Sample Property - Land
Mother and Daughters

The Suburbs Vs Nature & Common Sense

If we are not in the city, we may as well have access to nature—and yet for most suburban dwellers, nature is still a drive away. Why?

Because suburbs retain all sorts of cultural artifacts from lawns, to yards, to stoplights, that served a purpose at one point in American history but not today. This silly grasping for cultural artifacts robs us the ability to enjoy our natural surroundings with our kids and friends.

So many of the failings of the modern suburb remind us a The Little Old Lady who swallowed a fly. We needed the stop lights to slow the cars, we needed the cars for to pull up right next to our house, we needed to pull up right next to our house because of the lawns pushing the houses far apart, we needed the lawns to fill the yards.
Why did we need the yards? (I don’t know why she swallowed a fly – Perhaps she’ll die!)

Yards

Most people would rather have hundreds of acres of woods and trails, communal gardens, and sports fields to share with their neighbors than an acre to themselves. Why, then, do we have yards? Families used to need two acres per family to grow crops used to feed themselves. 

Lawns

When we stopped needing our yards to feed our families we had to figure something to do with them.
Lawns are an antiquated historical artifact—invented by French nobility to show they had extra land to dedicate to nonproductive (and yet labor-intensive) crops. Today lawns are nothing but a waste of time, money, water, and resources, with the average homeowner in the US spending two hours per week for every acre of lawn they own.

Roads

Because we had yards we had lawns, because we had lawns we needed private garages to get our cars close to our houses. Because we needed private garages we needed roads that led to the front of every … single … house.

Stop Lights

In the 1970s a report showed that stop lights where slower than round about and lead to more accidents, yet we still adopted them. Why? Because it was more important that the cars where slower when they went through suburbs. The cars where in the suburbs because the roads where in the suburbs, the roads where in the suburbs because of private garages, the private garages where in the suburbs because of the lawns, and the lawns where in the suburbs because of yards.

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