It's beautiful, no? Again we have flag waving...more developer's semaphore for "we are special." But they also fly The American Flag. No one would dare criticize this place because The American Flag Is Flown Here.
Except for your Monologueonian.
First of all, are there four units in this photo, or only three? What exactly is that out-of-scale narrow unit? In any event, a full seven eights of the first unit's frontal facade is the blank garage door, so to embellish it they added four-square windows to the garage door. An illusion. An illusion as they are unusable. The garage windows are so high that no one will ever be able to look out of them. There are no other windows at ground level, which in earlier times was an integral feature to the street-feel of a neighborhood, when windows were proportioned taller than wide, to 'frame' a human standing in them. The opposite proportioning is true today. More importantly, windows provide security for the street because humans might appear in them at random. Nope. There's no expectation that anyone will be outside unless housed in a motor vehicle, so there's no longer any need for them.
We also have fake white window planter boxes mounted underneath the upstairs' small bathroom/bedroom windows. Another illusion; a begging for a return to old architecture when window planter boxes were actually built and held dill, sage, or basil.
I suppose, however, the most egregious thing this developer did was to erect a big blank stone wall around the whole of this 'community.' One could argue it's a sound wall against all the Elk Grovian thru-commuters, but the upstairs bedrooms would hardly be shielded unless the wall were thirty feet high. No. This wall's purpose is to segregate this society by income, because what you can't see in this photo is that this walled community is surrounded by twenty year old second-suburban-tiered South Sacramento sprawl that is already turning to liquid shit. It's an effective way to suggest that "if you lived within our walls and gates, you can consider yourself more successful that those chowderheads outside."
This is a fundamental problem with sprawl: not only the zoning of land by activity but the indirect zoning by income. Say I buy an Elk Grovian starter home, and as I live there for several years, I (perhaps) engage neighbors, develop friendships...I become part of a community. But to move up forces me to move out, and as I move every six years (the Merikan average) I am forced to move to a different community. The same thing would happen if I'm just about to retire at 64 and I wanted to downsize. Seniors are forced to abandon their familiar communities just to seek a smaller place to live and they have to start all over.
And any kid, growing up within these gates and walls, will be ill prepared to live in a diverse society...and indeed they never will.
I went to the Chicago Power Metal Fest in 2005 and toured the city for the first time. The most striking thing I remember about that trip wasn't the metal music or the Cub's home opener, but how one moment I'd be driving north on Michigan Ave. among the most valued places in the city, to turning west and within seconds be driving through the burnt out, bombed out craters of what was then left of Cabrini Green. The contrast was absolutely stunning. A place where the social meltdown was so complete that it had to be demolished...this is what happens when 'affordable' housing is built in dense concentrations...or what happens when you completely segregate by income.
But in some sense, this is exactly what we are doing here in SACTOWN and in Elk Grove. My point is to suggest that we've learned precisely dick about where income segregation takes us.
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