Buffalo, New York: Fencing is the exception in post-WWII residential areas, with some unfenced properties in older neighborhoods. New subdivisions are built without fences following property lines.
Las Cruces, New Mexico: Fencing is the norm. New subdivisions are built with rock walls on property lines.
Denver, Colorado: Fencing is the norm. New subdivisions are built with wood fencing on property lines, and elaborate masonry walls if the property backs up to an arterial road.
Orlando, Florida: Fencing is common, but new subdivisions are usually built without without them.
Cleveland, Ohio: Fencing is the exception in areas built after WWII. New subdivisions are built without fences following property lines.
My thoughts behind it: fences are the norm for new development in western cities because Westerners tend to be more protective of their property than Easterners. The “get the hell off my land!” attitude doesn’t seem as prevalent east of the Mississippi as it is west.
Here in Cleveland, if kids knock a ball into my backyard, they usually just walk back there and get it. Neighbors walk their dogs in the woods behind my house, which I own. When I lived in Denver, if a ball got knocked in my backyard, the kids asked my permission to retrieve it.
I’ve lived in the South all my life, and I can tell you that unfenced yards are an anomaly, at least around these parts. When I was house hunting, every place I looked at had a fenced yard. Now, in the ghetto, you see fenced front yards sometimes, and that’s unusual.
It may have to do with terrain as well. Steep terrain requires retaining walls and such between properties, which can make fencing desirable from a safety and/or privacy standpoint.
In Atlanta fencing was not uncommon but far from universal. I have since moved to the mid west and fencing in the backyard is almost universal. It is almost always privacy fencing and serves as a much needed wind-break.
Another poster mentioned fencing drawing neighborhoods apart. This may be the case for some neighborhoods and some fences, but our fence in Atlanta made us many neighborhood friends. Specifically we could sit in our front yard with our dogs and chat with neighbors as they walked by with their dogs. The neighborhood dogs also like to run around loose with our in the yard.
14 years later and I’m asking the same exact question. I live in California but am browsing houses on the east/Midwest and I’m noticing a lot of homes without fenced yards. I had to actually look up why when I came across a house with a semi-fence around the backyard porch. I’ve traveled, and as others have said, when I have seen fences out there they are chain link fences if any. So it does, as someone raised on the west coast, seem like an east coast thing to note have backyards fences. As a renter with a shared yard currently I can’t imagine how so many people would be fine not having personal yard space, almost like a bedroom outdoors. I can’t wait to have somewhere safer to grow a garden where others can’t interrupt it or have a space to sunbathe or just read by an outdoor fire without a neighbor/their guest/pets interfering or watching me so bluntly.
Always has been fenced, even before pools. I’m thinking the reason may be ranch-style buildings filling up small lots. My ancestor thought it odd when she moved there from the rural midwest.
Canberra, the planned city built as capital of Australia, was designed by an American expat. The Australian residents have never come to terms with the lack of residential fencing, and fencing crept in as rules have been relaxed.
My impression is that in the last few decades, when house prices were soaring (remember when?) that the developers of large subdivisions used every trick in the book in terms of making the house as cheap as possible. As happened with my (Canadian) home, the developer leaves landscaping up tot the new occupant, or does something absolutely minimal like plain grass, no fence, even no deck - a back yard door opening onto mid-air with a board across it for safety. (If bylaws allow, not even the driveway) The buyer then gets around to finishing these details in whatever manner they prefer and afford. Only fences I saw installed by the developer were between backyard lots and public spaces like cross streets, or the main road the yards back onto. Sometimes, not even that.
And of course, to do a big subdivision they took out all the older trees. In New Jersey I remember one development which was biggish houses amid plain grass with a few scraggly 6-foot trees. Not a single fence, though it backed onto a main road. My step-mother laughingly called them “executive slums”.
When I had my house built, my neighbour put up a chain link fence for his dog. So I only had to do 2/3 of my yard, i was consistent with the same 5’ black chain-link… needed to keep out the Canada Geese. They poop everywhere.
I agree that urban spaces typically have fences or walls, pretty much everywhere. And rural areas the fences are usually about containing livestock. The differences in norms are in suburbs, small towns, etc.
I don’t know if it’s east vs. west, but I do know that the laws vary from place to place. Where I live, if you want to put up a fence, it needs to be entirely on your property, and the fence is normally centered a foot from the property line. There are places where you can put up a fence on the property line and force your neighbor to pay half the cost. So obviously the norms and expectations are different.
No, my neighborhood dates from the 1950s, and there are (almost) no fences. Parts of my town that have placards saying the buildings were constructed in ~1900 have few fences, too.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this. I have a rock wall on the back property line. It’s only about a foot tall, and it’s made up of the rocks I’ve removed when turning over my garden, and the rocks my neighbor removed when doing yardwork, and the rocks the prior owner removed when putting in a patio, and… But it does give a sense of boundary. And the area the rock wall is in is “unimproved”. It’s not cleared lawn, it’s just scrubby woods.
There’s also woods on one side of the backyard. The other side, a new McMansion went in and blasted out the hillside, so I constructed a chain link fence (fully on my property, with enough room on my property to walk outside it for maintenance) so I wouldn’t fall down the cliff. I also planted a hedge on one side of the front yard. The other side already had several bushes. There’s actually a somewhat defined path between my front door and the neighbor’s (the postman sometimes uses it, as do we) so it’s not as if the plantings would keep anything out. But they provide some visual separation.
Well, I can’t exactly sunbathe naked. But I’m a pretty territorial person, and my territory is pretty clearly marked. And my neighbors and I aren’t on top of each other, and we certainly each have our own space.
I had a fenced yard when I was a kid in northern NJ - and so did everyone else I knew. But today in suburban MD, I’m in a neighborhood where no-one has a fence. Just a matter of style, not related to east or west, but rather to the design aesthetic preferred by the land developers and the people who chose to live in a neighborhood.
I think you really need to consider lot size more than anything else, which isn’t necessarily as simple as urban vs. suburban, let alone east vs. west. The smaller the lot the more likely you are to find fences, because you don’t have enough room to buffer against your neighbors any other way. I would posit the reason you see more fences out west (specifically California) is because their new suburban subdivisions still tend to have lots that are smaller than in the midwest or east.
@mack also mentioned wood and rot, which is less of a problem in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. I can’t imagine Portland or Seattle fare well in that regard though. Still, in warmer climates it’s also easier to build walls since the footings only need to be about a foot deep, and it’s pretty rocky hard soil out west. Compare that to more temperate areas where footings may need to be three or four feet deep into mushy clay soil.
On a broader scale, suburbs in the midwest and east usually attempted to evoke (whether successfully or not) an “open park-like setting” with large lots and sweeping uninterrupted lawns. This started well over 100 years ago in opposition to dense industrial cities. Fences and walls are anathema to this vision. Out west it’s almost all suburbs to begin with, you’re not “escaping” the city, you’re escaping Ohio altogether, so that urban/suburban differentiation doesn’t seem to be as critical. However, with crushing demand for housing and a relative lack of urban neighborhoods, lot sizes have to shrink.
I’ve heard that the style began as a conscious reaction against the British model of closing off properties with high hedges and walls.
I don’t see it as an eastern/western thing. In general, neighborhoods with houses crowded together have a lot more fencing in an attempt to create boundaries.* With more space, people don’t care as much.
*without them you can have trouble, as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul found out.