Houses with Yards, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Today is Blog Action Day, and the topic is water. I did a post for this last year when the topic was climate change, so I figured I’d do it again. Water is obviously a huge issue, especially in the arid Southwest, so there are a lot of directions I could go with this. I did an earlier post on the importance of water at Chaco, which is certainly worth linking in this context. For Blog Action Day, however, I thought a discussion of a rather different issue, a bit far from my usual fare here, would be interesting.
One of the most noteworthy characteristics of urban sprawl is inefficient use of land, symbolized most obviously by the suburban development pattern of single-family houses on large lots. Whatever space on these lots is not covered by the building footprint or a driveway is typically divided into yards. Front and back yards are nearly universal in suburbia, and found at a smaller scale in some urban areas as well, and on particularly large lots side yards are found as well. These yards are generally interpreted today as being for recreational use, and backyards in particular often have recreational amenities like swimming pools, but at least in my experience people don’t seem to use this space for recreational purposes to nearly the degree you might expect given the sheer amount of it. Maintaining a yard is also a major effort in time and resources, especially if it is covered with a grass lawn which requires regular mowing and (at least in more arid regions) watering. The amount of energy and water expended on these activities is huge, and for what? A big empty space that isn’t generally used for much of anything. This is not to disparage the choices of people who prefer to have large amounts of space on their property or like maintaining lawns, just to say that I really don’t understand the appeal, and judging by the popularity of apartment-style living where it is available it seems I’m not alone. Plenty of people, it seems, find the amounts of open space provided by public parks and other public or semi-public areas to be perfectly adequate for their needs. And yet, we still have all these yards. In most suburban areas they are essentially mandated by setback requirements in zoning and subdivision codes.
So how did we get here? Obviously it’s a complicated story, and I’m sure there are many different parts to the answer. One important aspect of the story that doesn’t seem to get much attention is described by Jon Peterson in an article on the nineteenth-century sanitary reform movement and its influence on American urban planning. As Peterson describes it, the origin of the yard is something of a byproduct of a series of important changes in urban sanitation and waste management in response to the rise of the industrial city.
Aragon Handyman Service Sign, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Up until about 1850, every house in America, rural or urban, had two things which were absolutely necessary for life: a well and a cesspool. In rural areas, where most people were farmers, everyone had lots of land, so siting these so that contamination of the water supply was not a major issue would presumably have been pretty easy in most places. Even in towns, lots were generally large enough to maintain a safe distance between the well and the cesspool. In preindustrial cities, lots were smaller than in typical towns, but there was still no public provision of water or sewerage, so people still had wells and outhouses on their small urban lots, and disease could be a problem. As long as cities remained small, however, these problems were manageable. Garbage, too, would generally be stored on-site until someone took it away, and waste kitchen and washing water would often be dumped right into the street. There were sewers, but they were used exclusively for carrying away excess stormwater and preventing flooding (basically like storm sewers today), and dumping waste in them was illegal.
The problems with this system, such as it was, became most glaringly apparent once industrial growth led to massive increases in city size. This happened first in Britain, where by the early nineteenth century the filthy conditions of fast-growing cities were atrocious, and the decision to deal with the problem by allowing waste to be dumped in sewers only made things worse. Remember, these were storm sewers, and water only flowed through them when it rained. The rest of the time, all sorts of waste accumulated and clogged them up. By the 184os it was clear that the problem had reached crisis proportions, and the social reformer Edwin Chadwick came up with the idea of dealing with it by introducing a system by which water would be provided to houses and used to flush waste through a system of sewer pipes laid out so as to use gravity to carry the waste away. This was known as “water-carriage sewerage,” and it was the principle upon which all subsequent sewer systems were based. The full implementation of the idea in a slightly different form in London came in the 1860s under Joseph Bazalgette.
