Suburban Legend

This text is excerpted from the chapter “Earth” in Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire (Angel City Press, 2025) by D. J. Waldie.

They’re called 2-by-4s, only they aren’t. The true 2-by-4 became—a fraction of an inch by a fraction of an inch—today’s notional 2-by-4. It’s actually 1.5 inches by 3.5 inches, 34 percent less in volume. Those in the wood trade call the difference between lumber then and lumber now “selling air.”

Two-by-four studs are the vertical members of a wood frame wall. A wall’s studs, mud sills, fire stops, and plates can be nailed up by just two or three framers. It doesn’t take very long. Finished, the wall is hollow, a skin of stucco and drywall over a skeleton of wood. It’s a grid of absences. Electrical conduits weave through the empty spaces between the studs like lianas in a dark jungle. This sort of “light stick framing” built the tract houses in Los Angeles.

This way of building a wall evolved from “balloon” frame construction, quick to build but dangerous in a fire, the long, vertical voids between the studs like so many flues carrying flames to the rafters, eventually collapsing the roof and attic spaces into the rooms below. Fire stops between pairs of studs break up the empty space today, slowing the reach of fire.

Exterior walls—an inch or so of stucco over chicken wire and tar paper—are permeated, too. Voices pass through them, an indistinct murmur sometimes resolved into angry insults, sometimes into laughter, although most of the houses on the long suburban blocks of Los Angeles keep silent.

The characteristic landscape of Los Angeles is a lawn: a fenceless, thirsty commons mandated by your home owners’ association. The lawn is framed by driveways and that strip of ambiguous land between the sidewalk and the curb. Possession of a lawn acknowledges limitations. It will grow out of control, welcome weeds, decline to be green. Its habits demand habits from you. Part of a suburban life is shaped by landscaping.

Ted Steinberg, author of American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (2006), wonders why drought-rattled Angelenos would want a lawn. “Every square foot of … turfgrass requires 28 gallons of water, roughly speaking, per year. Every square foot. But that’s for the coastal environment. If you move inland to a more arid part of California, that number increases to 37 gallons of water.” By a common estimate, 40 to 60 percent of household water rains down on the lawns of Los Angeles.

A lawn is contested ground. Why it’s there, as a threshold to domesticity, can be explained as a hunger for cultivated order or as conspicuous waste. A lawn is someone’s moral sign. It’s also—and wonderfully—a gift to the street.

The typical Los Angeles tract house—so lightly built that it likely wouldn’t kill you if it collapsed in an earthquake—doesn’t have one.

They’re a suburb’s foundational choice: to have or to have not. Not preserves the illusion that home is a haven indifferent to what’s beyond the lawn. No sidewalk means no skateboarders, no casual strollers, fewer strangers at the door. Sidewalks mean chalked hopscotch grids, someone walking their dog, an unwanted flyer slipped into the lattice of the screen door.

“The sidewalk is a subversive space,” argues Claire Stanford, writing for LENS magazine. “While only those with access to cars and driver’s licenses are welcome on the street, anyone is allowed on the sidewalk. The sidewalk is free … it bears no entrance fee up-front, not even a bus ticket or a gallon of gas.” The liberties of a sidewalk are potent. When you step off your porch, the sidewalk might take you miles away.

Sidewalks carry other risks. Over time, tree roots heave sidewalks into hazards. You have to pay attention to what’s at your feet. You’re in public on a sidewalk. The bike rider gains on you from behind. The concrete path is only four feet wide. Stay at the right edge. It’s a courtesy you’ll give to the uncaring cyclist who’s now right behind you.

Also called cul-de-sacs. Bag-ended streets are common in suburban Los Angeles. An entire tract can be a tangle of them. Their inwardness is deliberate, a reaction against the too-permeable grid that was a spectacle of democracy in 1950. In a tract of cul-de-sacs, the single entrance to the tract is also the only exit. It can be barricaded by a gate and a tasteful kiosk with an armed guard inside.

The wary security of a cul-de-sac neighborhood produces cul-de-sac kids imprisoned among streets that lead nowhere. “Age 3 through 8, it’s great. Beyond there, you’re a captive,” Jeff Speck, coauthor of Suburban Nation (2000), told the Los Angeles Times.

All the streets in a new cul-de-sac neighborhood have to be named, since only one of them connects to an older grid of named streets. There are rules for names in Los Angeles County. No name longer than eighteen letters and spaces. No name too similar to another street in the same fire service area. Upbeat names connected to landscape features are popular—Arbordale, Green Meadow, Birchbrook, Lakeview. These landscapes are never actually there.

Consider furniture, particularly furniture you complete by being on it (dining room chairs) or in it (armchairs). An empty chair suggests a seated figure, anticipating its presence. Houses haunt themselves.

Every house is carnal, makes a place for bodies, imagines a hand reaching out to a doorknob, a woman standing undecided before turning it, her lover unaware within, the life they could have together until they grow old, dust later undisturbed on the windowsill, and now a moving van in the driveway. As the key is set in the lock by new owners for the first time, as the front door sweeps inward, the empty house conceives whole lives.

The suburban yard has become an icon of unnatural nature, of nature kept at bay with pesticides and herbicides, Weedwackers, and ride-on mowers. But the yard isn’t exempt from nature. It’s in nature. Migrating geese pass over it. Spiders parachuting on silk threads drift through it. There are small lives in the grass, enmeshed in cycles of photosynthesis and respiration, of growth and decay. A yard is a web of relationships and a zone for contacts near and globally. A coyote pauses at the end of the street. Possums, raccoons, and deer dispute the abstraction of a well-tended lawn. A hawk perches in the tree the developers of the tract planted years before. Songbirds accompany the pedestrian, either in person or as a fugue of their calls interleaving overhead. Bees rummage among the tiny white flowers of the pepper trees.

In the first decades of the mass-produced suburbs of Los Angeles, nearly every room had a door. A shut door is a barrier, a coconspirator, a declaration of autonomy. Because most rooms could be shut up, many doors made those houses less expensive to heat. Sometimes, a metaphor of separation is only economy. Houses have fewer doors today. Interiors look even bigger when nearly all rooms freely open into each other.

An open-plan house is no place for hide-and-seek. Where in that vigilant house is there a door behind which you might be alone and daydream?

There are discarded figures in the landscape of Los Angeles, settling the in-between spaces. The driver in an SUV glimpses a tent pitched next to the strip mall. Someone inside is wrapped in a blanket. And then there are more tents, more sleepers. The SUV driver feels feet slipping on a precarious, middle-class rung.

Life in the suburbs was once about having enough (despite the claim that suburban lives were about wanting too much). For want of enough, there are at least forty thousand sleepers every night on the sidewalks of Los Angeles.

Even the housed are too often homeless. As Danny Sillada writes in his 2021 essay “Homelessness of the Soul in the Digital World,” “I want to go home, but lamentably, I don’t know where home is anymore.”

Once on deep, old-fashion porches, families sat, a pitcher of lemonade on a table next to rocking chairs. Sweethearts courted there, screened by the blooming wisteria. Porches shrank in the eras of the bungalow, the ranch house, and the midcentury post-and-beam until the garage-forward tract house of 1970s Los Angeles reduced the porch to a platform hardly big enough for a welcome mat. When the remodeling of an older house swallows up its porch, something is lost. Prospective buyers stand there and sense a phantom limb.