But if you regard children as not just a lifestyle choice but part of becoming a human being, if you believe that creating a home for your family is not drudgery but a valuable undertaking, then you begin to see the point of even an exurban subdivision. (Though I still like sidewalks.)
For instance, we used to live in a gently-curvilinear suburb full of Craftsman houses, Colonial Revivals, and the odd Tudor, nearly all built during the height of the local streetcar system in the 1920s but with nods to the rise of the automobile. Head a mile north or south of that old streetcar line, though, and everything is a small brick Minimal Traditional built during or just after World War II. (The familiar Cape Cod-type house is a variety of this type, but not the only one; the Minimal Traditional styles were all officially endorsed the FHA, so builders and homeowners preferred it because it brought guarantees of federal insurance.)
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Now we live another five miles farther out from the city in an area that was first settled as its agricultural hinterland. There are a tiny handful of Greek Revivals from before the railroad arrived, but aside from those the oldest houses are all Victorians dating exactly to the arrival of the railroad, mostly Queen Annes but with the odd Gothic Revival in the mix. As the city grew, the railroad began to carry less food and more commuters until sometime in the 1910s, when a streetcar line arrived. As houses filled in what had been fields the farms were cut smaller and smaller (an 1880 Queen Anne up the street sits next door to an 1915 American Foursquare) and the process continued as first the US Highways and then the FHA arrived. My next door neighbors are both Minimal Traditionals built in the late 1950s on what a century before had been the farmland belonging to the whatever Pre-Railroad Folk house was eventually knocked down to build mine.
This is still, I am told, how some of the more sensibly-governed parts of the world run their transit systems: whatever company has the right to build subways buys up the land around a planned (but not announced) subway line through shell corporations, builds the subway, then sells or develops the newly-valuable property. Far more efficient as a funding mechanism than fares!
This 2020 NBER working paper points out that redlined areas were 85% white (though they did include many of the black people living in Northern cities) and suggests that race played very little role in where the red lines were drawn; rather, black people were already living in the worst neighborhoods.
I'll defend the "children in the city" position, but it needs to be the right city. I live in London (England), and before I had kids I assumed that I, too, would want to move out once I was a parent, but the opposite has been true. I think there has been a relatively recent revolution in child friendliness; public transit is free for kids, nappy changing stations and high chairs are now pretty much universal, museums are basically all well equipped for kids (and free), I live on a big beautiful park with multiple more within walking distance, I get my groceries delivered, school and nursery are sub ten minutes away, the local church hosts (multicultural, five minutes walk) play groups... And there are plenty of other parents around!
Is my house small? Yes, it is, and I admit it would be a squeeze with more than two kids (albeit could renovate the loft to fit a third). But we pack our lunches and are outside almost all of every day, and I don't even own a car; parenthood in the city has been lovely. Looking ahead, London's schools are now excellent and crime is much lower than it used to be.
It turns out January is the perfect time to do this, because the ground is frozen and there\u2019s no way you can be expected to actually do anything (except read, which is much easier than pulling weeds). So I spent some glorious afternoons wandering the library stacks and checking out enormous, stroller-destabilizing piles of books.
The library is the best way to enjoy gardening books, which tend to be enormous, beautifully photographed in full color and printed on lovely heavy paper, and therefore incredibly expensive \u2014 you can grab anything that looks interesting but abandon it without remorse if it turns out not to be.1 I learned all about theories of garden design, the habits and bloom times of different plants, and the intricacies of rose breeding (I\u2019m a David Austin gal), and compiled long hand-written lists of flowers I like, haphazardly organized by scientific name or shade tolerance or what might look nice with what.
I accumulated all this book knowledge while the trees were stark and jagged against the sky and the ground was bare except where shreds of wet leaves clung. It was a dull, grey, snowless winter, and when the Christmas lights came down the outside world seemed entirely bleak and unappealing. Like always, we looked forward to spring \u2014 for the warmth that meant we could walk to the park without ten minutes of chasing down stray mittens, for colors, for the smell of life in the air \u2014 but when spring finally rolled around, I found it entirely new.
