This terrifies me.

There's nothing that says you have to live there if you don't like it. You can find the same type situation in pretty much every part of the country. Would you rather live on Staten Island? Maybe Las Vegas?

Me too, OP. I think I'd commit suicide if I lived in a development like that. Completely depressing to see, much less inhabit.

It looks like Castaic, Ca.

It's called suburbia.

We've dealt with this for many years. Everybody sing!

It’s Calabasas. And there are indeed “shops to be seen” along the 101 in that photo, including an Albertson’s supermarket.

"Call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye."

No thanks! Yuck

Isn't Calabasas supposed to be wealthy?

Don't worry, OP. People don't live there for long. Just look at that over built mess and you can see why California has its wildfire problems.

Whoosh! Gone!

Yesterday I was thinking the same thing about that ugly suburb Chris Watts lived in in Colorado. It looked like a bunch of houses clumped together in the middle of nowhere.

Don't you find the price of these houses more terrifying? I don't know how middle-class people such as bank tellers, secretaries, teachers, etc., can afford to live there.

[Quote] I don't know how middle-class people such as bank tellers, secretaries, teachers, etc., can afford to live there.

They can't. Most of the people you listed live in Sylmar with their families, their parents and brother and his wife in a 4 br 2bath house if they're lucky.

This is certainly not my idea of paradise, but I could put up with living here if I absolutely had to.

Little boxes made of ticky tacky

It seems a shit way to live from my perspective, but perfect, I suppose, for the people who live there: jumping in their cars for everything, proud of their Albertson's supermarket, fake friendly with everybody yet can barely disguise the contempt for their neighbors, pleased to be apart from the city and its problems, rushing off to yoga class.

This is what terrifies *me* - Texas suburbia, flat as a pancake, no shops in sight, MAGAts everywhere, and most of the year it's too hot and humid to walk anywhere.

Living in Calabasas is not bad - there are people who can't afford such proximity to major employment hubs in LA who live out in Lancaster and the Inland Empire and who commute 3-4 hours a day.

Not everyone is able to afford $1 million dollars for a charming shoebox/cottage in Silverlake or Los Feliz.

not just out west, the east coast invent this style of segregated housing.

Equally terrifying, r19.

[quote]It's called suburbia.

No it’s not. I live in Suburbia on the east coast and it couldn’t be more different.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, that photo in r19 *IS* from the East Coast: it's one of the Levittowns.

[quote] Would you rather live on Staten Island?

Yes.

Who said it wasn’t, r21?

It's an example of the East Coast suburbia that you claim is so superior to the West Coast variety, r23.

No it’s absolutely not, r24. Most of suburbia in the East is like this:

There is plenty of ugly suburban sprawl in the East Coast. The older, more established suburbs can be beautiful and most of them are at least fortunate enough to have mature plantings, proximity to historic features and fewer fires and floods to worry about. But if you think suburban Atlanta (for example) is less soulless than anything in California, think again.

To say nothing of the vile golf retirement communities gobbling up irreplaceable shoreline in the Carolinas, or the vast tracts of dreary, peeling stucco in Florida.

And some West Coast suburbs look like this.

Some find the idea of living in cities especially terrifying OP, especially American cities. Many are afraid of the country, or remote mountain hideaways. All first world problems really.

People who say “first world problems” are usually ultra-privileged themselves ....

Yes, R27, there are some absolutely beautiful West Coast suburbs.

Exurbs both East and West are generally ugly. In the DC area, it’s out towards Loudon County that look like OP’s picture, and the inner old suburbs like Bethesda Maryland look pretty and established. Developers put tons of houses on old farmland with nothing nearby. They look like pimples on a giant ass.

OP, what's Siberia like this time of the year? Are there shops and boutiques? I wonder if you have a window.

Looks like a fire trap to me.

Or it's a plan. As in PLAN. You know to easily take out whole communities. I'm working on my conspiracy theory now whether it's Black Ops or Cylons. Don't anyone steal my script idea. c.

Yes, r31, I've lived in suburbs and exurbs on both coasts, and none has been as bucolic as the one pictured in r25's photo. Mainly because neither my parents nor I have ever had the funds to afford a fancy neighborhood like that one in Newton.

[R34] I’ve done my time in exurbia as well. It’s ok until about age twelve, when you start wanting to go places without having to be driven by your parents.

