There’s a house a few blocks away from ours, in the neighboring development, that displays magnificent seasonally themed lights and outdoor décor. Here it is for Halloween, late at night:

They have a corner lot, and the decorations span the whole street frontage. Every inch of the house and property are decked out, for every holiday. Not just Christmas and Halloween, but Easter. Memorial Day! It’s one of my favorite things about the neighborhood.

We take evening walks and if we go past this house, we’ll always stop and admire it. I can imagine being a kid and waiting with excitement to see what the next holiday is going to look like. It makes me feel like a kid.

A friend was visiting a few weeks ago and we took a walk by here, and he remarked that the lights were very bright. Does he ever turn them off? Wouldn’t that be disturbing to have those lights shining into your window while you’re trying to sleep? Does the HOA really allow this?

I guess they do. My own HOA is pretty permissive about holiday displays as well, even though this is one of the things you hear about a lot with regard to HOA controversies. You can’t tell me I can’t display a 10-foot skeleton on my lawn! It’s my property! (Although my HOA does regulate the color of backyard child play equipment. No son, you can’t have the blue and red swing set, we’re not allowed to have non-nature colors on our play equipment.)

But more broadly, this embodies what I’ve come to call the ideology of suburbia: a certain paranoid, anti-social tendency in suburbia itself, as I believe there is in driving. Living and getting around this way underlines our independence and individualism, but hides our interdependence. It makes us feel, and indeed it makes us, islands unto ourselves. A beautiful light show displayed for everybody becomes a elfish, inconsiderate nuisance. That’s perception, not reality.

Maybe this tendency makes sense to some degree—Charles Marohn calls it the “party analogy”: classical urbanism is a good party, where more people enhance the nature of the thing. Suburbia is a bad party—more people detract from the thing. In one sense, that serves as an explanation, but in another sense it proves the point.

I wrote about this mental transformation of vitality and amenities into nuisance a little bit in a long essay here:

There is an assumption, abstracted from these old memories and now living apart from them, that any increase in density, or even an increase in amenities, will bring with it urban problems….

And so the other day, my wife and I were in Reston Town Center, during one of the development’s summer weekend pedestrian days: closed streets, vendors, music, games, beer and wine on a limited network of streets. A festival atmosphere. We saw a portable trailer hosting a trendy ax-throwing game (as it happens, my hometown has also hosted pop-up ax throwing near its microbrewery). We saw a young mother with a glass of rosé shepherding her daughter along; we saw a DJ playing loud music and a woman performing with a violin; we heard the sharp thuds of axes hitting the plywood backing. Young couples, teens, children, some older folks: everyone.

It felt so energetic, yet family-friendly; like such a reprieve from the boredom, isolation, and physical distance of typical suburbia. Seeing stuff like this makes me more excited to be young and autonomous, but at the same time more excited to have kids. It’s a hint of what can be. Through a glass darkly.

But I can imagine so many people taking all of this in and shaking their heads. This feels like the city.

I’ve come to see subdivisions and strip malls as quite bare and bereft when built and inhabited exactly as intended. It’s the human touch that makes them feel lived in—that makes them real places.

Block after block of the same four or five model homes, and then suddenly, a sea of colorful light. I hope those folks never move.

Related Reading:

The Spider Skeleton

Benches For Whom?

What a Strip Mall Can Be

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