Water Tower, Hammonton, New Jersey
In the US, industrialization had not yet progressed very far at that point, but the nation’s few cities were growing, and other factors were making the waste problem worse. Probably the most important was the introduction of public water supply in the 1840s. Once people no longer had to depend on their own wells (which would become less productive as more people moved into the area with their own wells, lowering the water table) or cisterns, they began to use vastly more water, much more than the engineers who designed the water systems had anticipated, and the excess water overloaded the cesspools and created many of the same problems that British cities had been experiencing for a while. US sanitary reforms were impressed with the sewerage ideas coming out of Britain and argued for sewer systems to be implemented in American cities. Boston and New York, which had the biggest problems, accordingly put in extensive but largely uncoordinated sewer lines in the 1850s and 1860s.
In the 1870s, as industrialization began to take hold and American cities began to grow rapidly, the problems with the traditional water and waste disposal systems became apparent to more and more cities, and the use of sewers proliferated from then on. This led to a considerable improvement in urban public health, although the other health problems resulting from the expansion of urban industry may have made this improvement less apparent at the time than it is from our perspective today.
Houses with Yards, Hammonton, New Jersey
So what does all this have to do with yards? Peterson mentions briefly, near the end of his article, what he calls an “illustrative but little appreciated impact of sanitary reform upon urban land use,” namely, new uses for the space on urban lots formerly occupied by wells and cesspools. Once urban households had running water and water-carriage sewerage, they no longer needed to devote space outside the house to these necessities of life, and they could use that space instead for recreation. Thus, the yard was born. In the biggest and fastest-growing cities, of course, rising land values in the late nineteenth century led most of these earlier lots to be bought up and used to build tenements, skyscrapers, and other high-density uses that maximized the amount of the lot used productively and destroyed both the houses and the yards that had been there before. In smaller cities and towns, however, this didn’t happen to nearly the degree it did in places like New York and Chicago, and the yard remained. Around the turn of the century civic improvement associations around the country associated with the City Beautiful movement encouraged the planting of grass, flowers, and other plants in these vacant parts of household lots to beautify them. This is the origin of the lawn. Later, this particular idea of beauty would be incorporated into the self-consciously suburban developments of the 1920s, and from there to the sprawl of today. And so here we are, with big empty spaces filled with grass, the result of technological improvements in sanitation intersecting with emerging ideas of civic beauty.
Peterson JA (1979). The impact of sanitary reform upon American urban planning, 1840-1890. Journal of social history, 13 (1), 83-103 PMID: 11632375
Gambler's House 
Thanks to be part of Blog Action Day!
Please read and share my post about Water’s footprint in Fashion: you’d be surprised at how much impact your personal or family clothing preferences have on the environment. http://wp.me/pXsUB-oi
You can make the difference!
Check the current issue of Newsweek: “Liquid Asset” Big Business and the race to Control the World’s Water.
They’d privatize and sell the very air we breath if they could only figure out how to do it.
Imagine the parks we could have if we gave up yards!
Yards are pretty, concrete is ugly.
I’m all for conservation, but honestly, it’s people like you, dear blogger, that hinder the efforts by polarizing people with your smug “I don’t care for it, so obviously it’s not necessary” attitude.
I hate apartments. I hate sharing a wall with anyone, especially cat-owning metrosexuals that like apartments (seriously, the toxoplasma does something to their brains). I hate being in densely packed (you may say efficient) neighborhoods where every open stretch of ground is coated with cement or asphalt.
I like the smell of rain on fresh cut grass. I like for the rain to have someplace to drain into & evaporate from when the sun shine, buffering the climate with humidity. I like to be able to let my dog out to run around and take a shit that I don’t have to pick up. I like to have parties outside on my own property where no sanctimonious fuckers can tell me what to do.
I’m American, I eat meat, I shoot guns, and after reading this article, I just might take up smoking. I also have a doctorate, work in technology, and make lots of money.
I’ve earned my yard.
America, Fuck-Yeah!
Gotta agree with An American, up above, though I didn’t get quite the same feeling he got. I do think yards are great, but I also think that planting them with climate appropriate plants is key.
