I live in the South and inside the city. I have a small lawn in front and back. The back is fenced but the front is not. I don’t think I have ever lived in a house with a fenced front yard. We’ve always had fenced backyards because we’ve always had pets.
I should probably mention that in some suburbs and neighborhoods of Los Angeles – like Glendale, for instance (the conservative, nondescript city sandwiched between Burbank and Pasadena) – front yard fences over 18" tall are forbidden. As are tall hedges, if I’m not mistaken.
I’m an antisocial, hermitty sort, so I often wish my front yard had a fence. But then, my front yard is 95% concrete (wish I knew which previous owner thought that was a good idea :rolleyes: ).
In Adelaide South Australia, all back yards are fenced and I would guess around 70% of front yards. Many front fences are only a couple of feet high to mark the property boundary and in most cases look hideous. Not only does each house have a different fence which spoils the look of the neighbourhood, but many don’t even match their house. What were people thinking? It’s only in the newer suburbs where they have dispensed with the front fence or alternatively on smaller blocks, have one which is 6’ completely enclosing the property.
Houses sharing two walls with others (corner houses sharing one), typically with a concrete alleyway in the back seperating them from another row of same which face front on the adjacent parallel street.
It’s a bit hard to find a photo of the type I have in mind, probably because the streets are so narrow that photographing a block from across the street would require one heck of a wide-angle lens.
Northern Californian here, and I’ve never seen a neighborhood without backyard fences. (Probably because I don’t remember living anywhere but our current place.) I can’t even imagine what that would be like. Even the house where my mom grew up in Washington, which had (what seemed to 11-year-old me, anyway) a huge yard, had something to show which yard was which.
Here’s an aerial photo with one meter resolution for those who can’t imagine what a neighborhood without backyard fences looks like. I grew up here. As I said, there are landscaping features that indicate the borders of properties. But they suggest more than demand — there’s still a free flow design to the yards.
Suburban Chicago. Not too many fences in the neighborhood when I was growing up, but that has changed. We had hedges on either side of the back. One guy in the neighborhood put a chainlink fence around his house, all the way to the sidewalk! Everyone thought he was a numbskull.
I grew up in a suburb in NJ in a neighborhood with maybe 1/4-1/2 acre lots. Part of everybody’s back yard was woods, so my ‘block’ was like a ring of houses and open front yards with woods in the middle. The only fences were the required ones around swimming pools. Otherwise children, dogs, cats, and whatever else pretty much roamed free. Every once in a while a pet would get hit by a car so it was by no means a perfect system but I though it was pretty good. Everybody respected everybody else’s property and at the same time certain people would allow others to ‘cut through’ one another’s property to get to a school bus stop or the lake. The woods offered sufficient privacy.
I have a place upstate and the zone has only 5 acre lots, so no one has fences except around gardens, paddocks, or to keep livestock in.
Thanks for the link, Walloon. Here’s the picture of my old neighborhood.
We don’t have a fence around our yard. I don’t feel like we need a fence up to keep the neighbors animals out of our yard. I feel they should keep their animals up and out of our yard as we give them the same respect of keeping our animals in our own yard.
You ask “What about your dogs”? Hell, I wish that was all we had to worry about. Instead we have to put up with this shit. Can’t find the picture of the horses running around but we got that too tearing up our yard. The pigs started an all out family feud, as it is family that owns them. We live in the country and just outside of Knoxville to boot.
I’m from central PA. I don’t like fences - they aren’t neighborly and they’re ugly.
Don’t have any dogs. The neighbors don’t either. People who do have dogs usually tie them up or they have some sort of pen set up.
Dude, it’s central PA! Have you seen how rural some areas are?
snort Now you really sound like you’re from California. We don’t need no fool poncy “landscaping.” :p. 'Sides, it snows and freezes here every year so we spend just as much if not more time looking at snow than we do seeing green plants.