Remote View
Housing Rule
Housing Rule
205 comments
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They really do have a lot of odd rules and personal regulations for a supposedly free country
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I learned this after moving out of the US. I live in a third world country now and I feel more free here than I ever have in the US.
One example of this is that the traffic sucks here. Like its always crawling and slow, but the flip side is that you do not feel like you are constantly being hunted by police. Sometimes, not following the rules is what makes the most sense to reduce traffic and that is completely OK here.
There are many other examples, but off the top of my head that is what I thought of.
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America is so dumb on so many levels.
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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.
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No HOA for me. Long term goal is to build a greenhouse that connects the garage to the house, build a rainwater system for drinking that collects from the greenhouse roof, and collect water for the plants from my garage and house. The put solar in the back yard and plant some fruit trees and berry bushes.
The biggest pain is my city won't let you keep bees unless you have a certain amount of land, and I'd like to have a beehive passthrough for the greenhouse so my plants can get pollinated without letting pests in.
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HOA truly scares me about American living. That a group of people can dictate what you can and can't do with your own house is absolutely wild. How is that home ownership?
In Canada the only real rule is don't leave your yard in disrepair.
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It's worth mentioning that in the majority of residential neighborhoods, either they do not have HOA enforcement or the HOA is entirely optional, in that you can pay to belong to the HOA and gain benefits like access to community centers and pools, but then have to abide by guidelines.
In these places, you can ignore HOA rules if you're not interested in joining. I've greatly enjoyed telling their offended members that no, I will trim my shrubs when I feel like it, thank you very much.
There is still going to be a lot of regulations against like, turning your house into a tavern or something, but there is a little more freedom here in most places than people talk about. But it's still pretty bad and getting worse, there are more and more "master planned" communities that turn entire countrysides into oceans of rooftops in these homogeneous people hatcheries where you have to get approval to grow flowers in your yard.
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don't leave your yard in disrepair
Even that should be your own business, unless you're endangering anyone
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Freedom \TM
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HOA truly scares me about American living. That a group of people can dictate what you can and can’t do with your own house is absolutely wild. How is that home ownership?
You probably do have a group of people that can dictate what you can and can't do with your own house. You just call them "local government", "county government", "provincial government", "state government", etc as appropriate to however your current region organizes things at the smallest level.
The difference is that the bad kinds of HOA are essentially extra-local government chartered into existence for just one neighborhood, and since the "real" government has covered most of the actually important issues, they need to do something to justify themselves and are local enough to actually pay attention to your front yard and make ordinances against things they think will lower property values.
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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.
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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 mean you see the same basic thing in places where there's a lot of post-WW2 GI housing, except the houses are smaller and older. They often packed those in pretty close together, like close enough you have space to run two strips with a mower between houses, one on each side of the property line.
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Meanwhile there are freaks like me that want to share no walls but dislike the maintenance of a big lawn.
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Re-wild it and let it maintain itself
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May as well connect the walls into row housing and drop the price 100k.
Sorry, best I can offer is row housing that is $100k more expensive.
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Why do I feel like living in an apartment would be better in that case (if u can't find an older house)
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A lot of higher-density residential areas are actually more enjoyable to live in if you're a people person and like walking to places. Areas of apartment blocks tend to be placed closer to shopping and bars and restaurants.
Meanwhile, a lot of the newer, cleaner "master planned" communities are just sterile oceans of identical rooftops miles and miles from anything but schools and fire departments, forcing all residents to drive if they want to so much as pick up a carton of milk.
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Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
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In my Eu country, and also the neighbouring countries, the general rule for a detached building is that it has to be build 3 to 5 meters (depending on the local rules) from the terrain boundary. If the builder wants to build closer, then they have to build a blind wall on the boundary with certain minimum fire + insulation requirements. If then someone else builds against that blind wall, that someone else is expected to buy "half" of the existing wall, ie: pay the first builder some money.
So we fortunately don't get those dystopian tightly packed detached housing neighbourhoods.
The shared wall between a home and any other building is also required by law to have certain minimum acoustic insulation values. But there's plenty of old buildings where this isn't the case yet. Living in an apartment building without proper acoustic isolation is horrible, I'd rather live in a dystopian detached house, so maybe that's why those houses are still popular in North America and Australia: guaranteed proper acoustic insulation.
