Why do American suburbs look the way they do?

Factual Questions
21

You misunderstood me, you can build your house here too anywhere you want, I am asking about fences mostly and why people have those big open lawns where anyone can walk as they please, in theory at least.

Here you could have the houses be the same distance from the road like in USA, but people would put fences in front of their house all the way up to the sidewalk, so its nothing sound related, just safety related, also by putting a fence, you turn it from a “public” lawn, to your private yard, where kids can play, where you can build a pool and anything else a yard serves for.

Unless that is law regulated, and it apparently is, then creating a big lawn that is open for everyone and that you don’t use for a private yard, just seems like a waste of a property and money.

Just poke around in Google street view, places like Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Romania,etc. Germany unfortunately has low coverage and I suppose that most French and Italian villages have tighter neighborhoods due to their traditional architecture, Netherlands is also not good, since they have a very, very high population density and their neighborhoods look extremely planned (a bunch of rows of the exact same model of a house).

Here’s a example from a Hungarian city https://s20.postimg.org/db9dlryx9/Szeged.png

In that particular example houses are kinda close to the road, but for example my cousin’s house starts 12 meters from the road and the fence starts right after the sidewalk. In USA I looked at a random suburb and the distance was less, about 10-11 meters from the road and there was no fence. My own house is some 7 meters I think, a little less than in USA, but I don’t really notice any cars unless the windows/doors are open.

22

As the value of land increases so does the incentive to optimise use. Eventually, an entrepreneur will buy up a block of two or four houses, knock them down, and build a dozen on the same site. Naturally, they will all be on tiny (by comparison) plots.

Over here, where land is really expensive, people sell off their gardens to build on. Near me (and I live in the suburbs of a small town in middle England) there is a large five-bed house on a corner. They sold their garden and it now has four tiny houses on it with a communal parking area in front and postage stamp gardens behind.

Many people with front lawns/gardens have paved them over so that they can park off the street.

23

Couple of things.
First, what you’re looking for is a “white picket fence” type neighborhood. Tons of them exist. Many people still consider them part of the American Dream. At least as much as the “I want a house with a white picket fence” trope still exists. Doing a google image search of that will get you, naturally, houses surrounded by actual white picket fences, but there are plenty of neighborhoods with fenced in front yards. And they’re in all different classes of neighborhoods. Just in my area, I see them in very wealthy areas and they’re meant to show off (some of these might as well have been built of of actual dollar bills). I see them in [upper]middle class where they just look nice and in lower class areas I see chain link fences to attempt to keep people out.

However, some cities don’t allow them. They don’t allow any fencing along the sidewalk or to extend past the front of the house. They also don’t allow any shrubs (that would act like a divider) to extend past the front of the house). I believe what they’re trying to do is keep the neighborhood more open and friendly looking.

As for your statements about having a big yard but it basically being public if it’s not fenced off, that’s a big difference between the States and other countries. We’re pretty funny about our property and people know it. No one is going to go and use your front yard as if it’s public property. Sure, someone might walk across it, but you’re not going to get home to find the neighbors having a birthday party in your front yard or some kids hiding in the bushes getting drunk. And if you do, the police in most communities will be more than happy to remove them for you. As our sense of property is pretty strong so are our trespassing laws.

Also, we do still use them as a private yard. Just because they’re not fenced in hardly means they aren’t or can’t be used like a bark yard.

24

Or the local residents will ban any such development, resulting in an artificial limit on the housing supply in the area which just so happens to jack up the values of their own homes.

25

These are all part of the reasons. A suburb is not put up one house at a time. It is designed as a whole by a land developer. Post-war land developers wanted to attract people from aging cities with the idea of a “country” house. You’ll notice in “Mad Men,” suburban residential areas are referred to at least once as “the country.”

They are also built to accommodate getting around in cars and not on foot.

A suburban area doesn’t have to worry about being “open to anyone” because it’s inconvenient and inaccessible to people who don’t live there. That’s why they’re not within walking distances of city centers, that’s why the number of incoming streets is restricted, that’s why the streets are curved and twisted in unpredictable patterns. Many of them don’t even have sidewalks/pedestrian pavements/footpaths.

There’s very little reason for someone to be in that neighborhood unless they live there. And people who live in the neighborhood aren’t going to just walk over someone else’s lawn for no good reason.

I grew up in these kinds of suburban areas and we know when you were in transit, to stick to the sidewalk, if there was one, or to stay parallel to the street. The lawn doesn’t become “public” just because there’s no fence. Indeed, front yard fences are usually prohibited because it looks like a feature of a poor neighborhood.

