A crazy thing happened when I moved from the big city to a house in the suburbs a few years ago. I liked it!
I didn’t just like it in the sense that I liked having enough space for my children and their stuff. That’s a plus, but not what I’m talking about here. I also didn’t really end up caring that my wife and I had moved to a purportedly trendy town in New Jersey where a lot of “creative class” workers live. Almost none of the people we actually meet here are in the media or entertainment business, and the food scene is not a strong one. (You can barely order delivery after 8 p.m. Ridiculous!) Whatever benefits there may be of living around a slightly higher concentration of documentary filmmakers than other people do, I don’t think they’re determining much about my quality of life, although I’m sure all the filmmakers are nice people, and I enjoy seeing everyone’s different tattoos at the pool.
The unexpected thing that I liked, rather, was the physical responsibility of having a house and a yard.
I was not a handy person; I didn’t know anything about home or yard maintenance except for having mowed lawns as a kid. I was also conditioned to view the suburban home—and particularly its lawn—with skepticism and even contempt. The cultural and political literature is nearly unanimous on this front. The headline of a 2021 Vox story about the effects of zoning rules that favor single-family homes—effects which historically include racial segregation and the locking-in of wealth inequality—asserts that simply owning a home could, itself, “be turning you into a bad person.” One housing historian interviewed in Jacobin this April told the leftist publication that she has “always been skeptical of this idea that homeownership was so important and innate in Americans” and that “people in the housing industry are very good at propagandizing the idea that owned homes are wonderful.” It is commonly said, as demographic theorist Richard Florida does in this column for Bloomberg, that the behavior of any homeowner is most easily understood as the selfish compulsion to “protect the value of their investment.”
As for the lawn itself, whew. Grass yards are said to be terrible for the environment and especially problematic as a matter of zoning, but that’s only the most tangible of their faults. If a suburban lawn appears in a movie, you can be sure it’s to show that the character responsible for it is struggling under the weight of conformity—or, even worse, not struggling under it. Academic histories of the lawn treat its existence in North America as an imperialist pathology, the obsession of manic social climbers who have essentially been tricked by the lawn-care industry and its Mad Men–era advertisements into believing that the quality of their grass and the frequency with which it’s mowed are paramount expressions of wealth and social status. Lawn keeping is an unnatural impulse that “had to be taught” to Americans by the “arbiters of taste,” one historian has written. Another scholar (in a review of the first one’s book) describes the lawn as a consequence of “the particularly American habit of using huge moats of open space to establish status and to solve problems of adjacency and mix,” which is to say that wealthier and whiter Americans essentially invented yards to avoid being adjacent to, or mixed in with, poorer and less white ones.
Out here, four years later, when I finish mowing my lawn and stop to wipe the sweat off my forehead with the bottom of my shirt, and look at what I’ve done with satisfaction, I sometimes have to wonder what all these people are talking about.
I can’t be the only one. Two-thirds of United States homes are occupied by people who own them (or are paying off a loan in order to be able to own them). Both the numbers and the eyeball evidence indicate that people of all political orientations and racial backgrounds, in both red and blue states, continue to seek ownership of homes and yards, and to take an interest in maintaining them, despite their increasing unaffordability and the various problems associated with them.
Could it be that each of these people is obsessed with status hierarchy and the urge to acquire and cultivate an “investment”? Was the country really propagandized permanently by Madison Avenue campaigns that took place 70 or more years ago? Sure, maybe, I guess—or maybe the kinds of people who aspire to own their own home and mow their own lawn for less sinister reasons are disproportionately underrepresented in the national press and the academy, and there are reasons to take part in a home’s occupation and upkeep that are, as a consequence, relatively underdiscussed and underappreciated.
Some of the groundwork for understanding why millions of Americans still want to work around the house and on the lawn was laid by the writer Matthew Crawford in his 2006 essay “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” which he expanded into a 2010 book. Crawford, who has worked as both an academic and a motorcycle mechanic and electrician, observed persuasively that a great deal of what is considered “manual” labor—like, say, being able to picture the inside of a motorcycle engine in order to figure out what’s wrong with it based on a sound it’s making, then figuring how to fix it without breaking it further—actually requires more knowledge and mental dexterity than socially prestigious, white-collar “knowledge work.”
Part of Crawford’s purpose was to make a point about the organization of our society and its education system, but he also wanted to articulate why making and fixing things has intrinsic value to the individual. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” he wrote. “They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth.” Continues Crawford: “The craftsman’s habitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the distinction between the Right Way and the Wrong Way. However narrow in its application, this is a rare appearance in contemporary life—a disinterested, articulable, and publicly affirmable idea of the good.”