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When I had the opportunity to buy a house I was elated. Now, 10 years in? Yeah, I despise it. Neighbors that don't give a shit that you can't get away from, no privacy, no ability to do anything without the worry someone will report you for some HoA shit you're not aware of, etc. I was raised on a country house on 7 acres, now I dream of ever being able to escape and have something like that.
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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.
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You have any helpful links that assisted you with setup? I've been toying the idea but the soil here is horrible. Basically 6 inches of crap soil on top of bedrock. Any help is appreciated as I'm brand new to the idea. I do have some bucket planters that were gifted but other than that not much to start with.
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You are starting way behind here, but I strongly recommend you hit up YouTube to get the basics on the Ruth Stout method and the Hügelkultur method.
I have modified both in the following ways:
First, I stripped away all topsoil. Whether you use or dispose of yours will depend on the availability of good topsoil in your area, and how good the current topsoil actually is. Then I dug down to provide myself with about 50cm (2-3ft) of vertical space to work with (accounting for the maximum height of the final soil level that I don’t want to exceed). If you aren’t doing this near a foundation, or you can still rework the soil to slope away from any foundation, you might be able to ignore this.
For the Hügelkultur method, I went with a flat layout instead of creating humps, and I used wood chips instead of logs and branches. I was aiming for a dense woody later that is laid down about a foot thick, and has about 8-12 inches of soil on top of it. This is meant far more as a decomposing layer that holds onto moisture, as I am in an area with sand and rocks further down that water just drains straight through. Bedrock might have this method as a good idea as well, just lay down an inch or two of sand before you put down the wood chips as a way of water running off if it gets saturated. And if possible, pack down the chips using a powered soil compactor, so you minimize the subsidence as the wood decomposes.
Once the topsoil is down, I finish the soil itself by bringing in several tons of horse manure, and rototilling it in. Horse manure because it doesn’t “burn” roots like steer/cow manure does. This is also why I went with an 8-12in layer of soil - so there is no chance of the rototiller reaching the wood chips. Also: June bugs and other root-sucking grubs love horse manure, be sure to spray with beneficial nematodes every year you supplement with manure.
For Ruth Stout (the soil cover), I have access to several acres of herbicide-free grass via a family orchard. I mow this through the year and pack it into a 8×4×4ft bin (this is fine for up to 1,000ft² of bedding cover, make it commensurately larger for larger gardens). Because I cut and pack when the grass is completely fresh and green, this starts the composting process that kills off any seeds, but the heat of the composting process also stops the process after a short while because I’m not turning over the pile to cool it off and introduce oxygen. This leaves me with lots of barely-composted grass clippings to use as an initial layer (about 60% of the total) when laying down the hay bedding. This suppresses weeds and holds in moisture much better than just hay alone.
You are likely to find green areas which are not treated with herbicide where the owners might permit you to mow and collect the grass clippings. Pretty much any green material, including heavily weed-filled areas, will suffice, as the seeds will be killed off during the composting stage. You want to avoid treated lawns because the herbicide will VERY negatively impact any vegetables you plant. In the end, you will be planting your garden through about a foot of thick hay and grass clippings; separate them by pushing them aside and plant directly into the soil. The grass and hay can also be considered as soil for bulbs and so forth, things like garlic can just be placed directly on top of the soil and re-covered. You will also have to recharge this layer every year by just putting more on top, do so in the early fall once you start shutting down your garden so you don’t disturb any beneficial insects that are bedding down for the winter.
Good luck.
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Ruth Stout
You had me excited to find a better method. Then it was "find a cheap source of hay". Then you need a method to spread hay- which ain't easy. I'll stick with my cultivar which makes mulch in place.
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Then it was "find a cheap source of hay".
Many hay farmers will sell spoiled hay (unfit for animal consumption) for 50-25% of what you would pay for clean hay. Get evangelical about permaculture and the Ruth Stout method and some will just let you have spoiled hay for free.
Stables will frequently give spoiled hay away for free, except here you need to fork it up and pack it off by yourself, it won’t be baled for your convenience. Plus, a lot of bedding wasn’t meant to be eaten by the animals in the first place, and comes with embedded manure.
Remember, spoiled hay is spoiled. it’s not fit for feeding animals, and it’s not gonna be displayed in the Smithsonian as an example of premium hay. Many places that produce or consume hay just want to get rid of it, as it’s wholly undesirable for their main operations and just gets in the way.