I know people who have refused to move into a neighborhood because the front-yard fences make it look “trashy.”

26

A lot of European properties which include large plots have the house right at the road, with maybe a small yard (not a lawn). Many of them were built before the combustion engine came around. From our point of view, if you have such a house you can put a garden in an inner yard or in back; you don’t put it right in view (and noise, and dust) of the road.

In the end a huge factor is, as so many things regarding architectural differences between the US and Europe, automobiles.

27

American suburbs are also often designed around the Public Land Survey System or “Jeffersonian Grid”. If you Google Maps pretty much anywhere in the country outside of the original 13 Colonies, you will see that the suburbs and rural areas around the cities tend to follow a grid approximately 1 mile square. The grid is then divide into quarters which then get filled in with various subdivisions and office parks.

28

This is a classic Euro query/complaint, or one common to Brits anyway, since their usually smaller properties tend to be heavily fenced/walled-off in an attempt to guarantee more privacy, while a lack of fencing and more expansive views have been seen in the U.S. as more egalitarian/less snooty (and since you’re not jammed up against your neighbors as much, not necessary).

Personally, I like the idea of hedging and fencing for privacy and noise abatement and don’t need to have views stretching down the block.

For an example of stifling conformity, here’s a north London suburb (not so different from some U.S. suburbs, except there’s a lot less elbow room).

29

The farmhouse in the middle of the farm might be an American trait as well. When I lived in a small village near the Rhine, I was surprised to get stuck behind a tractor being driven by a German farmer driving from the village out to his fields. I seldom saw a farmhouse out in a field - farmers lived in the villages.

30

How common are front porches outside the US? I think that many of the kind of houses that have front lawns also have front porches, and at least before home air conditioning became the rule, it was common for people to sit out on their front porches in warm weather. That’s less pleasant if your house is right up next to the street.

31

When the Mennonites came here in the 1940’s they bought large tracts of land and built their house there.

The locals saw this as very peculiar. Where the norm was to live in the town that provided services, water, electricity and small stores. The exterior wall of your house was also the wall of your neighbor’s house. Homes were built right up to the street. And the milpa was outside of the village.

32

That’s almost completely wrong. Or rather it is only sort-of-true for the inner, historic cores of major cities.

Most large European cities vastly expanded in area during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So they too have extensive suburbs. That’s where most of the inhabitants now live. This can sometimes be difficult for visitors to grasp. In cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Madrid most of the houses have been built in the past 150 years and are often also the only buildings ever to have stood on those sites. That’s usually true even for those cities that were heavily bombed during the Second World War, because bomb damage tended to be concentrated in city centres.

Moreover, those suburbs, although often developed more piecemeal than in America, were nevertheless “designed”. Whole groups of streets would typically be created by a commercial developer, who more often than not would build the houses as well. Architectural uniformity could be seen as an asset, as it had connotations of order and prosperity.

A significant number of such suburbs were not developed until the twentieth century and so after the invention of the motor car. Indeed, like the railways, cars made it easier for commuters to live further away from city centres and so, as in America, encouraged more suburbs to be developed. The roads were laid out to reflect that. But even before that, roads in new suburbs had usually been laid out to allow two carriages to pass each other. Where there is no off-street parking, that can now be insufficient. But widening the street is almost never the solution. In such cases, it is far easier just to make the street one-way.

33

The lack of fencing in suburbs comes from the days of Levittown. Those suburbs were built up as small, self-contained developments of houses and no other amenities. The school might have a playground but it was too distant for young kids. And all the families were expected to have young kids - childless couples experienced coldness if not outright ostracism. The fenceless backyards were playgrounds so that the kids could spend their days outdoors in safety with always some parent’s eyes on them.

The historical white picket fence wasn’t suburban but a product of small town America - think Tom Sawyer. Small town houses were built individually rather than in subdivisions. Families marked off their property to showcase their attention to their homes and yards. A fence needed regular whitewashing to stay looking crisp and new, just as lawns needed cutting and flowers planted. A well-tended yard was a mark of pride even for poorer families. By walking down a street people could see who the solid upstanding citizens were and who let themselves go materially, which was a sign of weakness and an indication you shouldn’t let your kids play there. Thousands of stories appeared over the years about the kid from the poor, unkempt house who is an outsider and has to prove worthiness despite the parent’s (usually a single father’s) failings.

