Trees are a luxury, growing something like that takes time. I hope they really have a good reason for doing what they did.
And a public good. They keep things cooler when it’s really hot out, keep things warmer when it’s really cool out, mildly improve air quality, reduces noise pollution, provide measurable mental health benefits, and so on.
Around here removing big trees is illegal, on your property or not. I’m a fan.
Open soil instead of pavement also helps reduce flooding during heavy rainfall since the ground absorbs water instead of just making it run off to somewhere else.
At risk of doxxing yourself, can you expand on where you live? Just curious of the most general area. I love that law!
Toronto, and the law I’m referring to is a city bylaw.
The reason is probably “raking is work.” I see this shit all the time in Florida, where we really need more shade trees.
Do not understand people who rake. Do the trees in the forest need their leaves raked? Then why do it?
Considering they also took out the shrubs I’m betting not, though that tree closest to the house the roots may have been affecting the foundation I guess.
It legit looks like half of the weed dispensaries in my city. Who tf would actually do that to their home tho
I feel like the car in the picture is important context. I’m thinking that the home was turned into a business, and the pavement is for parking
Ah yes, the rare parking without any car access.
Wow, it’s even worse than I imagined on the inside. Not one ounce of good taste.
But yeah, none of that pavement is accessible to cars except for the ramp where the range is parked.
Yeah but the concrete is elevated. I don’t see how. Car can get up it.
Except there’s not way to get a car up there.
To the right of the bottom picture a sign(guessing the business) has been cropped out of view.
I was just thinking who needs this much parking space.
The infuriation is not mild :(
Right? I feel like this warrants criminal charges
why? people have the right to do what they want with their property.
if you don’t believe that, they join a HOA and setup their bullshit regulations that require your lawn to be perfect and green or you get fined hundreds of dollars.
HOAs can be absolutely awful, with power tripping board members and management companies that steal collected funds. But if you want to live in a manicured, upscale, gentrified suburb that’s the best way to get ahead of crappification, salvage grade cars on blocks in the yard, appliances on the porch and meth houses.
Me, I’d rather a large buffer of land between me and my neighbors. I do realize those with commuter jobs can’t practically get tens of acres to live on, however.
personally i like seeing salvage cars in someones’ yard next to a home that is upscaled mcmansion.
that’s why i live in the city. variety and no bullshit regulations about how your house has to look.
i also feel i have no right to judge or condemn anyone else’s aesthetic choices with their property. personally i removed all my lawn bullshit and i put in low/zero maintenance flowers and shrubs and i let it grow wild. my neighbors fucking hate me, but they are miserable lawn worshiping types who make passive aggressive comments out of ‘neighborly concern’ because they think I’m a meth-head for not walking a manicured water-wasting soul-sucking lawn. I also drive a regular $10K car and not a $60,000 SUV, which also pisses them off.
all better
Just steal the image and put the source in the body text. That way you’re not redirecting everyone to reddit. Sort of defeats the purpose of the protests.
It’s like they heard lawns were bad for the environment, but stopped listening at the part about replacing it with native plants.
Yes, I feel like a good idea was taken in a very strange direction here.
It should actually be an offence for someone to do this. That change from garden to hard standing will cause issues with any drains and probably cause flooding.
Why don’t they like trees?
Capitalism has drained their soul. They don’t think artistically. They don’t think about nature. They don’t see beauty. Their art is corporate art.
Capitalism is when ugly house
I’m disabled and can’t really do hard work any more, we are planning on large rock gardens and planter boxes to replace a grass lawn.
Chad Soviet architecture enjoyer
Man I don’t know, that’s weird. Maybe they just prefer it this way? Some people don’t like the cottage/nature kind of aesthetic. I think their house is ugly as sin but it’s just a matter of personal taste.
Thats okay, but then why buy a cottag-y in nature house and then change it instead of buying something more fitting from the get go.
Even if the house was a good bargain, I cannot imagine the added cost of tearing out all those trees, paving the front yard, and remodeling/updating the interior would be cheaper than just buying a house that was already like that.
It’s been ruined.
I would have left the trees alone, but removed the grass and covered it with small black and grey stones. That way the trees would still look nice, and the rain water can still pass through the rocks and prevent flooding, unlike this mess. This looks like a business now, it’s not a home anymore.
pass through the rocks and prevent flooding
Yah, that doesn’t work that way. Water needs to get pulled into plants or water channels created by dead plant root systems, or it just runs off. This is why deserts have flash floods.
Never understood homes that pave/block out all the greenery; makes the home depressing af all for saving some 30min of upkeep per week.
A lot of it is people misunderstanding the logic of “maintaining a lawn is horrible for the environment”. They think that, because they won’t be wasting thousands of gallons of water a month on their lawn that they should pave over it.
Which is a nice intent but mostly shows a misunderstanding of how grass/lawns (should) work. in moist climates you generally don’t actually need to water anything. You might have more weeds or some patchy grass, but natural rain will keep everything alive. And in more arid climates: you just don’t get Kentucky Bluegrass and instead get grass/clover/whatever seeds that make sense for your climate. Those generally need a bit of water to get started and then are fine until the end of time. They might not look like Leave it to Beaver’s yard, but you have roots to prevent soil erosion and it still looks pretty nice.