Then you need a method to spread hay- which ain't easy.
Gesundheit? If you are complaining about spreading hay - and I can cover my existing 185m² in a single afternoon with ease - then gardening in general is not going to be up your alley. Spreading hay is not supposed to be difficult or laborious. If it’s baled, unbale it and use your hands to break off chunks and crush it to floof it up and simply drop it in place. If it isn’t baled, get a fork, spear the hay, walk over to the garden with the fork full, then just shake the fork to loosen the clumps and let them fall.
Like, you are doing this while standing upright, some time between October and March, long before the first plant gets planted. If your plants are already in the ground, you’re doing it the hard and needlessly difficult way.
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Fruit trees. It's the way to go. So much less work in the log run.
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Kill that lawn! Let's fucking go!
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That’s amazing to hear! If it’s possible and doesn’t doxx you, I’d love to see a picture or two
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This person is like the only one with those kinds of plants, an AI can Geogeuser them already.
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- 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.
- Yes. Lobbying by oil and car companies
- see above.
- See above.
- See above.
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A lot of it also has to do with racism, and these days, people don't even know why zoning ordinances are the way they are. They can't defend them. They just assume that it's what people want and there must be some good reason for the zoning being the way it is (spoiler alert: nope, actually). This is one of the ripest, and probably lowest-hanging fruits in terms of achieving QOL improvements in North America.
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I don't even like zoning in city builder games, can't even imagine living in a zoned area.
I currently live in a single family apartment on top of a bakery; within one block of my house I also have two small family markets, two restaurants, a barber, a bicycle repair shop, two clothing stores, a pet shop, a small languages school and a few other stuff, with several houses and apartment buildings in-between.
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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.
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Since I found out about the neighborhood association, I've been rather suspicious of this land of the free.
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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.
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Sounds like the Philippines. Hell, sounds like just about every other sane place on the planet.
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Scandinavia would like a word.
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I didn't know heat until I went to Kuwait in summer
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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.
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So, you guys are tearing out parking lots and removing parking minimums, right?
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And defaulting to mixed-use zoning in residential neighborhoods to lower the demand for such parking lots in front of corner stores? Right anakin? And surely you'll be outlawing concrete slab driveways in favor of semipermeable parking surfaces? Right Anakin??
Narrator: "flood protection" was in fact yet another transparent excuse to keep building the most soulless and uniform shit imaginable in the name of racism and classism.
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Turf is barely previous
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StormTech under the parking lot is all the rage now.
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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.
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I drive but i wasn't going to stay working in Texas long enough to justify the costs of buying my own car and transferring my license there, but same situation.
I was in Houston which has some buses and decided to use them. To do a 10-15 ish km ride, it took over 2 hours because there was just one bus that way and it stopped in every street corner. An uber took the same route in about 20 minutes.
I really disliked the way Texas looked, too much sprawl, cheap falling apart houses and whole blocks of abandoned houses and businesses. Definitely not enough trees. Also how it's organized, but the people were fairly nice. Like 60% of the time.
There's a lot of racism but i already was expecting that. I thought the racism would be whites vs everyone else, but honestly I've witnessed and experienced racism there from every race, towards everyone else. People also treat you better when they think you're their own race, so being Mediterranean i had random acts of kindness from Arabs, Latinos and white people who thought i was from their respective race. I also met some Brazilian people who hated Europeans for some reason and were not shy to show it.
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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''
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America spent so long cutting off its own nose to spite its face that it's no wonder it believes today that its shit doesn't stink.
For fucks sake why can't there be a place that's basically identical to america EXCEPT without the racism, homophobia, transphobia, and fascism. What the fuck is humanity doing, god damn.
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For fucks sake why can’t there be a place that’s basically identical to america EXCEPT without the racism, homophobia, transphobia, and fascism.
Because such a place would be very, very, very different from America.
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Spain looks pretty good. Their sociological statistics at least paint a good picture, and many parts of Spain have been multi ethnic for centuries, and they are open to immigration.
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I grew in a town with lots of parks. Yes the smallest and shitest used to be black only. Basically just look for park in lower area. And we started building suburbs with redlines on day one the raciam didn't need to wait for redlines to go away. The school district thing. That's a bit more region based. Up North they mosrohad mono ethnic neighborhoods so they was less need to make seperate racial schools. The south although they had redlines and other housings policy creating black and white neighborhoods they also just went fully into making blackand white only schools.
