The Fascism of American Subdivisions
"Art tends to the soul," as a former principal of a magnet school for the arts used to tell me. Where is the art in modern America to tend to our souls today?
Near to my house are several new subdivisions, which are sprouting up and gobbling tens of acres of land to the south and east of the state university in this town. I wasn’t particularly fond of the swampy land here in Baton Rouge when we moved here from California, but it’s been home for thirty-five years, and all the vegetation in Louisiana is good for the planet, I figure.
But now, the land is being bulldozed and whole subdivisions are springing up, along with the occasional commercial zone to service them. It makes me sad to see all the destruction of the environment even in order to house people, but what makes it even worse is that the environment is being destroyed so carelessly. There are few green spaces or parks in these subdivisions, to give people access to the outdoors, and to keep some of the land in its natural state.
And, it seems like the developers of these subdivisions no longer care to make the homes particularly distinct from one another, or particularly comfortable. The homes are squeezed next to one another, so that neighbors can literally look out their windows into the houses on either side of them. There is little thought to creative ornamentation and virtually no landscaping, except for the small, obligatory lawns in front and back. Perhaps the market is so seller-friendly that the builders can get away with making all the homes in the subdivision exactly alike, with no obvious differences in floor plan, or architectural style.
As Melvina Reynolds says, they are indeed “all made out of tacky-tacky,” with fake brick siding in some cases, but unlike the song, there’s no “pink one and a green one and a blue one and a yellow one…” They are all white and look even more like “little boxes” than the ones I have seen in South San Francisco, marching lockstep in rows that go up and down the hills for miles, the ones Melvina Reynolds saw when she wrote this song.
YouTube video of Melvina Reynolds singing her famous Little Boxes. [Released Jan. 1, 1961]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Cjk0zst3Cs
Along with the lack of privacy, and of green spaces, one of the most noticeable failures of thoughtful planning in one subdivision where we frequently visit friends is the location of a children’s play area. I don’t know if the other subdivisions are like this, but this play area is a farce, a bone thrown to the buyer so that the developer can claim to have made a playground for the kids.
It’s about the size of one of the lots, which is to say, pretty small—about a fifth of an acre, or even less, but what really concerns me is that it is located at the front of the subdivision, visible from the highway. This is not what could be called smart planning. Anyone, with any kind of motive or intention towards children can easily see them from the highway, playing with or without adult supervision. If I were planning a subdivision, and had any care for the buyers (or concern that they would notice), I would put a children’s play area in the very back of the subdivision, so that it would be less accessible to anyone not living in the area. If it had been necessary to put a bench for the kids to sit on while waiting for the bus, fine, but the playground should be located so as to afford children the maximum security.
This lack of concern for the children mirrors a deeper flaw in these tracts, and that is a lack of “humanity,” for want of a better world. Not only tasteless, devoid of any creativity, and as fake as the false brick siding, the housing in these subdivisions is regimented almost to a Kafka-esque brutality to the soul. In fact, there is no soul in these places, and so I am tempted to think of them as preparatory to the kind of regimentation that the children will experience in the military when they grow up. The housing is only a little more private and individualized than the housing on the former military base in my hometown. Indeed, there is a fascist quality to the entire neighborhood, dictating that all buildings be crammed together and rendered almost indistinguishable from one another.
In a way, this mirrors a noticeable conformity in automobiles. It used to be that cars came in different colors, but now about 90% of the passenger vehicles on the road are a neutral color: black, white or silver gray, and only about 10%. I have been watching and counting about this, and I think it is significant in the way that “Freudian slips” are significant. Our mode of transportation has become as bland and colorless and regimented as the shelters we repair to in order to refresh our bodies and—one would hope—our souls.
When the visual expressions of our culture become identical to each other, and our lives are lived in a milieu of conformity necessitated by mass production, whether of clothes or furniture or automobiles or—yes—even houses, then I fear that our thoughts and even our spirits are too easily lulled into a false perception of the world, and we become limited in the way we think, and more important, in the way we feel.
My bona fides about this post: Both my parents were architects, my father having studied under a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and my recollection is that he was also on the city planning commission in my hometown. I was not particularly interested in architecture or city planning, and never could get excited about it all until I went off to college and studied some art history and urban geography on my own, but my perception of Man’s activities on the planet has been deeply colored by the Organic Architecture movement, and I have to confess great distaste for so much of what passes for “architecture” and buildings in America. Green & Green and Frank Lloyd Wright and Gaudi were to architecture what Monet and Picasso and Ravel were to painting and music: a new way to look at the world and relate to it.
Sources and Notes
Lyrics of Little Boxes by Melvina Reynolds
https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUoXtddNPAM
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.
And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.
And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just 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.
”San Francisco housing development.” This particular subdivision is much more visually appealing than subdivisions in South San Francisco that were built in the fifties.
Photo by Misterfarmer on Pixabay.
https://pixabay.com/photos/usa-san-francisco-settlement-houses-992467/
Wikipedia. ”Little Boxes.” [no date]
The Wikipedia article gives a short description of the song’s origin in 1962. More importantly, it shows a photo of the 1950-era tract housing in Daly City which was the inspiration for the song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boxes
”Aerial view of Daly City's little boxes (tract housing) along Skyline Blvd, from the south, on departure from SFO.” [2021]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Daly_City_little_boxes_aerial.jpg