I write for and read a large number of home and garden magazines (referred to as “shelter” magazines).  These magazines always feature many beautiful homes, meticulously laid out with the oh so perfect throw tossed “casually” over the sofa arm, beckoning the reader to imagine sitting there.  Page after page of fabulous homes with usually a single shot of the exterior (unless it’s a garden piece).  What you usually don’t see is a neighborhood picture—a picture of the streetscape.  Why is this?  There’s an easy answer: Many neighborhoods suck.

This month’s Dwell magazine has a treatise by the editor that really struck a cord, he talks about how America is filled with what he calls “undesign”—buildings and areas no one cared enough about to think through.  Usually what determines design in America is money—the cheaper the better. This is why our country is filled with cheap, crappy looking strip malls and blank, soulless big box stores, and acre after acre of forgettable ticky tacky houses massed together without any relationship to each other (other than all being beige and the exact same house) or the larger neighborhood.  Americans fetishize the private home and ignore the surrounding area, but it’s not their fault—we’ve been given nothing to care about for the most part for the past 50 years.

Thankfully, this is changing, the neighborhood is getting attention from designers, urban planners, and architects—and there are plenty of examples where good design isn’t only for the millionaires—neighborhoods that provide housing at many different price points.  This is for the most part, thanks to the new urbanists, who have created a whole movement around creating places people can care about again.

There are a few magazines that have articles on neighborhoods, most notably Cottage Living, which has an article in almost every issue highlighting a great cottage neighborhood.  I’d say the neighborhood is back, but it never left—people have always wanted to care about their neighborhoods, they just haven’t had much to care about in new construction until recently.