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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

There's a neighborhood nearby that I often go for a walk on. It was built probably immediately after WW2. Most of the houses, if you look closely, are of identical design. (Sometimes a mirror image.) But over the years, they've diverged as the owners would add garages, bedrooms, expansions, etc. They're nicely done, and it's a charming neighborhood.

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Finland has this exact same thing. We call them "Rintamamiestalo", translates to something like "Soldier house".

They're all pretty much the same kind of two-story wooden house, people built them in bulk when they got home from the war. It was an event like an Amish barn raising, the same guys built a ton of the exact same house one after the other.

Now they've got maybe the second or third owner and the designs have diverged quite a bit, but you can still find the central house if you know how to look.

I grew up in such a neighborhood, built to absorb the baby boom. It took me a long time to figure out that the houses were identical except for being oriented in different directions, having different facade, and so forth. One day I realized that I knew my way around David's house because I knew my way around Kevin's house.

It's unfortunate that the beautiful trees of established neighborhoods take 50 years to achieve.

It doesn't have to be that long. My mom asked the city to put in some oak trees when I was a kid. It only took the trees about 15 years to grow to a pretty good size. In my opinion, it's worth the effort of lobbying the city.

My parents did it the unofficial way, put in 5-10 trees along the road, over a few weekends, with the same style of concrete surrounding that the city used. They are huge now, and nobody ever questioned how they got there. Not 50-years huge, and a faster-growing species than oak, but still a big improvement.

Remember the song,

    Little boxes on the hillside
    Little boxes made of ticky tacky
    Little boxes on the hillside
    Little boxes all the same…

That's what it was complaining about: a neighborhood where people could make it their own.

This is how many urban residential neighborhoods built before the 1950s are. Mine in CA is a such a neighborhood built between the 1920s and 1940s - originally very similar 1000sqft Craftsmans that have been incrementally enhanced over generations up to and including including now.

Where you find a distinct lack of this sort of organic variation is in suburban tract single family home developments where changes are micromanaged by neighborhood HOAs.

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