The people the suburbs were built for are gone

Re:The people the suburbs were built for are gone by WalterBright on Sunday January 24, 2021 @02:28AM (#25890095)

There's a neighborhood nearby that I often go for a walk on. It was built probably immediately after WW2. Most of the houses, if you look closely, are of identical design. (Sometimes a mirror image.) But over the years, they've diverged as the owners would add garages, bedrooms, expansions, etc. They're nicely done, and it's a charming neighborhood.

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Re:The people the suburbs were built for are gone by theshrike79 on Sunday January 24, 2021 @06:19AM (#25891138)

Finland has this exact same thing. We call them "Rintamamiestalo", translates to something like "Soldier house".

They're all pretty much the same kind of two-story wooden house, people built them in bulk when they got home from the war. It was an event like an Amish barn raising, the same guys built a ton of the exact same house one after the other.

Now they've got maybe the second or third owner and the designs have diverged quite a bit, but you can still find the central house if you know how to look.

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Re:The people the suburbs were built for are gone by analog31 on Sunday January 24, 2021 @10:50AM (#25892963)

I grew up in such a neighborhood, built to absorb the baby boom. It took me a long time to figure out that the houses were identical except for being oriented in different directions, having different facade, and so forth. One day I realized that I knew my way around David's house because I knew my way around Kevin's house.

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Re:The people the suburbs were built for are gone by m463 on Sunday January 24, 2021 @02:51AM (#25890221)

It's unfortunate that the beautiful trees of established neighborhoods take 50 years to achieve.

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Re:The people the suburbs were built for are gone by Bob_LaBLahh on Sunday January 24, 2021 @03:54AM (#25890464)

It doesn't have to be that long. My mom asked the city to put in some oak trees when I was a kid. It only took the trees about 15 years to grow to a pretty good size. In my opinion, it's worth the effort of lobbying the city.

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Re:The people the suburbs were built for are gone by improbable22 on Sunday January 24, 2021 @04:43AM (#25890677)

My parents did it the unofficial way, put in 5-10 trees along the road, over a few weekends, with the same style of concrete surrounding that the city used. They are huge now, and nobody ever questioned how they got there. Not 50-years huge, and a faster-growing species than oak, but still a big improvement.

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Re:The people the suburbs were built for are gone by mcguire on Sunday January 24, 2021 @03:37PM (#25895693)

Remember the song,

    Little boxes on the hillside
    Little boxes made of ticky tacky
    Little boxes on the hillside
    Little boxes all the same…

That's what it was complaining about: a neighborhood where people could make it their own.

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Re:The people the suburbs were built for are gone by danans on Sunday January 24, 2021 @01:50PM (#25894573)

This is how many urban residential neighborhoods built before the 1950s are. Mine in CA is a such a neighborhood built between the 1920s and 1940s - originally very similar 1000sqft Craftsmans that have been incrementally enhanced over generations up to and including including now.

Where you find a distinct lack of this sort of organic variation is in suburban tract single family home developments where changes are micromanaged by neighborhood HOAs.

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