People have weird attachments to their lawn, even if they never use it.  It was also the case in Australia where water is in even shorter supply when I was growing up (although I understand the modern semi-permanent state of drought in Australia has changed that).

We are currently planning to convert large sections of our back lawn to garden, albeit for different reasons.  The wife wants the garden and I want to mow less grass, but that makes for a happy match.  I do however greatly enjoy the fruits, as it were, of our existing veggie patches.  A lot less work (really!), no fertilizer (we pit compost for soil replenishment), and best of all, no mowing :)

The other low hanging fruit to my mind, water-management-wise, is in the front yard - the driveway.  In investigating replacements for my asphalt driveway,  approaches that don't act as massive catchments for the storm water drain are no-go.  I've found that I pretty much can't do anything but replace it with solid concrete of asphalt.  Given that my cities' sewer system blows out (literally) each time we get a good downpour this seems nuts.  And it's even more nuts in areas where we're rapidly depleting underground aquifers.  No permeable surface driveway for me (even though the city was thoughtful enough of the storm water system to ensure I didn't add a drain into my newly dug Egress window!).  However I understand that this situation is changing elsewhere in the country.

Yet more bloviating about "sprawl"? One of the most irritating things about environmentalist zealots is their almost complete cluelessness about how ordinary people actually live.

Oh, lord, where to begin... OK, let's start with the canard that all or most suburban landholdings consist of lawns. Most people actually use them to grow stuff, including vegetables in victory garden-style plots that one would have thought environmentalists would be applauding, not scorning. The Times reported that vegetable seed companies are reporting 3x or more sales increases in recent years. Where I live, these sprawling suburbanites grow their own veggies, blueberries, strawberries, plums, apricots, peaches, apples, lemons, grapes etc.

Clue #1: if you don't have _land_, you can't grow any meaningful amount of vegetables or fruits. Score one for "sprawl."

Next, the sprawl-haters might do a little research into how life differs for those people who are raising children in 2008. Clue: you can't let kids run around in a "communal" yard today, as we did 30+ years ago. That's because across American communities large and small, there's been so much disruption, so much mobility, so much immigration by transient dropouts from south of the border and not least, so much real estate speculation resulting in a hodgepodge of transient home renters next to families, that the homogeneous family neighborhood environment that allowed kids to run free simply doesn't exist anymore. The only "communal lawn" notion that any parent could safely trust today is one inside a gated community. Is that what you guys are asking for, more gated communities? I thought you were against those, too?  

Clue #2: NO ONE lets her or his kids run around unsupervised these days.

Clue #3: Read Joel Kotkin sometime for a sober look at the environmentalists' Demise of Suburbia wet dream, and ask yourself how it's going to happen when all the job growth is taking place in the suburbs.

Clue #4: talk to a real estate agent and ask her which is a better investment, a single-family home with a large lot, or a townhome in a complex that has a "communal lawn." Hint: prices for the latter are _plunging_ in Silicon Valley, while prices for the former continue to climb.

People with kids want land. People with kids NEED land.

The only way you'll get people with kids to live in unsafe, crowded communal environments is by forbidding private land ownership, as was done by the Soviets with their concrete high rise monstrosities and _communalki_.

Brad you haven't figured out that Tep is the spokesman for the Suburban Family Protection Coalition yet? Kidding Tep.

The post above says nothing about anyone give away their lawns. The fact that many suburban developments can be planned better to alleviate their isolation from services and make them more walkable is a good thing. It would also be nice if some developments didn't resort to the fenced parcel yard with an 8 foot wood privacy fence so you don't have to talk to your neighbors...you know those people you live next to?

I can cite an example of where a common open space links the houses backyards with a walking path, tennis courts, playgrounds, etc. and people still have their own back yards albeit with out the privacy fences. It's the Devil's Thumb neighborhood in south Boulder and it's a quiet family friendly place that also has many older couples that have lived in the development since the 70s lending a sense of permanence and stability. That there are also townhomes and condos interspersed as well within the development gives it a great mix of people across a wide economic spectrum and it's only 10 minutes from downtown Boulder, less if you drive.

One solution might be in developments where density is desired while affording folks the yard and open space that everyone can use...including some kids that play unsupervised is the shared open space that links yards. This not only increases social connectivity amongst neighbors through backyard connectivity and because by-in-large the new developments exclude porches and sometimes even sidewalks.

As to the issues regarding shared maintenance, the homeowners association would address that. Couple the single family house with interspersed townhouse for folks who don't want a yard but want a quiet neighborhood and you get a mixed- density development that subsequently differs from the pure leap-frog single family housing development and the inner-ring suburbs of yesteryear. By also infusing a sense of shared responsibility this can also foster an actual sense of community in many of these newer neighborhoods. A critique by many of what suburbs lack is a "sense of community." Especially if that lack of community is exacerbated by families or couples leaving after 2-5 years or so to move onto the next big, better development.

The American city & its suburbs are constantly fluctuating and areas that were ignored or left to die a slow death such as first-ring suburbs and even second growth suburbs are experiencing a renaissance of mixed incomes and mixed densities that are close to bus routes , and reasonably close commutes by car or bike to services and even employment.

