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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

Those sound like good things. I live in a place where non of those demands are considered acceptable (or noone bothers to coordinate) and family-home suburbs look absurd. Every house is from another world, like the neighbors didn't exist. Color, style, fence, roof: everything is as random as you can imagine. It's a continuous spatial conflict.

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I am very curious why you would want your house to look exactly like ( or coordinated) with your neighbor? One of the things I felt odd in US is that every house in a sub-division looks like they were made from cookie-cutter. Isn't expressing individuality and having the freedom to make use of your own land in way that suits you more important, as long as it does not impact the living conditions of your surroundings?

Different folks want different things. Though as time goes on more and more houses look different in style in the same neighborhood. There are limits though - there are only so many ways you can do a garage and the required drive from it to the street so that always looks similar.

Most builders of spec houses intentionally buy just a few scattered lots in many different neighborhoods - that way they can build the same house they always build, yet not neighborhood has two houses that look alike. But there are neighborhoods where all houses are built exactly alike...

Copy-paste suburbs is bad too, that's the other extreme. What you want is for the architecture to have awareness of its surroundings and to have it seek harmony, not conflict.

The thing is, in the Bay Area, suburbs still look absurd because rich people can build anything by greasing the local bureaucracy enough.

It’s obvious if you’ve ever set foot anywhere south of San Francisco: depressing, no common architectural style, really dumb land use, yet somehow you’d need a million permit to change a window on your house.

I'm with you on wealthy people who want to build huge houses.

I'm not with you on the guy whom justs wants to remodel, with no increase on footage.

(I don't like the increase in Permit fees either. It prevents basic upkeep on a home. Towns/cities know they can increase revenue by raising fees on anything. That's why we have $270 green righ turn citation. (you can only turn left on a green in certain situations. You need to wait for a green arrow.) If a county can't afford to fund employees, especialy nonessential personnel--fire them. We are not running a charity ward, as they like to say when asked about helping the homeless?)

As far as I'm concerned what I'm talking about doesn't have anything to do with remodeling, unless you're doing something janky.

Those sound like good things to you — some people prefer a world where they are free to do as they wish with the property they own, so long as it doesn’t cause a problem for neighbors (I.E. basic maintenance to avoid pests, overgrowth, etc.). I have the opposite take on the neighborhood you described: uniformity is boring, uninspiring, and depressing.

The word uniformity puts a negative spin on the sense of cohesion I'd like to see (like uniforms). What I'm talking about is how a group of friends adjust to each other. They show a sense of togetherness, self-awareness and interplay that leaves a sense of harmony. I'm not talking about a platoon of soldiers in uniform at attention.

It turns that I think it's really nice to be able to distinguish your house from your neighbors in a few words: "white colonial with a red roof, past the brick ranch and the blue Cape Cod".

Having to say "Number 12702" really isn't the same.

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