When my friend told me he was
thinking about building townhouses on a piece of property he owns, I blanched.
I like my friend, but I loathe developers. I
think sprawl is one of the worst of our environmental problems. I don't think
we need an influx of people with all their cars crowding the roads, parking
places paving over Paradise, and houses squeezed onto formerly "empty"
lots (never mind their flora and fauna).
Trying to be reasonable, though, I admitted
the financial wisdom of building rentals as an investment in retirement funds,
and I recognized the practicality of the townhouse design – two-story houses
with front doors facing the street. But all attempts at fair-mindedness were
defenestrated in the face of garages as big as the fronts of the houses.
"Hide the garage!" I cried. "The
front of the house should invite the visitor in, not just emphasize the
importance of the car."
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| Emphasizing the importance of the car |
"Well, that won't do, then,"
I said in a pout. "We live too much indoors. How can we begin to know more
about nature if we don't provide places where people can be in nature, even if
it's only a patch of weeds under a tree?" I ranted on: "Children,
especially, need to be outdoors." My friend said there was a very good
park only a few blocks down the road, with a playground and lots of open space,
and I said that that was very good, but that nothing could take the place of a
child being able to step out the door and play outside. If we are going to
encourage children to know nature, I said, we have to provide them the
opportunity.
Adults, too, need that expansive
sense of space that comes from the outdoors. Thoreau would take visitors to the
pine woods behind his house, which he called his withdrawing room, so they
could make conversation there. "You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port," he said. Thoughts bang into walls, no matter how big the house.
My friend the potential developer
pointed out that he had included an open space with his townhouses, I think by
law, but I hooted at the postage-stamp size of this open space.
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| A small square of open space at a development in Grants Pass |
These nods
towards the outdoors don't contain the mysteries of nature that intrigue
children – and adults. I had in mind, if not Thoreau's withdrawing room, then
the sort of continual back yards of a neighborhood I had once seen in Atlanta,
where all houses on two streets opened to a large common back yard with slopes
and trees and ravines and all sorts of mysteries for children to explore and
for the soul to contemplate. That wasn't possible here, but, still, I argued,
we needed to make the common outdoor area larger.
Well, said my friend the developer,
if he built three houses instead of four, he could create more open space, but
that would mean less income. I said maybe the larger open space would make his
townhouses more attractive to buyers, so he could charge more for each one. It
is of dubious truth, but surely there are other people who see the value of
this kind of living space.
My final point was trees. Where were
the trees? The landscaper's plan included some hawthorn and other smallish
trees here and there, "but," I said, reaching the ultimate in
unreasonableness, "where are the 100-year-old trees to put swings on and
for the children to climb into and test their strength on?"
In the event, my friend decided not
to be a developer. He sold the land instead, and, as usual, the new developer will
jam in as many houses as legally possible, giving residents a postage stamp of
grass for outdoor space, emphasizing garages, and planting spindly little trees
that won't ever grow into mighty giants, and children won't be encouraged to be
outdoors and adults won't know the benefits of nature in their lives. My
attempts at creating a better society through better living spaces came to an
unfruitful end. But, for a while, I tried hard.
nice post
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