To Southerners and Easterners: what's with the fencelessness? What about your dogs?

I live just outside Philadelphia in PA and there is no shortage of fencing around here.

If you and your neighbor each have a 1/4-acre front lawn, putting up a fence makes it look like two 1/4-acre lawns. Not putting up a fence makes it look like one big 1/2-acre lawn. When my wife and I bought our first house, the driveways in the neighborhood alternated left and right sides of the property to enhance this.

Over the years, I’ve always had as little fencing as possible. Some is required, to keep neighbor kids from falling in the pool, to keep my goats out of the neighbor’s flowers, to keep the foxes away from my chickens, and so forth, but I never want more fences than absolutely necessary.

My rural “neighborhood” was once a 220 acre farm that was divided into 5 acre parcels. Most of the lots were purchased in 3-4 parcel groups. There are two 5 acre lots, mine and my next-door neighbor’s, and there is one 10 acre lot. The land is zoned “agricultural”.

None of us have fences except for one neighbor who has horses. Our dogs run free, but it’s never caused a problem that I know of. The dogs stick to their own territory most of the time, but they are welcome to visit. There are no children in the neighborhood other than grandchildren visiting.

It’s an unusually tight neighborhood - everybody knows everybody else well enough that we know other neighbors’ relatives. We get together for cookouts and oyster roasts and fish fries quite often. We also watch over each other’s place (which is easy because there is only one street in and it dead-ends inside the neighborhood). I feel like the sociality is both encouraged and facilitated by the lack of fences.

I grew up in suburban Boston, no one had fences, we had no leash laws and most dogs ran free. People with pools (not many since we had a neighborhood pool) had fences.

Not that I have ever subscribed to it, but there is a theory that in California people aren’t “friendly” because they have fences which prevent them from getting to know their neighbors.

The only fences we have around here are to keep the cows in the pastures. :smiley:

Hardly any fences in our Milwaukee neighborhood. When our dog was outside, we were usually with him. But if we did put him out there by himself, we would put him on a chain. He did seem to understand where the borders of our property were.

Landscaping is used to indicate property lines. This may mean a hedge, bushes, flower gardens, trees, walkways. Also, utility poles usually stand at the corners of property lines.

Having no fences is great when you are a child! You and the neighborhood kids can run around all you like in each other’s yards; it’s one big play area. None of the adults minded. The idea that every yard in Southern California is closed off sounds sad to me. Enough in modern society alienates us. We need more neighborliness.

First…what is a “rowhouse” exactly?

Second, the slum lawns tend to be brown weeds.

Third, thanks all for your answers. Interesting.

Next, yes, I refer to backyards, although there are plenty of front yard fences, too, and actually I do aspire to one. I want more privacy.

And there is something to the lack of neighborliness remarks, at least with me. I have met many neighbors in various places where I live and rarely have I cared much for any of them. Proximity is a poor basis for a friendship, in my view.

This seems to be more a matter of opinion and personal experiences than hard facts, so I’ll move this thread to IMHO.

bibliophage
moderator GQ

Googling “dog dazzler” produced nothing useful.

I gots to know - what is this thing?

I am in the south and have never noted a lack of fences. I have a privacy fence and half my neighbors have chain linked ones (mostly the ones that own dogs). I have to agree with the earlier comment on people using shrubbery or some type of border to seperate property when they lack a fence. The homes I grew up in also had fences in the backyard. A good way of not only keeping the dogs in the yard, but the little kiddies also.

This kind of thing?

(be bad luck to run into a deaf dog though!)

I have a friend from South Africa who is amazed that our houses here don’t have huge fortress-like walls around them.

I fenced in my former 1-acre yard to keep my dogs in. It didn’t work for my German Shepherd. He went over, he went under. But the other dogs stayed put, which is what I wanted.Currently I own 14 acres. I have a paddock fenced for my horse, and the front of my yard is fenced with a decorative 3-plank post and rail fence. My dogs are free to visit the neighbor dogs and the neighbor dogs visit us. When my horse has gotten loose, my neighbor just gives me a call to let me know that he’s out.

In my mother’s subdivision in a tony neighborhood, fences are forbidden by the restrictive covenants of the subdivision. Only one house was allowed to have a fence, and that was because they had a mentally handicapped child and needed a little extra safety for her.

StG

I’ll bet that the fence free neighborhoods have much lower overall canine lifespans.

Even spectacularly well behaved dogs (I own a couple…its more genetic than me, and the fact that I’m home all the time) are, after all, just dogs. expecting them to remain inside an invisible barrier all the time, under every circumstance, unsupervised, is just asking too much.

