The attractiveness of new tract housing isn't necessarily the homes themselves, it's the cleanliness and homogeneity of the landscape. It's the ultimate in sterility, isn't it? Every new unit prominently displays their blank two or three car garage door to the street, with no loathsome minivans or Pacers in any driveway to clutter the view. There are no more that four different models but all are offered in both chiral forms to give the illusion of eight unique offerings.
Along with the sterile houses are the equally sterile front landscapes. The same species of grass (to take advantage of mass purchasing), the same two or three trees (to take advantage of mass purchasing) and the same two or three shrubs (to take advantage of mass purchasing). This is the end product of our ongoing Elk Grove Active Home Eugenics Program (AHEP).
Here in Elk Grove, the current favorite trees are American Sycamore, Lagerstroemia, and flowering plums. The shrubbery is almost always comprised of India Hawthorne or Agapanthus. Granted, we freeze every third winter and summers are 50C so there isn't a wide variety of choices in vegetation...but more than 5 different plants are actually known to grow here.
There's one massive problem with this whole setup. Nature on her own cannot replicate the same symmetries and sterile environments that tract homebuilders can. Trees get overgrown. Some die. Others get mistletoe. And...they drop leaves. When the newest Elk Grove subdivision is up for grabs by throngs of Bay Area cretins out-bidding each other, they visit the model homes with not a leaf in any gutter, not a clump of Dallisgrass in any lawn, not one out-of-place branch, and not a single root overtaking any stamped concrete walkway. This changes over time. The sterility and cleanliness slowly dies, and so does a part of them. The neighborhood becomes...vegetated.
In my opinion, a large piece of this transformation is directly due to owner/occupant laziness and ignorance. Take a look at a classic example on Franklin Blvd:
Four Modesto Ash trees in front of the Campbell Soup factory.
Franklin Blvd. just underwent a massive tree planting 'beautification' effort about a half mile south of this photo while these trees stand neglected. They were doomed from the beginning. Thoughtlessly planted. Four trees in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a late model sidewalk. Then they stood there for probably a decade and a half without any pruning. The only reason they were likely ever pruned at all was because the county threatened fines for growing into the street. But instead of being pruned they were pollarded. They pollarded these trees one winter when they were ~16 years old, leaving the trunk and 4 or 5 6-foot mains because of complete neglect. Now, after another 9 years, they've become standing bushes...no envelope, no height, with secondary branches growing along the trunk line. A few years from now they'll be pollarded again, to compensate for continuing neglect.
These could have been magnificent trees with proper attention! And this is exactly what's happening in Elk Grove today; no one gives a shit about their trees. They don't give a shit. Many were simply terminated; most are neglected. Along Frye Creek I count eight trees with their stakes and rubber ties still attached...after 18 years! Many trees lean to leeward, their owners having never re-staked when the winds came. Surface root systems abound because they never took the time to deep water and only watered them with their lawn sprinklers.
Let me tell you, this is a classic symptom of what happens when people view their own neighborhoods as areas not worth caring for...when they view them as areas not worth maintaining after the sanitized, sterilized, and homogenized illusion evaporates. If occupants aren't willing to care for their own properties, their own trees, why would they care about anything else in the community?
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