It\u2019s not as though I hadn\u2019t noticed spring before, of course, but knowing what you\u2019re seeing makes all the difference in appreciating it. What used to be a flowering tree was now a redbud or a dogwood or a cherry. A bush laden with snowy blossoms was a viburnum whose cultivar I might be able to identify from the scent (or lack thereof, since all the prettiest viburnums seem to be scentless). The bizarre red sprouts in my neighbor\u2019s yard grew, greened, and revealed themselves as peonies when their massive buds began to droop \u2014 a tomato cage eventually appeared to keep them upright.2 I started walking around town just to look at plants, tracking the seasons\u2019 progress through what was in bloom, noticing that my azaleas were still in bud when my neighbor\u2019s sunnier yard was a riot of pink blossoms or the way the hostas grew up to hide the exhausted foliage of the early bulbs. There was a suddenly part of the world I got that I\u2019d never gotten before.
Virginia Savage McAlester\u2019s marvelous A Field Guide to American Houses does for the residential built environment what it took me stacks and stacks of gardening books to do for plants: explain what you\u2019re seeing and why it is the way it is, so that you can see the world around you in a new way. She wrote in the preface to the original 1984 edition that it is \u201Ca practical field manual for identifying and understanding the changing fashions, forms, and components of American houses,\u201D so with book in hand (or possibly waiting for you at home, since the paperback weighs three and a half pounds) you should be able walk down any street in America and identify the style of every house you encounter. Aha, the facade is dominated by prominent front-facing gable with a steeply pitched roof and a round arch over the front door? We don\u2019t even need the decorative half-timbering to tell us it\u2019s a Tudor!3
Most of the book is given over to brief but comprehensive chapters on each of nearly fifty different styles of house, from the stately Georgian to the elaborate Queen Anne to the humble ranch. Lest the options overwhelm you, however, McAlester opens with an illustrated cheat-sheet of architectural features that can help you narrow down a house\u2019s style: if you see an eyebrow dormer, for instance, flip to \u201CShingle\u201D or \u201CRichardsonian Romanesque\u201D and see what other features you can identify.
But this isn\u2019t the sort of book you\u2019ll want to sit down and read cover to cover, unless you\u2019re particularly interested in architecture, because many \u2014 perhaps most \u2014 of the styles simply won\u2019t exist wherever you happen to be. Sometimes the variation is chronological (you\u2019re obviously not going to get Victorians in an area that was farmland until 1970), but it\u2019s just as often regional: there\u2019s lots of Spanish Revival in the southwest and Florida, where there are original Spanish Colonial buildings, but practically none in New England. Usually, though, it\u2019s both: Greek Revival was the dominant style of American domestic architecture from about 1830 to 1850, to the point it was called \u201Cthe National Style,\u201D but is practically unheard-of in areas settled after 1860.
Many of the changes in house style were just a matter of fashion: for example, the transition from Georgian to Federal architecture (about which you can read more here) was mostly about shifting tastes in ornamentation and visual weight, like differences in graphic design between a website from 2003 and one from 2023. Local conditions had their part to play, of course \u2014 porches have always been far more popular in the South, for obvious reasons. But technological advances in heating, roofing materials, and construction techniques have also done a great deal to influence the forms and structures of American houses, and here McAlester\u2019s opening hundred pages or so are invaluable.
Take roofing: traditional English cottages are typically thatched, but thatch will only shed water if the roof is pitched very steeply. Accordingly, a thatched building can\u2019t be very deep \u2014 if you want to make it bigger you have to make it longer, because making it wider would require an impossibly high roof. The earliest buildings in the New World copied familiar European construction patterns wholesale, but the colonists quickly discovered that thatch didn\u2019t stand up to severe New England winters and switched to covering their roofs with wooden planks or shingles \u2014 which, incidentally, will shed water at a lower pitch. And since those same long, cold winters made a larger house seem awfully appealing, and a square is a much more efficient way of enclosing the same area, the colonists quickly worked out a lower-pitched framing technique that could span a full two-room depth. Thus, by 1750, most American houses were closer to square than oblong. As for heating, I\u2019ve discussed elsewhere the ways the switch from burning wood to burning coal changed domestic architecture; McAlester extends it to central furnaces (coal or, later, oil and gas) that could heat a large or irregular house without needing multiple stoves or grates. 152ee80cbc
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