British-born Laurence Brown has a YouTube channel dedicated to documenting the differences between Britain and the USA. In the last year, he’s become and American citizen and bought a house in the suburbs (Chicago’s, alas), and has some observations, mostly positive, about American suburbs, including the community of dog owners, immaculate lawns, and America’s love affair with rectangles.
Tags: Laurence Brown, Lost in the Pond, suburbs, UK, video
Lol this was good. One of the things that’s cropped up recently is the rebranding of liberals hatred for suburbanites as the “walkable cities” or “15 minute cities” movement. Not a thing about these movements is new, it’s all the same old tropes of urbanite angst and aesthetic distaste for home ownership, large lot sizes, and the generic wholesomeness of not having to claw your way through syringes and druggy feces while dodging people trying to mug you.
I love watching these people romanticise the walkability and environmentally friendly nature of an urban landscape in which the only trees you see are landscaped ones in street level planters…if you’re lucky. Yeah. No. Sorry liberals, I actually get to see nature (and deer) when I walk through my neighborhood, not some curated concrete jungle you grew a liking to because you saw a picture of an Tuscan hilltop village community in a book once.
Chain link fences tend to be a thing in the northern United States In the Southern states it tends to be cedar fences,
You see some down here, either on older houses or houses with very large yards, where cedar might be cost-prohibitive.
[…] Brit-Turned-American On the Glories of Suburbia. “British-born Laurence Brown has a YouTube channel dedicated to documenting the differences […]
I’m with Lawrence, I hate chain link fences. Do you really need to do that? You can’t put up a decent fence if you really need to have one?
I disagree Mike. I like neighbors with chain link fences. You can see through that fencing to see someone injured on the ground.
There is a mix of fences in the south. Where I grew up, on the east side of Houston, it was all chain link, but on the west side it is all cedar (except for the brick walls).
I’ll take a chain link fence over those shiny white vinyl monstrosities any day. No, you’re not fooling me that it’s whitewashed wood – it’s plastic. With a chain link femce, you can see right through it to flowers and grass, and the fence is almost invisible unless you’re right on top of it.
The chain link fence anywhere there is a decent amount of snow is a failure waiting to happen… Please don’t ask me how I know; I’m still dealing with the idiocy that my stepfather had installed on the property that my mother lives on. Snow banks, snow plows, and frost heave are inimical to any sort of longevity on the damn things…
If you’ve got no snow in your climate, or it’s just an occasional visitor? Chain link does fine. Any more than that? LOL…
I think that he fancies himself as a Ricky Gervais clone. Except that he’s always glancing around rather than looking at the camera. And his observations are pretty much the same thing I have heard a half dozen times before from other Brits. Oh, well.