R29 Whether privileged or not, a recognition of these and a sense of gratefulness is wise. Appreciating a roof over one's head, health, clean water, enough food and basic sanitation has apparently gone out of fashion. It's called perspective. People who cannot distinguish real fears from such silly notions as OP's are tiresome.

I think it's more in line with thoughtless privileged types to go on about such things. Count your blessings R29.

You prefer this, OP?

Much sleight of hand going on in this thread by western coast beehive drones ... well, it could be firebombed Dresden! Shut up because at least you have a roof over your head!

Yes we aren’t Darfur orphans, so let’s never discuss preferences ... ever.

Is this spice-rack existence the reason there are so many serial killers in California?

No one is saying that sterile over-development is bad. Is is objectively bad. But that's not how the OP framed his question.

Any fairly newish development is going to look overplanned and under-detailed from the air. But once tree cover is established, most of these neighborhoods are pleasant enough.

I prefer the feel and attention given to detail by older "garden city" and Olmstead-influenced plans, and wish we could get back to that as the gold standard, but it is also a matter of the market can reasonably bear. Not everything looks like Bronxville or the Back Bay because Bronxville and the Back Bay cost a lot of money.

I can’t imagine living somewhere I couldn’t walk to a grocery and drugstore.

Some of us get our groceries and medications delivered, R41.

Hell, I lived in a 4th floor walk up in the West Village and paid to have bags of dog food, cat food, cases of wine and bags of food delivered right to my door. No need to drag shit through the streets and up those narrow stairs.

Me neither, r41, which is why I could never live in a place like Dallas or Minneapolis where it's either too hot or too cold to walk anywhere much of the time. Much less a place like Plano or Edina, which are nothing but widely separated McMansions with intolerable weather to boot.

No, R39. No.

Californians are the reason California has so many serial killers.

R39 You need a brief primer in statistics.

CA has a population of 40 million. Total number of serial killers in CA will of course be higher than any other state given that CA has far more residents than any other state. As are number of MVA fatalities, numbers of people dying of cancer, etc

If you break down serial killers per 100,000 of the population, CA fares no worse than other states.

Serial killers are most active along interstate highways.

I had an opportunity to buy into a community like that in my city, and I passed despite the house itself being large and beautiful. I went for a smaller house in a normal neighborhood, and I don't regret it.

The worst thing about those communities isn't necessarily that they're far away from the city or that you have to drive everywhere, even just to pick up milk at the store, it's that they're designed to be that way in perpetuity. Notice how those developments are never designed on a normal grid. All those curvy roads and cul-de-sacs make it impossible for those housing developments to be anything other than that. If you changed the zoning to allow commercial and multifamily developments, the fundamental street grid makes that kind of development impossible. Those neighborhoods will be abandoned or become slums before they get developed into real communities.

That's what happens after a fire destroys a natural habitat. New housing comes up to take its place.

R14 I could put up with that place too.... but not for over $4 million. I'd far prefer something far smaller and older in a nicer location for that sort of money

[quote] CA has a population of 40 million. Total number of serial killers in CA will of course be higher than any other state given that CA has far more residents than any other state. As are number of MVA fatalities, numbers of people dying of cancer, etc

That’s like saying that Germany didn’t have an Adolph Hitler problem because it had only one Adolph Hitler for a population of 50 million, therefore an acceptable population.

Dearheart, one serial killer is an unacceptable number of serial killers. And California has lots.

R25 : Most suburban areas don't contain trees that old, but nice try.

R25 Bullshit.

You spice rack denizens can keep posting photos of Levittowns all you want but you know the truth that your suburbs are mostly ant farms and eastern suburbs couldn’t be more different.

Quick, post ANOTHER photo of a Levittown!

[R51], that photograph must be nearly 70 years old. There are trees in Levittown now.

But it was never a particularly attractive suburb.

Plano, Texas is actually pretty convenient. I lived there once for a few months. Gay life was pretty dire, but big malls & big-box stores were abundant and EVERYWHERE. For day to day shopping, 90% of the stores I cared about were within a mile... and I was technically near the still-undeveloped (at the time) frontier, near Preston Rd & Headquarters Drive.