I grew up in Western New York, never fences in the front yard, and fences in the backyard mostly for dog control or for pool safety. We had a back yard fence when I was a kid, because we had a dog, and my mother was thrilled to finally get rid of the fence at the end of a dog’s life. The weather in WNY makes fence maintenance a pain in the butt. Let me tell you, this includes so-called “weather-proof” fences.

(I mean, she was sad about the dog, but happy about the fence.)

We just bought a house in that area that came with a backyard fence. We have a cat, not a dog, so we’re thinking of keeping the fence. A year later, the fence seems to be more trouble than it’s worth. It’s one of the few houses in the area with a backyard fence. When I meet people in the neighborhood, and tell them which house we bought, I’ll mention the house number (vague look) … the blue house (vague look) … the blue house with a big picture window (vague look) … with the fence (OH! I know that house!).

I also know many people with a fenced-in area for the dog (of a decent size), but not the entire yard fenced in.

I think “rowhouses” means houses that are attached to each other, in an urban way. Count me as another person who had a hard time grasping the concept of a Southern California bad neighborhood, because all the houses had front yards. I was also shocked the first time I saw a front yard with a fence.

Nova Scotia here, and I’ve only seen a handful of fences in my life. Of those, some were on farms or at least around horse pastures–places you’d have to have a fence. The rest I think were more for asthetics that anything else. Many of them didn’t cover the entire property.

Around where I grew up, most people keep their dogs on a run, it gives them plenty of room to run around but still confined to your yard (or even better, part of your yard, so visitors aren’t jumped on before they get to the door). Fences aren’t a very pratical option. Some people don’t tie their dogs, like my neighbours whom I don’t even think should own pets at all–one dog is now tied after he started attacking people, the other is sweet as a button but has been hit by cars several times already. But a dog run is by far the preferred choice to keep dogs under control. Cats on the other hand…

I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland. The only houses that had fences were ones that had pools and/or dogs. Just back yards, not the front.

I moved to Virginia Beach. All the houses in that neighborhood had back yard fences. More expensive neighborhoods tended not to, and some of the newer ones even had covenants that restricted the building of fences because they were considered to be ‘ugly’ - I think that depends on the type of fencing, but whatev.

Now I live in a semi-rural area in North Carolina, and we are just about the only people who have a fence (the farm on the main road is a major exception - miles and miles of horse fencing there). We built it to contain the dogs, who are not of the type that can be trained to stay in their own yard. It is also a back yard fence, and as we have a large lot, it was quite expensive, so I can see why fencing is not so popular. Other neighbors have resorted to the invisible fencing for their dogs. It costs quite a bit less. I’m also sure a few of our neighbors think our fence is ‘ugly’ - not so much because of its appearance (it’s nice wood, stained), but the fact that there is sooo much of it - but my dogs’ safety is more important. When we can afford it, we’ll landscape around it and it’ll be pretty nice.

I’ve not noticed any difference in ‘neighborliness’ between any of these places.

Only if you let them out to wander. Most homes in my town don’t have fences either - because as Smackfu said it’s not easy to fence 2+ acres, which is about as small a lot as most people here own - but the majority of the dogs are tied up for their safety and that of other people/pets/wildlife in the area. I’ve lived here for seven years and I can count on one hand the number of wandering dogs I’ve seen. Fortunately most folks around here seem to grasp the fact that dogs and toddlers are not enough aware of danger to be let loose at will.

Here, in and around Sydney Australiam it has always been a combination of both, leaning towards fenced properties being in the majority, and that majority increasing over the past few decades. As a kid, we were fenceless and our dog roamed the naighbourhood (as did the other dogs)., These days, that’d be a whopping fine.

Our house has a six foot “Colourbond” metal fence all around the backyard, but our front yard is unfenced. We are on a corner block, and the land is small-ish, so our private land kinda merges with the City’s land, and I’d need to drag the plans out to ascertain the actual boundary exactly if I ever needed to know it. Relatives have suggested we build a fence for privacy (and possible increased security), but I prefer it the way it is. We get to feel our land is a bit bigger than it really is, and in exchange for that, we mow the City’s grass and I don’t act the “grumpy old man” bit if a pedestrian or the neighbour’s kids cut across my lawn (within reason). I feel more a part of the neighbourhood this way. The high fences on the back yard are fine, but I don’t want a total fortress either.

Based on places where I’ve lived:

Buffalo, New York and suburbs: about 75% fenced in the city, 25% in the suburbs. Chain link was the dominant fencing material. Cleveland, Ohio and its suburbs are about the same.

New Mexico: massive rock walls fenced every back yard.

Colorado: cedar stockade fences fenced almost every back yard.

Kansas City Missouri/Kansas: most yards fenced, either with chain link or cedar stockade.

Florida: about 80% of all yards are fenced. Cedar and PVC dominate.