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by quantumstate
5040 days ago
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I'm surprised that you got that impression. I'm from the UK, I have visited the US once and was in the Philadelphia suburbs. I would say that the UK has smaller homes and gardens. In the UK most people live in dense cities and towns as opposed to suburban sprawl in the US, this limits space available. I would agree that in England we spend more time gardening (though "most of their 'home' time" would be an exaggeration, possibly true in summer). There is strong separation of gardens in the UK as well, not having a fence would be very unusual, whereas where I was in the US back and front yards weren't clearly delineated. |
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In the San Francisco Bay Area and the Las Vegas metropolitan area, both places where I've been able to keep up to date on for about 30+ years, later neighborhoods have smaller lots and larger homes. In what started as the 'suburbs' in the peninsula like Sunnyvale, Campbell, Cupertino, and Los Altos. You can see pretty this pretty clearly from aerial imagery in Google Maps if you also know approximate neighborhood dates. We've had a number of towns propose or pass 'zero lot line' ordinances which restrict the building of residences that go right to the edge of the lot. And lots themselves have gone from 1/2 acre to 1/3 acre then to 1/4 acre, and now often 1/6 acre.
On the east coast, where I spent some of my childhood, back lots were commonly unfenced and effectively like mini-parks behind the houses out front, whereas in California fences are the norm. In Las Vegas fences are also the norm and lots have shown a similar drop although there was a lot of desert around so it has not been as pronounced as it has in the Bay Area.
My sister lived in Birmingham UK for a while and noted how much more invested folks she met were in their gardens than Americans were.