut, in a suburb of Hartford, with no fences. Those expanses of unfenced yard behind the houses were great for neighborhood kids to get together to play in. Other suburban or rural areas in New England that I’m familiar with are unfenced.
Now I’m on Long Island (Nassau County; most people around here don’t count Queens or Brooklyn as the Island) and the backyards are fenced in all the areas I know (including both old and relatively new villages). My wife thinks of LI as suburban and the area I grew up in as rural; most of Nassau County feels urban to me; they do feel very different.