Whew I almost forgot to blog tonight!
A thing about living in the exurbs is that to anyone else, your neighborhood could look explicitly like Anytown, USA, but to you these are distinct, recognizable views.
We live in an exurb with particular tracts of land delineated by homeowners associations, tracts that used to be farm (honestly, plantation), and now are dotted with clumps of townhouses, two-story single-family homes, and the odd bit of “affordable” apartment buildings blended into the landscape for good measure.
Our HOA (like many others) is strict enough to legislate what color paint you can use on your front door, so there’s an orderly uniformity, even if sometimes things get uniformly aged.
Growing up in suburban (exurban?) South Florida, our thirty-year-old neighborhood had once been relatively uniform, with just a few different facades and layouts for our ranch homes with attached garages, but time and individuality and I can only assume the developers and real estate agents themselves all did their thing and it wasn’t until I rode the bus in high school and saw our block from a different angle that I understood how alike all our houses were.
At least these days we’re transparent about our conformity.