Half Ass Suburbia Is Better Than Whole Ass Suburbia

 

Photo Creative Commons License Wikimedia

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 In America, you don't have a choice about what kind of house you want to live in if you want a new home because urban planning, zoning, and markets demand one type: a slightly smaller or more extensive version of the above photo.  

I have a recurring nightmare that is, for many, a dream; the American Dream no less. I wake up inside a vast and spacious house, thousands of square feet of sprawling rooms, a size that for most of human history would be the house of distasteful elites and not a middle-class everyman. It is one of the standard cookie-cutter McMansions that populate suburbs across America: thousands of square feet, three car garage, each bay containing a supersized, gas-guzzling, depreciable asset all surrounded by a vast Downton Abbeyesque expanse of lawn. The whole is on the edge of the radius of a cul-de-sac surrounded by literal miles of carbon copies of the identical houses with the same lawns on the same cul-de-sacs. I wake up screaming, at least in my head.

Circles of Suburban Hell. Creative Commons Wikimedia

 

Unfortunately, purchasing anything new that isn't a carbon copy of what I just described is almost impossible unless you want to buy an old house. My likes lean more toward the smaller early 20th-century homes before supersizing and car-centric design took over at some point in the 50s and 60s. If you prefer more dense development and less car-centric design, you are forced to search out a handful of expensive cities. In most of America, sprawl is the norm.

All that said, we have just purchased a modest version of the McMansion paradigm. At just under 1,600 square feet with a two-car garage and lawn sticking out front denoting what is central to the identity of our culture, it is modest by today's development standards. It is almost impossible to find anything smaller in a new house which is insane. 

Stay tuned for life in our new petite McMansion.