I'm not into American-style consumption anymore. Don't need an HDTV, Durango, Stainless Barbecue, 25" computer monitor, X-box 360, Vulcan stove, satellite TV, newer furniture, car stereo, DVD burner, or a garage full of power tools I buy but won't use, only to show up the neighbors.
You know what I'd like? A charming house.
This would cost me an arm and a leg here in Sacramento, however. Unfortunately so, because no one can build one here anymore, for it's illegal. Note that this house doesn't have 2/3rd's of its facade sporting a blank 3-car garage door. Without a frontal garage, shit! How would Americans park their mandatory 2.3 vehicles? All of our American cities think this exact same way, so they outlaw the alley (can't get those big fucking fire trucks down 'em), enforce 45-foot wide street widths, and won't approve subdivisions without sufficient parking in garages in the front.
The only way to buy a Craftsman Bungalow here is to buy one in the most expensive areas, because that's the only place where they were allowed to be built in the 1920's and 30's.
Does anyone, anyone in this fading Republic, have any idea what sorts of prices a new subdivision of small bungalows would command? If they could build them with alleyways so trash cans, vehicles, and underground utilities can hide? If they would provide sidewalks ending at T-intersections, with formally planted Red Oaks lining them and sufficient space for parallel vehicular parking? With corner groceries?
I just can't believe that all of you, every one of you, think that by building the exact same cookie-cutter tract-home subdivision in Dayton or Fayetteville, with no character, no charm, no vibrancy, that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." I am positive that almost all of us yearn for something different, something better, but instead we accept shitty architectural abortions in unsustainable, energy-squandering suburbia because we don't know anything else.
If we don't accept Elk Grovian style suburbia, we accept the northern Colorado model: build a 3,700 sq ft abominable piece of shit as a totem of success in the middle of a 3/4 acre spread, land that's now unfit for anything else other than displaying nostalgic farm implements, pink plastic flamingos, garden gnomes, or propping up comedic full-sized plywood cutouts of a woman bending over weeding, exposing her polka-dot ass crack, or the leaning cowboy, or kissing Dutch children, or a small child peeing in the bushes.
Then aside from these ignoble assaults on our dignity, a four car garage is built fronting the roadway, to house all those motorized accessories required for life twenty four miles away from everywhere and everyone.
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