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Thought today walking around Glendale, and drawing on memories of Berkeley and Osaka:
* street with no greenery: bad.
* street with no planted greenery but lots of potted plants: surprisingly nice.
* street with a foot or two of setback grass: meh, not sure it's that much better than nothing.
* street with a foot or two of setback with various plants: pretty cool in Berkeley
* street with 20 feet of setback grass and a few trees: meh, grass is fucking boring, grass and occasional tree is boring, and you can't even use front yards as a public park. And most of the time they don't look even used by the residents. elusiveat asked what I meant by wasted space and that's a good example: it's not that visually interesting and it's not useful to anyone even the putative owners. Except as rain absorber maybe.
(To be fair, it doesn't have to be that way, if local busybodies allow. One front yard around here has a low fence and paths and toys for children and non-grass plants. But a lot are just faux savanna.)
* street with 20 feet of setback with various plants: can be pretty neat! Especially when there's a small desert ecosystem going, or a bamboo grove. But, maybe not that much nicer than having a few feet. And not so nice that we need to be requiring everyone to have a 20 foot setback, especially when most of them are grass, and especially when the front yard is big enough to be a whole house.
And I'm not pulling 20 feet out of my eyeballs, I paced the side of one corner lot. 5 paces, 1.4 meters per pace, 7 meters, so 23 feet of grass between the sidewalk and the house.
I let Dreamwidth pick a random icon and it picked Rin in lecture mode. Well done, random bot.
* street with no greenery: bad.
* street with no planted greenery but lots of potted plants: surprisingly nice.
* street with a foot or two of setback grass: meh, not sure it's that much better than nothing.
* street with a foot or two of setback with various plants: pretty cool in Berkeley
* street with 20 feet of setback grass and a few trees: meh, grass is fucking boring, grass and occasional tree is boring, and you can't even use front yards as a public park. And most of the time they don't look even used by the residents. elusiveat asked what I meant by wasted space and that's a good example: it's not that visually interesting and it's not useful to anyone even the putative owners. Except as rain absorber maybe.
(To be fair, it doesn't have to be that way, if local busybodies allow. One front yard around here has a low fence and paths and toys for children and non-grass plants. But a lot are just faux savanna.)
* street with 20 feet of setback with various plants: can be pretty neat! Especially when there's a small desert ecosystem going, or a bamboo grove. But, maybe not that much nicer than having a few feet. And not so nice that we need to be requiring everyone to have a 20 foot setback, especially when most of them are grass, and especially when the front yard is big enough to be a whole house.
And I'm not pulling 20 feet out of my eyeballs, I paced the side of one corner lot. 5 paces, 1.4 meters per pace, 7 meters, so 23 feet of grass between the sidewalk and the house.
I let Dreamwidth pick a random icon and it picked Rin in lecture mode. Well done, random bot.