Or so I've been told. I don't know, I just think it's so tacky. Why invest so much in maintenance-free until landfilled in a few years later plastic? Maybe I am so infatuated with log cabins and rough-cut wood siding.
Friday April 24, 2026 — Suburbs
I am pretty sure they remind me of that old Microsoft Windows pipes screensaver. Very conservative, Trump loving country out this way, although the suburbs are somewhat turned off by his silliness.
But the suburbs, in the sense of the idyllic American pastoral Trump and Carson referenced, have been changing for some time—not necessarily the physical homes, stores, roads, and offices that populate them, but the people who live there, along with their needs and desires. Previous mainstays of suburban life are now myths: that the majority of people own their homes; that the suburbs are havens for the middle class; or that the bulk of people are young families who value privacy over urban amenities like communal spaces, walkability, and mixed-use properties.
This mismatch has led to a phenomenon called “suburban retrofitting,” as documented by June Williamson, an associate professor of architecture at the City College of New York, and Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They have a new book out this week: Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges. Money Welcome to Metropica, a Supposed City of the Future Allie Conti 08.29.19
Since the 1990s, Williamson and Dunham-Jones have been watching the suburbs evolve. They have found that much of the suburban sprawl of the 20th century was built to serve a very different population than the one that exists now, and so preserving what the suburbs once were doesn't make sense.
Gone are the days when a typical growing American suburb didn’t have a single building over two stories. While the classic images of suburbia remain the single-family home with a spacious lawn and the strip mall on a stroad, a slow but steady change has occurred over the past couple decades. We’ve witnessed the normalization of “suburban retrofit” projects: private developments that attempt to introduce a more urban form to the suburbs, with compact layouts, higher densities, taller buildings, more variety in land use (residential, retail, etc.) and more emphasis on walkability.
Mid-rise apartments tend to sprout up in little pockets of open land along major roads that were left undeveloped, like holes in Swiss cheese, as development filled in around them. In fast-growing places, the “Swiss cheese” effect is a common phenomenon, as landowners may sit on undeveloped land for a long time to speculate on its rising value, wait for the right market timing to develop it, or navigate a slow and complex approval process.
I always thought always thought lawns were good places to graze animals, although I know a lot of people use their lawns for riding snowmobiles and four-wheelers around. That said, I can also understand why one wouldn't want a cow right next to their house, mooing all night, much less hogs.