Now, Flower Mound was just plain "despicably dire"... the tackiest McMansions on earth, with incoherent cut & paste architectural details that make its stereotypes seem downright tame. Plano, at least, was pretty unpretentiously upper middle-class... mostly 3-4 bedroom houses with knockdown-textured fake stucco & universal 2-car garages, just like the ones built everywhere else in the 1990s, plus 3 or 4 story townhomes.

One very awesome thing about Plano -- even APARTMENTS often have attached garages.

I eventually got homesick & moved back to Florida, but it was more because Oak Lawn felt like an oasis tethered to a 15-mile lifeline (the Tollway), surrounded by 300 miles of Jesustan. Between Sunday & Friday night, though, Plano was actually pretty nice & convenient.

What I hate about those new developments is the absence of space. People pay $600-$800k for a box and garage - just because it has white countertops and some trendy bathroom tile. The desire for a “new” house gets them to over pay by 20-30%. Like a new car it ages and looks like crap in 15 years. Beats poverty - but a horrible reason to slave away in a miserable corporate job so you can live that “upscale” lifestyle in a new house.

OP that terrifies me too.

Apparently the biggest problem people have with Calabasas (in OP's photo) is that the houses are too close together. I assume this explains all the "spice rack" remarks.

But land and water are scarce resources (and not just in California). Yards and landscaping waste lots of both. So why is it so desirable to have a huge, thirsty yard that requires constant watering and upkeep?

I don’t understand what the point is in having a single family home when there is no yard and when you have to drive for hours in heavy traffic for everything including work. NYC makes more sense to me - vertical density. Horizontal density seems stupid because you are increasing the distance and time required to drive everywhere.

The problem with vertical density is that for large homes, it quickly becomes ASTRONOMICALLY expensive per square foot, even in places like literal Manhattan.

In most cases, if you want a 3,000+ sf residence with at least two garaged parking spaces & room for two more, a townhouse will almost always end up cheaper than a skyscraper with multi-story garage.

Skyscrapers need ENORMOUS amounts of space for elevators, fire stairs, trash chutes, and utility ducts. In a small-footprint tower, they can soak up more than HALF of each floor.

Ever wonder why so many 3-story townhomes have stairs OUTSIDE leading to a front door on the SECOND floor, with another outdoor stairway from a second-floor kitchen to the back yard? In most places, it allows you to get away with a single grand interior stairway up to the third floor plus attic. The alternative would be THREE stairways inside... the grand open one, plus TWO MORE fire-rated & enclosed stairways. Under most building codes, you're allowed two floors + attic above two "egress" points before the stairs themselves become a Required Means of Egress.

This is also why so many townhomes try to put the garage in the basement, even if it leaves you with an awkward "bonus room" first floor at ground level that's below the front door & has a door of its own people mistake for the front door. Suspended concrete slabs strong enough to drive on aren't cheap, and an awkward ground-level bonus room is ENORMOUSLY cheaper than trying to waterproof, insulate, and egress-enable a basement into first-class living space.

Per square foot, the cheapest way to build a huge urban residence is to get a ~25x100 foot lot w/alley. Build a 3 story townhome with finished basement & attic fronting the street. Build a garage w/2 stories + attic above at the rear (for rental income, granny flat, or the kids to inhabit someday).

If you're REALLY rich & in London, excavate the entire lot into a pit 30 feet deep, so the basement opens up into the depressed back yard, then put a second basement even lower... using the back yard's pool as a skylight. I'm not shitting you... google "London iceberg homes". AFAIK, London is the only city where this is both legal & commonplace. Apparently, so many people have done it, it's causing hydrological problems by damming up underground creeks & streams that were buried centuries ago & forgotten about.

[quote] by damming up underground creeks & streams that were buried centuries ago & forgotten about.

That idea saddens me. I know it’s true and that all over the world there are streams, brooks and creeks underneath urban and suburban streets, but I still find it terribly poignant.

OP is an idiot. He posts an aerial view of Western suburbia, but then street views of Eastern suburbia. Of course one looks more appealing than the other. Sheesh.

I've lived in several large cities, a couple of small towns and in the country.

I find small town life to be the best for me these days but I had my city years and they were great. Wouldn't knock it.

I grew up in a suburb. It was great for childhood but would bore the shit out of me as an adult.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

I would be more terrified by the fact that Kardashians live in Calabasas.

Most Americans are much more terrorized by the notion of living in a crowded, dirty, rat-infested center city that doesn’t offer them five bedrooms, a huge lawn, central air, great schools, a three car garage, and huge shopping centers.