I’m not sure why fencing like the one in the Hungarian picture seems unthinkable in America. Maybe because there is no access for cars in that photo. Do they arrive from a back alley or are there no garages at all? Gates across driveways are a gigantic pain. Gated communities in suburbs have 24-hour guardstations to open the barriers, but the houses inside have the same level of openness to one another as in other suburbs.Where do the kids play?

Academics talk of suburbs being representative of capturing the open frontiers of American history in miniature, and the closed borders of Europe may be subliminally reflected in sidewalk fencing. Basically, though, to an American that street looks like a prison camp.

34

I am not a student of fence history, but my LA neighborhood has no or very few fences. Where I live is relatively modest with small lots, but fences appear as you move into more expensive areas–still not the rule though.

My mother-in-law lives in a much more expensive area–not because she’s rich, but because she’s lived in the house for a long time and the rise in property prices coupled with relatively large lots means her once middle-class neighborhood has now become a rich one. Her neighborhood has always featured a fair amount of fences, but there’s a wave of teardowns happening as decent-sized family homes are being replaced by mini-mansions built as close to the property line as code allows. The new construction is all fenced–much of it by, yes, white picket fences, though made of plastic and so easier to maintain.

35

To a suburban American , maybe. But thisis a street not far from me, in Queens, NY. It’s rare to find a front or side yard that isn’t fenced/walled, even if it is only a foot or two deep. And those that have aren’t fenced or walled are still usually distinguished from the public sidewalk in some way - sometimes by being planted with flowers and bushes ( not grass), sometimes by being elevated a step or two above the sidewalk. The very few houses that have no fence, no wall, no garden, just a continuous paved surface from the street to the house, with the front steps jutting out into the paved area look sort of weird.

I have to say that privacy might have something to do with it. Hundreds of people walk down my block every day who don’t live on it, on the way to the school on the corner, or to the bus or the train or a store. If there was nothing to separate my front yard from the sidewalk, I don’t think I would ever find my neighbors BBQing there - but I might find kids hanging out on it , or people allowing their dogs to use it as a toilet.

36

New York City is not America. Seriously. There are so many anomalies in NYC life that it’s nearly impossible to make a generalization about America that also applies there.

That’s also why I’ve learned not to read books about urbanism written by someone who lives in NYC. They’re writing about a different planet than the one I live on, even though I’ve lived in a city almost my whole life. And even though Queens was a barren suburb before the subways were extended there. Everything about NYC is weird.

[rant]And you, Jane Jacobs, patron saint of compassionate urbanism, you’re full of it when you say that cities need to be like what Greenwich Village was like in the 1950s. The rest of NYC itself wasn’t like Greenwich Village then and Greenwich Village itself wasn’t like that earlier Greenwich Village by the 1970s, as you knew because you moved to Toronto then![/rant]

37

NYC is not all of America, but it’s part of America. And I’ve seen similar streets in nearly every city I’ve been to in the Northeast - that just happened to be a street that I knew, whereas I don’t exactly which street I’ve seen that in Rochester or Albany or Philadelphia or … But they are in urban areas, not suburban-type areas that happen to be within the city limits.

38

This is certainly accurate in most of America.

Front laws, fenced or not, are private property, and not to be trespassed on without good reason. Postal carrier is OK, but not most everybody else. That internet theme of the old man yelling “get off of my lawn!” is NOT made up.

I’ve done a lot of political work, door-knocking or lit-dropping, and a common item when training new volunteers is taking a short-cut across the front lawn to the next door. Or not. Most campaigns advise volunteers not to do this, just because some homeowners get annoyed at it. The candidate themself should never do this. People in America are very protective about their lawns.

39

That’s a 20th century development for many of them, though. My own house in the mountains is part of a development built when the local priest convinced the farmers to move to town, in order for the family to be within walking distance of healthcare and schooling (the church gave the land the development is built on, and it was built by the farmers themselves). Before tractors made the move possible, they’d lived out in farms, most of which have now been demolished (generally the ones where buildings are left have animals).

40

Here is a rather extreme example from my home town.

A road built in the days before cars but it has shops, business and houses on it. I probably drive up it every other day as it leads into the larger Market St.

Much of the town is like this, it is very old (heck, from my bedroom window I can see a Roman Fort and my daughters school was founded in 1563) and you are very heavily restricted in what you can build and where and this restricted area is bounded by the lines of the old town walls. Outside of that are more suburban developmentsthat are much more modern but still of thestyle of the relevant times and much smaller that the USA. Our land is limited, expensive and heavily regulated.