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Of course, racism is the source of every problem.
Let's forget the power that oil conglomerates and the automotive industry have on the government.
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Yes "what's good for GM is good for America. " and so on. The runaway neoliberal capitalism is a huge problem, but racism is the true heart and soul of America.
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Racism, like a bunch of other biogtry, is an important tool these oligarchs exploit to stay in power and gain support from ignorant and under-educated poor people.
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Why was there white flight? Racism. Why did they want to build freeways? For white flight. Don't get cause and effect mixed up.
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All these things are true and well documented. US housing policy is very much steeped in racism. Here's a video that sums it up pretty well:
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Fossil capitalism filled the niche that resulted from racial segregation.
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I am interested in the replies
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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.
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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
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Grass (the trimmed always green lawn type) is more demanding than many other crops. If the grass is growing there, then the topsoil is good enough for some other things too. Also the topsoil is something you can develop, especially on such small scale as personal garden. Make compost, grow less demanding plants first nad your soil will get better. You can grow things on sand mixed with a bit of compost.
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edit: looks like I'm wrong.
Do people in this thread really think the developer took the topsoil and sold it to someone else?
Bitch, please. Topsoil isn't valuable enough to strip and truck somewhere. The tiny layer we humans can grow food in is just that thin in a large part of North America.
Deal with it.
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They do though. They rip it all up and sell it off when they’re doing construction.
Source: used to work in commercial landscaping. Which on new jobsites involves bringing in new soil to replace the soil that’s gone.
That being said, there are places in the US where there isn’t much topsoil to begin with, it’s true.
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jokes on you, here in the south the top soil is old swap and sometimes actual farm top soil, it is indeed bagged and sold off sometimes
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Exactly. When I resodded our front lawn I kept finding building materials. I guess it's common for construction workers to bury the trash when building a house rather than dispose of it correctly.
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Even if you have soil, in a whole lot of cities/municipalities/counties... there are zoning restrictions on growing certain amounts and kinds of plants/vegetables.
And HOAs. They all have their own restrictions as well.
Wanna collect rainwater?
Regulations on that too.
Wanna start a compost bin?
Well your neighbor can complain it smells bad in the summer. Might attract dangerous critters.
Hell, probably just laying down a sufficient amount of top soil might be enough to get a visit from an HOA rep or a county zoning wonk.
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I’m not denying this happens in some places, but it’s not universal. I live in the suburbs and grow veggies during the summer. The state I live in has “right to garden” laws that prevent a lot of HOA restrictions. My city also has a rain barrel program to encourage their use and offers discounts on barrels.
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Compost helps, storage is the issue. I'm ok with it open but not okay with the timber rattlers, cotton mouths and copperheads different scavengers would attract.
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I figured they took the soil from digging the foundation and spread it around the yard in order to grade it and that's why the street is lower than the yard.
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They do, but after they strip most of the good stuff off the top. Which kind of makes sense because it’s gonna be ruined by the construction. Top soil is only about 5-10 inches deep in most places and pretty compressible so any foundation is going to be deeper.
The real crime is plowing up farmland for tract housing.
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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.
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So we can mow the grass silly.
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We have no freedom in "The Land of the Free".
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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
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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.
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So here's the thing:
The housing that people want is the housing they can afford. Sure, I'd love to live in a 20,000 sqft mansion up in the Pacific Northwest rainforest with a built in pool and free-range dino nuggies dispensers, but I can't afford that, so I live in what I can afford. Problem is, our zoning doesn't permit really anything except unaffordable, bland tracts of McMansions that force you to drive to everything. If you can't afford that, then, oh well, get bulldozered, idiot.
I want to make living in my city affordable; if all my kids can afford is a $400 studio with no car, then that should be an option.
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That's absolutely fine, and obviously a worthy objective.
My comment is really just pointing out that the "bafflement and hilarity" from the screen capped post isn't really baffling nor hilarious.
A surburban lifestyle is nice and that's why people want to live there and that's why it's expensive. You can make fun of people who want that, and you can make a case that alternatives are better in a multitude of ways, but it's a bit silly to suggest to people happily living in the burbs that a row house would be more comfortable.
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I believe housing choice is a good thing. The problem is that suburbia almost always takes away housing choice for everyone else.