The Menendez family home was in Calabasas. That's all you need to know to stay the hell away from there.

[quote] Most Americans are much more terrorized by the notion of living in a crowded, dirty, rat-infested center city that doesn’t offer them five bedrooms, a huge lawn, central air, great schools, a three car garage, and huge shopping centers.

False opposition much? Travel East of the Rockies and you’ll see that suburban living doesn’t have to equal spice rack existence.

Lol as if most Americans have those things R66. Five bedrooms? Great schools? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

Suburbs west of the Rockies aren’t all “spice racks” either. As you’d know if you’d ever spent any time in the Seattle or Portland areas - or Sac or Palm Springs or any number of places in California that embody your suburban dream of 3BR 2BA ranch homes plunked in the middle of quarter-acre lots. But please go on repeating that slur that you think is oh so clever. We need to hear it at least eight more times.

R16 Why do you assume everyone living in the suburbs is pleased about it? People are limited in their choices by job location. Many businesses are located in the suburbs. Telecommunicating is not an option for many. People also move to the suburbs for their children. The best public school districts in the country tend to be in the suburbs. There is also more green space compared to the city, at least where I live, next to a state park. If I wasn't limited by these factors, I'd love to live in a small town though I wouldn't like to live in one full of Repugs as most of them tend to be. Houses in liberal small towns tend to be astronomically expensive. So you see, the choice is not as simple as you make it out to be.

Couldn’t pay me to live in California.

Spent past week here in cookie cutter SoCal. I get why it’s attractive - but the weather benefit seems to be a double edged sword now. It’s been 95-100+ all week. Dry, hot, brownish skies from the smoke. I crave Fall.

Main problem is it’s just too damn expensive. Middle class families need to pay $600k+ for a modest home. That’s insane and unsustainable. The only solution is to move.

r64 A conservatory? You could stage your own version of CLUE in there.

In case anybody's curious, the real reason why almost no houses in Florida have basements has almost NOTHING to do with "the water table". Geologically, with the exception of a portion of Coconut Grove in Miami & a few other small areas that are LITERALLY waterfront, South Florida is no "wetter" OR "drier" than Chicago, Boston, NYC, DC, London, or Paris.

Nor is the problem "soggy, unstable ground". Quite the opposite, in fact... dig down a few inches in Fort Lauderdale, and you basically hit a layer of solid natural CONCRETE that needs explosives and/or a jackhammer to break up. This is actually our biggest IMPEDIMENT to basements here... blasting is rarely allowed, and jackhammering anything bigger than a small in-ground pool is prohibitively expensive.

The INSURMOUNTABLE problem is FEMA, which requires cities to ban dry-floodproofing of homes for some stupid reason as a condition of allowing the community to participate in the flood insurance program. It's a one-two knockout punch... you can't insure it, and you aren't allowed to fully-waterproof it. Apparently, their stupid rationale is that engineered dry floodproofing makes people feel "too safe" and encourages non-evacuation, so instead they legislatively mandate extreme vulnerability.

R67 The Menendez family lived in Beverly Hills not Calabasas.

R11, same here. Just finished watching the Watts murders documentary, and thought of this thread when they showed aerial views of their neighborhood. It looked to be full of characterless McMansions - and nary a tree to be seen.

R72 I'm really missing you here

No, R76. The family home was in Calabasas. The father, Jose, embarked on a major renovation of the home for which the family had to move out. The home in Beverly Hills where the parents got popped was a temporary rental.

so if you want to get a carton of milk, you have to get in the car and drive?? Ugh

They have this thing called "delivery" now, R80.

I grew up in suburbia (of NYC) and couldn't wait to grow up and get the fuck out. Never returned until 45 years later ( 3 years ago). I couldn't believe how beautiful it was with beautiful houses (circa 1930s and 1940s) and big old trees. It is funny that growing up there I never realized it was beautiful, I just knew it was horrible. Still would never want to live in the suburbs again.

It's Agrestic!!

If that's California--and there's no way that's east coast, what are you people thinking, that looks like a drought /bowl of dust-- that's probably where the rich live. It's terraced so they can all have a little corner view of the ocean. it's actually quite spectacular if you like that sort of thing. and yes NE coast would have more green and canopied trees, which is also quite lovely in its way