Similar themes were investigated by professors Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel in a 2016 article, “Hail to the Maintainers,” and a subsequent book called The Innovation Delusion, in which they make a case that we should worry less about making or obtaining new products and pay more attention (in big and small ways) to the practice of keeping things running. To try to keep something in working order, Russell and Vinsel observe, is to think about its usefulness, and the act of preserving something is a statement about what is worth preserving. (Reached by email, Russell told me he “LOVES” mowing his lawn—all caps—and keeps photos documenting his first mowing of the year in each successive spring season.)
Taking care of your lawn is a kind of entry-level way into this manner of interacting with the world. There is a right way to do it, and while it may not take immense skill, it takes attention to detail and orderly thinking. You mow the lawn; it smells nice and looks sharp. Then you clear the garden beds of weeds and stray grass, then trim the edges between the grass and the gardens and the sidewalk. When you’re finished, you’ve spent some time interacting with the physical world, a relatively rare state of consciousness for some of us. A small problem has been resolved. You have maintained the place where you live.
Nice job! The feeling is a good one to have among the ambiguities, anxieties, and intangible abstractions of life that we have far less control over: news events, the economy, our status with our employers, credit card debt, inscrutable health insurance denial letters, new fees for streaming services we didn’t ask for, the temptations of idle scrolling, restaurants that want you to order with a QR code instead of a menu—all that kind of alienating stuff.
But it’s not just a matter of personal therapy. Your yard is part of your community. One of the country’s original suburban planners, Frederick Law Olmsted, wanted yards to feel interconnected, like a park that stretched indefinitely around individual homes. And the importance of cultivating a front yard in particular has become a subject of some attention in political philosophy circles in recent years—see this site called Front Porch Republic or this essay in the New Atlantis (which originally published Crawford’s shop-class piece) by Clare Coffey about how to make friends—as an antidote to the oft-discussed decline of both organized and informal socializing in modern America.
These writers make the point that someone who takes care of a front yard or porch is going to interact more with neighbors who are taking care of their yards, walking a dog, jogging, watching children, or otherwise engaging in outdoor activity. These small moments of interaction can lead to both impromptu hangouts and larger-scale cohesion. (Backyards work for this, too, when the weather is nice and enough people are using them.) It’s a simple but useful point, and it calls into question how someone could conclude that Americans had to be propagandized into enjoying a stretch of green grass, or that the main function of such a thing could be the weaponized separation of people from one another. Humans have always wanted to gather on cultivated expanses of lawn: village commons, university quads, bandstands, baseball fields. By general agreement, the best thing in New York City, the most urban place in the United States, is Olmsted’s big lawn.
What about the environmental and economic problems mentioned earlier—overuse of water, toxic fertilizers, NIMBYism, segregation? Their correlation with yard and home maintenance doesn’t have to be destiny. You don’t have to water your lawn, spray it with weed killer, or use a gas-powered mower on it every four days in order to achieve any of the goals discussed above. (I share a battery-powered mower with two neighbors. Social bonds!) You don’t even have to have a grass lawn—a wildflower garden or desert landscape will require similar attention and serve similar purposes.
Nor must the existence of single-family homes preclude the existence of social housing, “missing middle” multifamily development, or programs that could make homeownership—and the passing on of generational wealth in a way that doesn’t favor affluent whites—more attainable. The opposition to these things, I think, tends to be motivated more by misguided beliefs about local character than iron laws of economics and “property value.” (We moved onto a street that is near a stretch of multifamily housing by happenstance, not because of an intention to make a political statement, but with experience I’m happy to make one: It’s fine.) Whatever the particular combination of markets and subsidies required to achieve it, wanting to have a stake in one’s community—and contribute to the future well-being of one’s children—is probably not a motivation that we should, or could, eradicate.
Ultimately, though, I think there’s something even bigger than peace of mind or community- and family-building at stake when one is taking care of a house or yard. In doing so—even if you’re just managing the simple things or learning enough to call a professional—you gain a sense of where you are and how you relate to the rest of the world. You learn where your water line and gas line travel between the basement and the larger pipes in the street that deliver the necessities of existence, how a sump pump keeps the basement dry, and what it actually means to “raise” an entire house to fix a sill plate. You learn what happens when you leave a fireplace damper open (a squirrel climbs in and lives in your house for four days when you’re in California, causing thousands of dollars in damage). You learn a LOT about what happens when you put different kinds of screws into the different things that walls are made out of. (There’s an incredible amount of knowledge to be discovered in the accidental misuse of a screwdriver.) You learn what the roots of different plants look like and which ones are most annoying. If you don’t have a sprinkler system, you learn where you don’t have to mow because the walls of your house block the sun for most of the day.
In sum, in what is sort of the opposite of a Walden-like back-to-nature experience, you find out how people actually live, at the intersection of the organic sphere and the human one, in your own particular time and place. That place might be an unusual one—it might even be New Jersey. But it’s you, and it’s somewhere, and there’s something to be said for knowing what that means.
