Everyone has different tastes of course, but for me they kinda look like an eyesore, something that you put up temporarily while you are building the real wall/fence.
I can understand when poor people build them, but why do medium and rich people do it as well? I live in east Europe, salaries here are 10 to 15 times smaller than in USA, yet everyone has different fences, someone has stucco walls, someone has bricks, stone walls, wired fences, shrubs, wooden fences of varying designs and heights (not just plain empty ones), combinations of stone or concrete and wood, of stone and shrubs and a bunch of others, but mostly only construction sites have the plain wood ones, so money is obviously not the reason for this, it just doesn’t make sense that someone has a +200k house and a ugly fence like that.
They are the norm in Australia too. Often the front fence is brick or stone but usually the sides and back are planks of wood. I don’t know the reason, but here’s a guess.
They are thin, so both sides get to enjoy maximum land use.
They are easy to put up and pull down.
If you don’t like the look they can be hidden with trees and shrubs
Cheap
There might also be town planning laws that must be obeyed.
chain link fences used to be popular but now many areas and HOAs ban them in favor of wood . That is for new houses, existing chain link fences can stay
That’s kind of how we view chain-link fences. If I was going to describe a stereotypical not-so-nice neighborhood in my area, one of the features would be run-down chain-link fencing, often extending into the front yard, with rusty gates and day-glo orange “beware of dog” signs.
I’m in an area where one of the hallmarks of the fanciest neighborhoods is that you never see something as tacky as a fence (if there’s a swimming pool, it will be fenced but the whole thing will be hidden behind the house), but the more upscale urban neighborhoods in the nearest large city do have some variety in the fencing. Some have wooden fences with some more ornate features, but some have hedgerows or brick walls.
To me, such fences say “Don’t look at me or my family and the stuff we keep in our yard!” Or maybe they’re to keep the homeowner from having to look at the crap a neighbor is accumulating on their property. Also, if you have a swimming pool, there are laws about how high a fence you need to have to prevent kids from getting in and swimming without permission. Mostly, tho, I think people want the privacy of being indoors while being outdoors.
Personally, I don’t like the boxed-in feeling, but I also hate chain-link fences with a white hot hate. (Yeah, that’s what we’ve got, but we can’t afford to replace it with something more attractive - our fenced area is nearly 2 acres.)
Based on my observations, types of fences vary depending on neighborhood, local laws, HOA rules, age of the homes, fashion, and probably other factors that I haven’t thought of. The people who owned our house before us were (IMHO) paranoid - they had chains with locks on the 3 gates into the yard, and the fence is 5’ high. Most of the homes in this development don’t have fences, or just have enough to contain a dog.
When I moved into my house I had a dog already. I had a tall wooden fence put up around the back yard so that I could just simply open the back door when it came time to let the dog out. Wood offers privacy vs. chain lnk (which is generally the only other option), and I think wood looks better.
I don’t know if those laws are set at the county or state level, but judging by the fences I’ve seen, I think the requirement must be 3-3.5’ high, just by eyeballing from the street. (There are about 240 houses in our neighborhood, ~30 of them have pools, and you can count the tall wood privacy fences on the fingers of one hand. The rest have these much shorter fences that would easily suffice for keeping a toddler out, but would fail against a determined 8 year old.)
I can’t tell if JakeRS is objecting to fences per se, or just to wooden ones.
For a long time, American yards/gardens have been less walled-off than their counterparts in Europe (from what I can tell, walls are a staple in much of built-up England), something Allen Lacy wrote about:
“For most of history, and in most of the rest of civilization, gardens have been conceived as walled-off refuges from the world, places of escape rather than engagement. Maybe that’s why Americans never went for the hortus conclusus, preferring to bring down the traditional walls and fences so that our gardens might, in every sense, connect.”
Walls/fences are still uncommon in many areas (HOAs seem particularly opposed to them). Fences are more popular where lots are small, so you don’t have neighbors breathing down your neck.
We don’t have much in the way of fencing, mostly a near-transparent mesh deer fence to keep the hooved rats in check.
Our HOA bans fences (except for homes with pools). I personally like that ban - it makes the neighborhood look more inviting, and gives space for the kids to run (and yes, kids still play outside).
Drove by our old neighborhood the other day, everyone now has a fence, and it looks cramped and uninviting.
I’m definitely seeing a move away from wooden fences. Around here it’s more common to see white PVC fences. More expensive initially but they last much longer with less maintenance. The one house where we put up a fence it was a nice cedar fence that was not cheap and certainly didn’t look cheap.
It’s very often against zoning laws to put them in the front yard. It’s been that way for every town I lived in.
There’s a mix of wooden and white vinyl fences in my neighborhood. The wooden ones are usually decades old and had been put up by a previous homeowner. Houses which were either flipped or remodeled by a new owner have the white vinyl ones.
Fencing is expensive, depending on the size of one’s yard. Excluding chain link, wood is the least expensive material.
We fenced in our yard on two sides with 6’ high wood to contain our dogs. Other neighbors have done theirs either or the same reason and/or for privacy.
When I lived in NY, NJ and Louisiana no one had fences. Here in California everyone does. Our’s is taller on one side where we replaced it (our neighbor really wanted a taller fence) but the fences look pretty reasonable.
Very convenient in that we can let our dog out anytime without worrying about her running all over the neighborhood. And it is also good next to our garden, because it keeps the heat over the winter for our fava beans and onions and herbs.
Funny that Americans love freedom but yet put up with all kinds of stupid HOA rules about fences, paint colors, etc . All in the name of “property values”
Fences of any kind are less common than you might think if you only know of the U.S. from watching American TV shows. I’m not entirely sure why TV houses are more likely to have fences than real average houses in the U.S. I suspect that one reason is that it’s easier to build a set for the backyard of a TV house if there is a fence around it. If there was no fence, you could see the neighbors’ houses and hence the neighbors more often. Perhaps a second reason is that fences around houses are more common in southern California than in most of the U.S. Much of what you see in American TV shows is uncharacteristic of most of the U.S. because so many American TV and movie people don’t spend a lot of time outside southern California.
Don’t forget that brick would be incredibly more expensive in northern states, and all of Canada. Here all footings would need to be four feet deep minimum. Brick walls, unless professionally installed would crumble like Lego after one winter.
Deer. Lots and lots of deer. Front yard is unfenced, vegetable garden has a very attractive wood and wire fence with Japanese-ish trellis, back yard has wood fences on two sides, a plastic mesh fence on the other, and a side fence of wood and wire, though not as nice as the garden. All back yard fencing was initiated by neighbors with dogs but serves our anti-deer, anti-turkey, anti-dogs-let-out-by-neighbors-despite-laws purposes.