But perhaps I”m biased- I grew up in a house that had pebbles and stones for a nice backyard, but we did water grass in the front, which I loved to play on (this was in Michigan).
Now that I”m in Hawaii, we don’t water the grass at all- rainbows do that for us 🙂 Wheeee!
The problem with participating in events like this, of course, is that you get comments like these. Oh well.
I have a modest, fenced backyard. I’m not much of a gardener, so it’s a bit ‘wild’ around the edges. When my girls were little it was their playground, where they could run around relatively unsupervised while I did housework. We’ve had many, many summer birthday parties and other family gatherings in it over the years. In the winter it is our own winter wonderland on those rare occasions when we get snow, and a safe haven for the snowmen we build. Now that I have dogs, I can let them out to ‘do their business’ without worrying about them running off, and without having to take them out on a leash. They can roar around the grass to their heart’s content. It’s a safe spot for my cats to bask in the sun and hunt months in the evening. I can’t imagine not having a back yard. The fact that the dining area of the house opens onto it with a sliding glass door was a major consideration when my husband and I bought the house when our girls were little. The backyard is the ‘outside’ portion of my home, and an integral part of it.
To An American
Unfortunately, for most people, and probably also for you, their yard isn’t the private island they may like to imagine. The rain they may love for the scent it raises from their green desert also drains pesticides and fertilizers from that desert into waterways and into marine dead zones. Other people’s air is polluted by the fumes generated as the grass is cut with the help of a dedicated quarter ton of grossly underutilized capital equipment.
I too have a doctorate, work in technology and make lots of money. Unlike you, I don’t interpret that as justification for the smug sense of entitlement you seem to enjoy.
No one can earn the right to wreck the environment for future generations. Apparently, you’re all for conservation as long as it doesn’t actually impact your precious lifestyle. You may not like sharing a wall with cat-owning metrosexuals. I don’t like sharing an environment with selfish wastrels.
People seem to be reacting to the post as if I’m saying that yards are bad and should be eliminated. That’s not the point at all, though. If you like your yard and use it regularly, that’s great and I’m happy for you. What I’m saying here is that if, as I suspect but can’t really prove, there are a lot of people who have yards (because in many places you literally can’t buy a house without one) but don’t particularly care for them, use them, or get much value from them, that’s a hell of a waste of land and resources. For the people who do use and enjoy their yards, that isn’t a waste of land or resources, because they’re being used productively.
Now, it’s certainly possible that every person in the US who has a yard values it and everyone who doesn’t care about having one lives in an apartment, and in places with a wide variety of housing choices that may well be the case. That’s a pretty small number of places, though (mostly major cities). In most of the country it’s basically single-family house with yard or nothing. I think it’s pretty likely that a lot of the people who live in places like that don’t actually care about the yard and just have it because they have to live in that area for some other reason and that’s the only type of housing available. Giving those people had more housing options (other than “move to New York”) would be more efficient both economically and in terms of resource use.
So no, I’m not advocating banning yards. I’m sure there’s plenty of demand for them that the housing market is capable of meeting. Quite the contrary, in fact. I’m saying that it would probably be a good idea to stop mandating single-family large-lot development in so many places. That is, I’m arguing not for more regulation but for less.
All that aside, however, the real point of this post is the interesting historical story of (one contributing factor to) how this settlement pattern ended up being the American default. I’m not saying this was a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just what happened, and I at least find it interesting.
Don’t give up your yard to soon. Yards are funtional, and if treated correctly can be a GREEN asset. Plant the right foliage and you will be able to offset your carbon footprint. Many plants, especially suculants, dispel carbons and release hyper amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere cleaning the air you breath and creating a relaxing living environment to boot. I would stay away from most traditional grasses, but many prairie grasses do well with little water and need less maintenance than traditional yard grass. As years progress and populations rise we will have need of more multi-family dwellings but for now make the best of what you have and plant a tree.
