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Newer suburban housing often depresses me. You have these large, lovely homes, but they're crammed together so tightly that you could reach out of your kitchen window to turn on your neighbour's sink. The front yard is often just a strip of dry grass with a single crabapple sapling, and the back yard is a box the size of a small bathroom, devoid of both foliage and privacy from the eight other houses overlooking it, and serves largely as a box with air to place your dog in. This could be remedied if the developers weren't complete cunts and sacrificed a house or two per block to space the homes out a bit. But they can't waste an inch.

I certainly don't mean to throw shade at anyone who has purchased a home like this and enjoys living there. Everyone deserves a place to feel happy and comfortable. It just sucks that anything built in the last twenty years is erected with no privacy or quality of life in mind. It's just housebox. As long as you don't peer outside, you won't notice you're trapped in housebox. This is extremely common here in Alberta, and it's the reason my wife and I wound up buying an older home (1960s-70s) in a mature neighborhood. Most newer places we looked at felt as though they were missing a soul.

Just kind of gets to a point where the whole "detached home" thing doesn't really mean anything. May as well connect the walls into row housing and drop the price 100k.

My own property is being extensively reworked to produce a majority of our vegetables. We have already put about 185m² 2,000ft²) under direct cultivation in the back yard, and intend to wrap that garden around the entire property to the full 400m² (4.300ft²) available.

In the end, I don’t expect to have a single blade of grass on the property. It’ll all be flowers, fruiting trees and canes and bushes, and vegetables. All done in a modified Ruth Stout method, with a variation of flat-ground Hügelkultur thrown in.

Let’s just say that Bylaw is already pissed off with me, and I’m not even halfway done yet.

1. As a kid I would play street hockey with my friends although nowadays I don't see kids outside much. Sometimes kids are unlikely and live in an area with no other kids their age around.

2. Yes. Lobbying by oil and car companies

3. see above.

4. See above.

5. See above.

tbf I do know many suburban families that grow a lot in their backyard, although I'm sure there are places with more strict rules around that.

otherwise very valid questions.

Since I found out about the neighborhood association, I've been rather suspicious of this land of the free.

The front and back yards are there to increase pervious cover. That's it.

I work in municipal development and have worked in dense areas, suburbs, and now work in an enclave for the ultra-rich (average new house is about 7 million dollars in the city where I work). Every single developer wants to level all the trees and build as much on the lot as possible with zero pervious cover anywhere, and they don't give the smallest fuck about flooding the downhill neighbors.

I moved to a suburb in a country with unbearable heat yet because of how the suburbs are designed, I still walk more than when I did in the US. Everything from barbershops and grocery stores, to pharmacies and bakeries are within a 10 minute walk. Though I usually wait until night fall to do so.