The answer to all questions is racism. We don't have public transportation because it became illegal to forbid African Americans access, we don't have public parks and services, because you can no longer have ''whites only'' signs up, we don't have stores in these areas because you can't stop immigrants from owning stores that whites see as 'beneath them' to work in, farming your own yard is trashy, because slaves were only allowed to farm food for themselves in small plots right next to the shacks they were allowed to sleep in, and why do we have remote single housing areas you can only access with cars that are over priced? To get away from the black people they could no longer red line to prevent living near them, and to create school districts non whites couldn't be zoned for as they were priced out of the districts, and then they adjusted school funding so it was based on land value effectively creating whites only schools with high funding. As the white racist mom in the 70s who was upset about bussing said ''if you let your kids grow up around theirs, eventually they'll all start to mix''

As a non driving eastern European, living a few months in a Colorado suburb was literally one of the most depressing times of my life.

Can’t grow anything but grass because they stripped off all the topsoil from the land that used to be a farm.

If you want a garden you need to buy soil

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.

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.

American suburbanism is truly wild. When you see how people live outside of the U.S., it's startling what we're putting up with here for the wonders of spending hours in a car every week.

It's technically against the law in my state to make a new neighborhood that doesn't have an HOA. I live in a neighborhood without an HOA because it was built before the law was passed. No one's running a tavern but we've got one neighbor who grows vegetables in a patch of their front yard. Another neighbor has a bunch of chickens and also a rooster. We're technically not allowed to have roosters but who's going to tell on them? Not me, for sure.

The more resources you waste publicly, the better. It indicates that you can afford it and brag about it.

Think about jewelry, expensive purses, sneakers, flashy cars, unused lawns, Halloween/Christmas/whatever decorations, etc.

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

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.

I can see that this is going to be an unpopular opinion but the answer is... most people don't actually want to live in commie row houses with a bar downstairs.

I live in suburban Australia. We don't have HoA's and the police don't shoot people, but other than that I imagine that it's comparable to suburban US.

We have a front and a back yard because it's nice to have some room. My kids play in my back yard. We also have about 10m2 of raised planter boxes to grow vegetables. Lots of people also have a shed where you can store hobby equipment like bikes, trailers, camping gear, woodworking, et cetera. Some people have pool tables, sofas, beer fridge, et cetera.

There are some sensible rules about what you can do in your front or back yard but they're for everyone's benefit. For example you can't erect a BFO wall along your front yard, because if everyone does it then the neighbourhood would feel oppressive. There's also some varieties of trees you can't plant because it upsets the neighbours when it inevitably falls over on them in 100 years time.

You can't have shops in a residential street because most people don't actually want that. In most suburbs there are shops, bars, and restaurants a few minutes down the road. Far enough away that I'm not bothered by them but close enough that it's convenient.

In Australia you can choose whether you want to live in a busy city in an apartment with shops up your ass, or in the suburbs, or on a rural property with no towns within 100km. Most people live in the suburbs this guy is questioning, because it's a nice balance of cost, serenity, and convenience.

So we can mow the grass silly.

America is so dumb on so many levels.

Out where I live there are whole neighborhoods built and owned by rental companies. Rows of duplexes, blocks of single family residences built through the 70s and 80s. All rentals for decades, with some houses being sold off variously. And even then many of the buyers in the last 20 odd years were landlords themselves.

The guy I bought my house off of still owned 150 some houses in his direct name in my county, not counting what his business owned or his partners and associates owned directly in their network.

Tenants don't exactly have a whole lot of choices of what they can do on the property, and many can only stay a year or so. It isn't like they invest in the land: so grass.

They really do have a lot of odd rules and personal regulations for a supposedly free country

I am interested in the replies

We have no freedom in "The Land of the Free".

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.

Like really. Besides a lot of these things we have no control over, I want to at least plant things in the yard but I heard there's this thing called HOA and you can't do that either depending on where your house is. It's really sad