Teo, Don’t be so insecure. It’s a good article but, will naturally bring out new and differing insite. Kodos for the buzz.
Thanks. These comments have really not been that bad, as these things go, and they’ve raised some interesting issues. I’m just generally conflict-averse, and this blog doesn’t usually get many comments, so this is a bit of an unusual situation for me.
I wonder if the suburban home developed in a similar way in New Zealand; we’ve never had particularly big settlements compared to the USA so I’m not sure the same influences would have applied.
Perhaps it’s another US import.
Why is it when you say you like apartments or you think people under-utilize their yards, often they think you prefer a neighbourhood where “every open stretch of ground is coated with cement or asphalt”. Medium and even high-density areas CAN be built with plenty of green space i.e. well placed living ‘walls’ to lend privacy, greened and tree-lined pavements, and shared playgrounds, gardens, and sports fields.
I used to live with a lady that had a huge lawn/garden. You could have comfortably fit another house on the plot -even with the triple garage she had. A small area of it was semi-tended (the part I would term a garden since it had some ornamental bushed planted, but was pretty constantly choked by weeds). I asked her why she didn’t sell off half the plot and pay off a good chunk of her mortgage now that land prices had risen pretty steeply. She looked horrified.
She said she loved having a large garden to potter in and have BBQs in etc. This confused me because in all the years I’d known her she’d hardly spent any time out in the garden (i.e. a couple of hours every month in summer, mainly mowing) and only had a BBQ for Christmases and then everyone stayed inside except for the BBQ attendee who was stationed near the door on the driveway concrete.
It seems to me that lots of people have romanticised ideas of what they will do (or even are doing) in their yard. I expect this is why so many people express disbelief or horror when I say I don’t want a yard. They think I’m rejecting nature or happy summer get-together. Really, I’m just being pragmatic. And anyway, I like apartments. At least the well-made ones that I lived in, in Russia, where the walls are so thick you don’t hear your neighbours unless you visit them and where kids play together on the communal playground visible from your windows. I would like a balcony to fit my pots of herbs and sit out in the sun -things I already have or try to do.
My partner wants a lawn again. Perhaps I should remind him that he used to have one and would often lament that he should spend more time in it, as it was so under-utilized they only got around to mowing it when the landlord came to visit.
Oh well.
NZ would presumably have been starting from the same British-derived settlement pattern as the US, so it certainly could have developed in the same way even with some differences in the exact mechanisms. And, of course, the suburban development pattern could be a US import (like we’re seeing now in places like China). I guess it would depend in part on the timing of development pattern changes, i.e., whether they were contemporary with those in the US or a bit later. Certainly this sanitation issue was far from the only contributing factor to the exact nature of US suburban development.
teofilo
Sorry to bring conflict to your blog. I didn’t interpret your interesting article as an anti-lawn polemic (I confess I was a little disappointed), I was reacting to “An American,” who apparently did. I suspect that having a large lot with a large immaculate lawn has just become a normalized expectation. Add peer pressure and mindless zoning regulations and you get to where we are now.
I have never been without a yard, in the houses I grew up in and where I live now. By the immediate local standards, I have a small lot, less than 2/3 of an acre. I have a couple of small “lawns”, which I never treat and which I maintain under my own steam with a true push mower. I pile garden debris into brush cover for wildlife.
What do I see around me in the neighborhood? Large expanses of lawn on which no one ever plays, which are regularly treated with pesticide and I expect with fertilizer, and which are often cut by someone riding a lawn tractor. These grassy areas are ecologically barren, particularly in comparison to the wooded areas they replace.
I live in upstate New York, in part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, so the excess treatments that drain off these lawns will end up contributing to the problems in that estuary as well as harming the rivers along the way.
I’m afraid all this does seem absurd to me, and I hope the day will come when people in general will look upon those who choose to flaunt such a wasteful and polluting lifestyle as they do now on cigarette smokers in restaurants, and that no one will aspire to copy them.
