Raised Ranch

There aren't too many of these kinds of houses built here in Elk Grove, but the principles of bad urban design aren't just limited to my little burg; they exist all throughout the U.S. Here's a beautiful example of just how wretched we've built things:


This is the raised ranch style. The sole purpose for any raised ranch, as I see it, is to provide for sheltered automobile parking underneath living structures so the builder can share the roof and save material.

If you stare at this house long enough, you'll notice the garage door and the two windows above it form a sorta pac-man like face. Several times a day the garage door "mouth" opens up to swallow or regurgitate dad's minivan and mom's sedan. There would be no need for the front door on this house, but alas, codes require one. Codes don't require shutters; yet, some colored vinyl slabs are stapled up and we call them shutters, because otherwise, this house might look like shit.

It still looks like shit!

I understand, I really do, the need for cheap, affordable housing. But this is cheap expensive housing. Even today this unit would command a hundred eighty five in most places. The new owners will throw up some mismatched vegetative units, perhaps an Italian pencil pine on each side, juniper in front of the lower windows, agapanthus near the downspouts where the water fails to drain...

It's expensive, looks terrible, and will have no, absolutely no, enduring value. Ever. This is all we are capable of building anymore. The building of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of units like this is what defines the bulk of our economy. We could choose to do better, but we don't.