Some of you know that we are moving to Greensboro NC - bought a great old house built in 1890 - and are trying to sell our own house. We had our first showing yesterday, and while the couple loved it, they opted to buy a smaller house with less charm and fewer features that cost $10K more because it was in a subdivision.
Now, the irony is that we chose to buy this house because it was NOT in a subdivision! There are 10 houses on the street, across from an apartment complex. There's no homeowner's association, we don't have a name, it's just...10 houses. Cute ones, at that, with woods in the back yards, but literally walking distance from a supermarket, Target, cineplex, etc.
To each their own, I suppose, but I've always been baffled why anyone would want to live in a subdivision. When I wrote out a list of pros and cons, everything that was a "pro" for most people (uniformity, heterogeneity, predictability, quiet neighborhood) was a "con" for me. The things I love about our neighborhood are
1. it's close to everything so we don't have to drive as much,
2. there aren't any covenances so if we want to paint our mailbox purple with gold swirls....er, hypothetically speaking, of course...or hang Tibetan prayer flags from the porch, nobody gives a crap;
3. on any given day we can see people walking by on the sidewalk who hail from Guatemala, India, Korea, Mexico, Duke
- we have the best ethnic food around here;
4. REAL COMMUNITY! Our neighbors are different from us in a lot of ways and are real friends - not people who have coffee with us and then turn us in to the homeowner's association for not mowing our grass. We all watch out for the older couple that lives a few doors down; we sit on the porch with the lesbians with 3 dogs and trade dog biscuit recipes; we go out to dinner every Friday night with 3 other people who live on the street.
From our perspective, living in a subdivision means hanging out with people who are exactly like you and live in houses that look exactly like yours and drive family cars to the grocery store a few miles away. How dull. Are we missing something? Part of me wants to say "how can we market our house to people who want to live in a subdivision" but the rest of me says screw em - let them go live in cookie-cutterland, I'd rather not bother to appeal to the masses and instead sell the house to someone who appreciates the neighborhood and will be happy here.
So, if you're a subdivision-dweller, or aspire to be, can you explain the appeal to me?