If the only constraints on typical lifestyles are to be what we can afford – i.e. how fast we can dig the resources out of the ground – then I really see no hope.
And I do think that my yard is too large, in the sense that normalizing such large individual domains raise driving distances for everyone, with all that entails.
No worries, Martin. I was also mostly reacting to An American, who I doubt is coming back to read any of these further comments anyway.
Hey, I wish my blog were getting reactions like this. It’s unlikely, though.
I have a small house on a small yard; clothesline & garden in back, birdfeeders & birdbaths.
Another factor to consider in the whole “house with a grassed yard” thing is the yard as a demonstration of social status. Prior to the wide-scale development of suburban living, individual homes were usually surrounded by family gardens which were supplying food to the family – the typical “cottage garden” was more about vegetables and fruit and small animals such as chickens than about flowers and grass. Having a lawn or a selection of flower beds was a demonstration of status, generally reserved for the very rich, because it was a large area of open space dedicated not to growing food, or timber, or grazing livestock or anything useful like that, but rather to being a purely ornamental space which required *more* upkeep than food or grazing land (weeding, pruning, mowing etc). Things like private tennis courts, or cricket pitches were demonstrations of social standing, because they said to all and sundry “look, I have enough money and status that I can afford to put perfectly useful land to no use whatsoever for large periods of time”.
A typical quarter-acre block in the days before the supermarket and the refrigerator used to be the feedlot for the family. It was filled to the brim with as many different food crops as could be fitted into the space, along with housing and feed for any animals required (and in the days before motor cars, any house which had a carriage of any sort needed at least a donkey to pull it) including such things as chickens to provide eggs, feathers and meat; a cat or two to keep down vermin like mice and rats; at least one dog; probably a house cow if the owners could afford it. In addition, there were things like the washhouse, the outhouse and the well to fit in there, and the majority of the household waste went onto a midden, or rubbish heap. It’s also worth noting the quarter-acre was generally considered a very small block.
The Australian dream of a detached house surrounded by lawn is largely based around the image of the stately homes of England, or the US suburban vision we see from Hollywood. Unfortunately for us, we’re living on the driest continent of the lot, and the majority of Australia has been on water restrictions for about the past decade at least. I think the picture is going to start altering soon, as folks start to realise a verdant green lawn may be a nice thing to have, but it’s too damn expensive to maintain in this day and age.
That’s a good point. In the post I focused on the use of space for sanitary facilities, but those would of course not have been the only things on a residential lot before the lawn era. A well and outhouse or cesspit wouldn’t take up that much space, especially in smaller towns and rural areas where lots were larger than in cities.
Teo,
As usual, a great posting…Thanks!
Here in Aridzona, lawns seem to be the sign of self-important status, or the “my parents had one, so I’ll have one too” syndrome. As precipitation in the upper Colorado basin continues to diminish on an annual average basis, the agreement between states for the sharing of water may be moving toward a crisis. As Lake Mead levels drop, there is a mandate to reduce water supplies to the Central Arizona Project at an approaching set point. BuRec may (likely) discharge from Lake Powell to satisfy the non-emergency level in Mead, but that only reduces the level in Powell on a longer-term basis.
Since the weather predictors are indicting a La Nina along with decadal precipitation minimums, we may be in for an interesting time.
Drink all the water you can while you’re in the East, and bring back as much as you can—-we may need it.
Keep up the academics, good land planners are hard to find!
John W
Wow, wondering if lawns really are necessary seemed to be quite controversial. It’s a question that’s often crossed my mind. I love my shade tree and back porch, but the lawn…contributes to urban sprawl, that’s all I can say for it. With thicker walls or more sound-diverting plantings or art, I’d be glad to live even closer to my neighbors than I do.
At least maybe we can convert some of this unused lawn to vegetable gardens, taking advantage of our household control of pesticide use and the carbon footprint of transporting vegetables from far away.