- Suburbia is not cost viable.
Notice how suburbs are almost always built around cities and almost never on their own. There is a reason for this; they are heavily subsidized by the city and its infrastructure - eventually killing off the city due to extreme maintenance costs and uncooperative tax base (NIMBYs). This is a parasitic relationship, fullstop.
- Suburbia is not recyclable.
It is extremely difficult to reuse suburban infrastructure for non-suburban purposes. This effectively eliminates scarce land until a patron spends 10x removing what it costs to install (not happening). This is why suburbs are often just abandoned instead of repurposed (see any rust-belt suburb).
- Space should not come at the cost of the future.
To navigate suburbia (only viable by car) is to put massive strain on the human body and environment. We were built to walk. If you do not, you will become fat and die (see America). Cars pollute the air to no end, and "third places" can never truly be established - killing communities.
Wanting space is fine, but people should find a way to do it sustainably without harming themselves and everyone around them.
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I don't really follow you regarding cost viability.
I live in a small city of about 70,000. We don't really have a dense CBH. There are small blocks of apartments here or there but not really in a business district.
99% of the population here lives in detached houses in a suburban setting.
It seems kind of nonsensical to me to suggest that suburbs kill off cities due to extreme maintenance costs.
I know people who work in the city's finance department. The taxes people in suburbia pay to the municipality pay for the maintenance and services they receive. If there were a deficit from suburban parasites the city would've become insolvent long ago.
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To me as a European who lives in a medium-sized city the US-style suburb model sounds very claustrophobic. The suburbs aren’t walkable, you can’t cycle anywhere either. The only way to get around is by car. Commercial areas are the same, shops are separated by streets and large parking lots, if you want to visit another shop you have to go by car.
It’s like each house or store is a little island and you can only island-hop using your car. Once you get out of your car, you’re stuck on yet another island. It’s like one of those older computer games from when they didn’t have the tech to stream large open worlds yet, just a bunch of small areas and a loading screen (car) in between.
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As an American, having lived where I can bike to the store I don't want to go back
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You are describing exactly why fast travel is bad in video games too. Convenience isn't the blessing everyone thinks it to be.
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I’m assuming there are suburbs that have these problems, but I think that’s a city planning problem.
I live in a suburb and enjoy it a lot. It’s very walkable and people bike around the neighborhood all the time. We have a walking/biking path that connects to a larger trail that goes for a miles.
I don’t have access to everything within walking distance, but I have access to a lot within a 10 minute walk.
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most people don’t actually want to live in commie row houses with a bar downstairs.
of course! these types of building were an imperfect answer to a problem of how to make enough living space for many people fast enough and cheaply enough. the apartment blocks went a long way from prefabricated panel blocks in a concrete jungle to the point i absolutely loved living in my modern block apartment in the city center in a quite spot between two parks, 10min walk from a train station and a shopping center, with a terrace, garden, playground and childcare across the street and within 15min from any shop, restaurant, pub, doctor or anything else i ever needed.
You can’t have shops in a residential street because most people don’t actually want that.
what? i mean, i can believe you can be conditioned to not wanting it. just like many americans think unions are bad or any other crazy shit like that... but generally no. anyone who ever lived in a place where they can run down the street to buy milk when they run out or just walk sane distance to a pub will disagree with you.
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It's kind of an odd take to suggest that people who have a different perspective to yours have been "conditioned" into thinking that way.
In Australia the "corner store" type set up where you could walk a few minutes down the road to buy milk and a paper was more or less defunct by the early 00's. It's just not a viable business model.
I spent my 20s working in bars and restaurants and I did drink far too much at that time. I always lived a short walk away from wherever I was working. IDK why exactly but I'm just not interested any more. I haven't been trying to abstain but I'm pretty sure I haven't had a beer or any other sort of alcohol since December 2022. I can assure you that I couldn't care less about being a "sane distance" from a pub.
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Suburbs are not feasible, cost wise, from a municipal standpoint. They've been heavily subsidized by the denser parts of the municipality, and surprisingly by the rural parts too.
The cost of maintaining infrastructure in a fit state of repair (water main, sanitary sewer and treatment plants, roads, bridges, storm sewer, curbs, sidewalk, street lighting) for these semi-spread out houses is the same as maintaining it in denser areas without the benefits of the higher tax income.