I suggest reading Dolores Hayden's Building Suburbia. It's a really good concise history of the American suburb and the complex issues that have gone into shaping them.

I see lawn-love as something like racism - you think it's never going to go away, but it's eroding slowly, and the erosion will accelerate. Just you wait. I don't like waiting, but there you go.

"many suburban areas themselves could be quite a bit denser and better planned"

Denser = less land per homeowner.

Less land per homeowner = a ceiling on appreciation for this, the most important investment by far that most Americans will ever make.

And again, communal = unsafe.

All due respect, explain, again, why anyone in his right mind would choose less safety and worse appreciation, if not actually ending up underwater, as many townhome buyers of the last few years are today? How does that work?

Tep...

Give me your definition of what you consider to be dense? 1 house per acre, 2 houses per acre, 3 houses per acre? I'm not talking 40 units per acre here. My position is to have a mix of housing types within a development that attracts a broad spectrum of people - families, couples looking to start a family, retirees, single parents, etc. Not everyone can start out in a single family home. Many have to take baby steps to home ownership. Denser doesn't necessarily equal less room. If, IF, the community is planned right, then there is enough open space both shared and private that meets the needs of everyone in that development/neighborhood/suburb. Quality of space has as much to do with a successful sense of place as quantity of space if not more so.

Communal also doesn't equal unsafe. Does one ever take their kids to a park or do they remain forever under lock and key in the backyard idyll that's been created for them?

I appreciate your position but you seem to be making the case that only segregated uses within a development will succeed. If you're only purpose for buying a home is to flip the house in 5 years and not make a commitment to the neighborhood for which you're living in that is one thing but if you're moving to a neighborhood because it offers many pluses then (one would assume) you're willing to make an investment in not just the plot of land you're buying but also the community in which you are buying into. That's what the shared open space all about. Much like the neighborhood park. It can take many forms and offer a way to connect neighbors to each other beyond the obligatory head nod to each other from across the street.

When you get a chance check out some of the planned communities by Calthorpe Associates.

They've done several new American planned communities and developments in California and elsewhere. Some you might be familiar with and they certainly don't fit the perception of suburb that many folks have of the beige patio home replicated for acres and acres or the hyper-density of L.A. either.

www.calthorpe.com/projects_community%20design.html

I'm curious about how many actual crimes against children have been committed by "transient home renters" or "transient dropouts from south of the border" as against crimes by otherwise respectable suburban dwellers.  It's certainly one thing to argue that kids -- it depends on their age, too -- need to be supervised at play and can't run around unwatched, and quite another to suggest that just because immigrant dropouts (= hardworking people who do the jobs Americans don't want to do?) or renters live in the neighborhood, that children are in some kind of permanent danger.

Tep, that was really unhinged.

The objection to "sprawl" in many cases is not necessarily the construction itself, it's the location and design of the construction. "Sprawl" generally refers to un- or poorly-planned developments that are solely residential (little to no mixed-use with commercial and other land use), inaccessible street designs (cul-de-sacs rather than grids), not integrated with the bordering communities (thus increasing the maintanenance and safety costs of for the city), and use of land that has other value (like agriculture or green space).

Your wealthy California neighborhood sounds nothing like the sprawl neighborhoods common across the Midwest and East Coast that I'm familiar with (Brad's right, northern VA is classic for worthless sprawl). I'd put up money that I could take you on a tour of Missouri sprawl and we'd see a meaningful garden in less than 5% of the yards.

Also, have you taken notice of the fact that (as reported by the WaPo) older houses in established, integrated, diverse neighborhoods (generally smaller plots) are holding their value far better than newer cloned sprawl on larger lots far out on the urban fringe? People are rapidly shifting their personal housing values to the very sort of housing you deride, while abandoning the housing you uphold as the American dream.

As someone who's travelled and moved a lot for his career, you of all people ought to recognize that a home is no longer the lifetime investment it used to be, at least for a lot of people.

You know, you're a passionated advocate for the average American suburbanite, but more and more it comes across like George Will advocating Bud Lite and NASCAR. There is nothing wrong with your lifestyle and your choices, but you are not representative of most Americans, and you seem unaware of dynamics and conditions in the country beyond Silicon Valley. Nothing you describe sounds remotely like the conditions in the MidWest and East, though I'll grant that I'm not an expert either.

Tep, what do you care if someone wants to try this sort of development?  What people want is fundamentally driving the process. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy homes they don't like or a style of home they don't like.  Your notion that the only type of dwelling that is keeping its value is the single family home -- and that every other type of housing is a bad investment -- is a total crock.  You can't make that generalization for the whole country.  Around me, already high home prices continue to go up in the denser, more affluent communities, because they are more desirable to buyers for a variety of reasons.  A new condo, with no yard, in a desirable urban neighborhood is a far better investment than a similarly priced single family home at the edge of the metro area.  Besides, this proposal *is* for detached single family houses -- except that instead of large backyards, they share a common private park.  Is it your contention that *nobody* would want to live in this type of development?  What do you base that on?