Not to mention that portland cement has severe environmental impacts of its own.
there’s a common misunderstanding in texas, as well, about cedar trees.
a while back, a ranch owner with ALOT of land, who was considered a great steward of trees, was interviewed for an article and stated that new cedars used too much water and that he tears them all out of areas where he wants to maintain a forest of alternate trees (i.e. oak, elm, whatever, idk)
everyone took that to mean tear out all cedar trees whether there was a forest of other trees or not, no matter how much land you have. they completely overlooked the qualifiers to practice this type of land management. (obviously owning cows are a different story, but almost none of these people own cows)
a ridiculous amount of land in Central Texas (esp the hill country) now is barren save the 1 or 2 odd scraggly oak trees here and there. anytime someone buys land (even a couple of acres) the first thing they do is clear cut the damn place, causing unnecessary erosion, bringing in uneeded heat, and in general, killing the ecosystems that made that area special in the first place.
You don’t even need that. Personally a overgrown garden looks better than no garden.
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I mean I hate lawns as much as the next person, but I don’t think the solution is to salt the earth and cover it in concrete.
I wish earth could look like one big coal mine. I’m a dwarf at heart.
Who hates lawns? 🤔
I do. I’m not sure how much of an issue it is in other countries, but most (if not all) lawn grasses grown in the States are actually non-native (yes, even “Kentucky Bluegrass”, which is actually native to Europe). I wouldn’t really mind lawns as much if it was normal to use native ground cover.
Probably the majority of slrpnk.net lemmy
Lots of people, including myself. There are even “nolawn” communities here and on reddit. The reddit one is very active. Lawns, at least in the US, are practically an ecological wasteland. They use non-native grasses, typically lots of fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides which are terrible for the local pollinator populations (save the bees!), and removing trees and shrubbery in order to have a manicured lawn reduces habitat for birds, bats, and various, essential other species.
It is much better to use native plants in your yard.
I personally don’t like it, but I respect their right to do whatever the fuck they want with their property. If they want a fugly house, then that’s their right.
Honestly, no. At least where I live, they’re finally starting to do something against gravel gardens. They are illegal here (have been for decades but no-one did anything against it) and they’re absolutely terrible for the environment and destroying green space (additionally to them being very bad for bees and further sealing the floor which is awful when any flood happens). Luckily people shouldn’t be able to do absolutely everything they want if it hurts everyone so much.
How do you feel about HOAs?
I’m not living in the US. As far as I know, it’s something very ridiculous that every house needs to look absolutely the same (I feel the freedom). And no, what I wrote isn’t “the same”, mandating how every garden needs to look exactly the same is something entirely different to fighting against very specific “garden” styles that combat the environment and are bad for the infrastructure (see floods). I’m fine with people having their garden however they want and doing stuff, but it needs to be in certain boundaries, e.g. that you aren’t allowed to seal all ground which is terrible for bees, the environment in its wholeness and dangerous during floods.
If there are some rare edge cases where many things depend on it and there are very good reasons to set a certain boundary but otherwise leave the freedom to do the own garden and house how they want, that’s something different to just mandating that there is no possibility to choose anything about it’s looks and destroy all creativity and uniqueness.
Got it. HOAs get bad press for requiring every house to look the same, but the basic function they serve also includes preventing stuff like the above. How far they go depends on the HOA, but one that just prevents egregious stuff like the above isn’t fundamentally different from one that requires near uniformity.
I just ask because lots of people hate HOAs, but this is one big reason they exist.
I think it’s the difference between principles and practices, and ultimately, the way people become small minded and ruin everything…
They’re good in principle, but people get controlling, or agendas develop, etc. Not sure how one balances that properly. I guess it’s partly exacerbated by the cultural extreme that Americans take freedom to (I’m not from the dis-US). Maybe the neighborhood as a committee would work better than one or two power couples?
I can certainly agree with that.
Maybe the neighborhood as a committee would work better than one or two power couples? That just means being involved in the HOA, which would certainly help curb many problems, but its work, and understandably, most people don’t want to do that.
I suppose you could build into the charter limitations which can’t be exceeded without a certain percentage of the entire HOA agreeing? Not sure.
they exist to preserve property values
Gravel gardens seal the ground? I thought it was just gravel on top of dirt.
I would prefer housing authorities don’t require manicured grass lawns. They are so expensive to keep up and repair, especially since many don’t use native grass species so they need watering in the summer if you don’t want them to go brown.
I think it depends on where the yard is. A luscious green garden of non-native plants is a waste of water in desert areas. With the kinds of droughts that are becoming more common, replacing yards with rocks and low-water native plants is beneficial. And to be honest, even in areas that aren’t in a drought, manicured lawns don’t do much for the environment because they get loaded with pesticides and fertilizers to keep them as green and homogenous as possible. No flowers, no weeds, no bugs, no seeds, no diversity.
Yeah I agree but man I personally would have some bushes in front of those windows but I walk around naked.
Just before the previous owners of my house decided to put the house on the market they painted all wood inside (stairs, doors, door frames, window frames, skirting) pitch black.
Yes thanks, I enjoy living in a cave. Removing, sanding and painting all that will take me 100s of hours.
Oh, and it was done with the cheapest paint possible while painting over all hinges, locks and sometimes windows.
Aah yes, the landlord special.
A few years back I would have asked why you bought it. But in this market I get it.
now its a gulag