Additionally, the spread out housing, at least here, has overtaken lower lying wetlands, filled in creeks, and increased water flow down the water courses that do remain, causing erosion, sedimentation, and killing off the aquatic wildlife. Ontario has just started to require Low-Impact Development, standards that require constructing artificial wetlands, soak away pits, raingardens, green roofs, or similar measures to reduce water flow off site and encourage aquifer refilling. These all cost extra money above and beyond what the cost of repair has been up to now.
I work as a consultant designing infrastructure repair and rehabilitation for municipalities, and have seen the cost of these projects. For most of them, it's the equivalent of their property tax for ~40yrs, and typically has a lifespan of 50-75yrs on the high end.
Suburbs are being subsidized through grants provided by our Federal or Provincial government, which is funded through other taxes.
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I would really enjoy a house i could afford.
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For what it is worth, those suburbs you are describing are decaying in America. Those bars and shops just a few minutes down the road closed a couple generations ago. Many are empty lots or were razed for additional road lanes or gas stations. (In my city: another shooting range for police.) There aren't even sidewalks outside the neighborhood where I live, and this is in an area developed in the 1980s 'shining house on a hill' era of America.
Most people live in the suburbs this guy is questioning, because it's a nice balance of cost, serenity, and convenience.
The cost is blown out of the water, but for serenity and convenience goes: the conveniences are decaying and so the serenity is about all you can hope to get for the cost. More than anything though the spiraling cost destroys that balance. Most renting folks I know can't afford the shops or restaurants anyway because of housing costs. American suburbs are increasingly isolated.
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I lived in a commie block for 10 years and I'd shoot myself before I have to return in one.
People who claim it's the future have never enjoyed the displeasure of living in one. They can fuck right off.
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Not sure about the details of a commie block, but apartments are fine.
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No matter how terrible your experience was, it was better than homelessness.
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Mixed zoning is absolutely evil. My area is becoming unliveable and gentrified because of people's shitty businesses
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Mixed zoning is what makes neighbourhoods walkable and liveable and truly desirable for a much wider range of working-class people from all backgrounds and family sizes; not just the white, upper-class, monoculture-focused, and conformance-obsessed NIMBYs.
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All those plants tend to be invasive
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When was the last time a lettuce invaded your country?
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Tomatoes, potatoes, and cucumbers invasive? Plants are one of my hobbies and I don't think this is true.
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that aphorism about pots and kettles needs to be reworded to human beings calling other species "invasive".
no metaphor would be more fitting.
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I live in the suburbs and really love it. My neighborhood is quiet and easy to walk around without much road noise. There’s a small park within our neighborhood that children play in and people take their dogs.
I have a front yard and back yard that’s mostly grass, but we do plant flowers and plants when the weathers nice. It gives me an excuse to be outside during the summer. And yeah, I do grow vegetables and garden in the backyard as do many others. The fenced in backyard makes it easy to have a pet with room to run.
Despite my neighborhood being quiet it’s adjacent to a commercial area, so I can walk within 10 minutes to a grocery store (a Walmart to be fair) and if I’d like, I can hop on public transit that has a bus stop right there. There’s restaurants, fast food, groceries and other small businesses like dry cleaners, hair stylists, banks, and gyms. All easily within 10 minutes of walking. The local public transit can get you to major shopping centers and downtown areas in a reasonable amount of time.
I mostly drive and what I love the most is that I can drive to heavily populated areas with activity within 5-10 minutes but my neighborhood itself is this quiet sleepy little suburb where kids play in cul-de-sacs without worrying about traffic and I know many of my neighbors by name.
I definitely get how suburbs can look bad, but it doesn’t mean they have to be.
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drive to heavily populated areas
This. This right here is a major problem with the suburbs. All the benefits for the people who have the privilege to live in one are great, with the negatives of driving externalized onto other people.
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I understand what you’re saying, and being able to drive is definitely a privilege I have. Public transit exists. I can walk to a bus stop within 10 minutes of my home. It’ll take me all over including to a vibrant downtown. It can also take me to a local train station where I can ride affordably into many neighboring communities along my route, ultimately taking me to a major city.
Suburbs don’t have to be these horrible places they’re made out to be.
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I think that might be the point in that suburbs can be this way, but it's mostly luck that you happen to have the 10 minute accessibility to the public transit piece, most seem to be a 10 minute vehicle ride away from facilities which is a huge downgrade
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