I just read something to the effect that the dream of owning your own home with a white picket fence is gone. It sure is. Around here it’s at least a seven foot stockade fence. I’ve never seen anyone tear down a stockade fence to install a white picket fence but I’ve seen the reverse plenty of times.
IMO that tells you a lot about life in the United States today.
I thought the pornographic film industry was in LA, not Sauganash.
When we moved here four foot fences were the norm. Our backyard had a five foot fence on two sides, the house on another side, and a chainlink fence between us and our neighbors on the north. Since then (with permission) we took out the chainlink and replaced it with a fence identical to the one we had on two sides. But we still have a five foot fence.
As each house has turned over, the new owners have routinely taken out whatever fences were there and replaced them with six foot stockade fences. For privacy? They can’t possibly need more privacy than the Ecuadoran allergist smuggling cocaine who lived next door when we moved in. He had a white picket fence.
“He had a white picket fence.”
Deception.
We’ve got the same four foot chain link fences we had when I was a kid, and pretty much so does everyone else. There are a few with no fences or tall wooden fences, but new fences imply money to spend, and we don’t have that.
Wait! Actually we have six foot tall wooden fences along the front of the BACK yard. That largely prevents people from looking directly into each other’s bedroom windows at unexpected times however. But even that is a little uncommon. These homes were built from the late Fifties into the mid-Sixties, and people were a lot more open with each other then. Mostly the fences were for restraining VERY small children and dogs.
What we have in abundance now hat we didn’t have at all when I was young are motion sensor lights on the outside of many, maybe most, houses.