Here in NYC its they tyranny of pavement and lust of patios. Meanwhile my yard grows wild and is a sanctuary for wildlife. No water pools because it goes right into the ground. Neighbors complain I have a shit hole back yard and my reply is "huh. all I see is nature." Fuck them.
I grew up on the outskirts of Manchester, NH where a Polish farmer subdivided part of his field and sold it to mostly Polish and French Canadian families. They built a house in 1973 and didn't do any more earthmoving than they had to do to put in the foundation.
By 1980 they built route 93 bypassing the downtown and built the mall, all the department stores were gone in a few years. By '87 or so they built a huge Arizona style subdivision in the field behind my house, then circa '00 an even larger subdivision across Wellington Rd.
When they built the new subdivisions they used bulldozers to remove the topsoil and they sold it. They rolled in fresh new green sod that looked great when they were selling the houses but in six months the lawns were terribly brown and could only be revived by heavy application of chemicals and water.
Half of our neighbors wondered what we did to get our lawn looking so good, the other half were mad at us for harboring dandilions. The '00 subdivision charged new homeowners for a "landscaper's special" which was a few yew trees, they failed to remove the trees from the burlap bags so they were all dead in two years.
