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JOHN BROWN is the editor of theslowhome.com and the founder of the Slow Home Movement. He is a registered architect, real estate broker and Professor of Architecture at the University of Calgary.
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Treeless Towns Leave Residents Exposed
May 28, 2008
By David A. Fahrenthold From the Washington Post
The naked suburb.
It has houses, yards and roads, but no large trees to shade them, no oaks to catch the rain. This place may even have a woodsy name -- it may, in fact, sound like a sylvan glade where elves dwell -- but its real-life trees are either scrawny or nonexistent. It looks like houses on a Monopoly square.
Last week, Virginia approved a law aimed at limiting these leaf-deprived developments. It would force developers to preserve old trees as they build new neighborhoods.
But for some people -- and, in an environmental sense, for all of us -- it's already too late.
"It's pretty barren. You just really see the houses and the concrete," said Teresa Veno, who lives in a four-year-old section of Ashley Ridge, a neighborhood in western Prince William County, where she said large trees are scarce.
"My daughter's 4," Veno said, "and I'm not sure she'd recognize a squirrel if she saw one." Read the rest of the article.
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We believe that our homes and neighborhoods should be healthy, vibrant places that uplift the spirit and gracefully fit our needs. We call for an end to poor construction, bad design, misleading marketing, unfair lending practices and environmental neglect in the housing industry. We acknowledge our collective responsibility to create CLOSE, SIMPLE, LIGHT places to live that leave a positive legacy for future generations.
SLOW HOME is an international movement devoted to bringing good design into real life. It takes its name from the slow food movement which arose as a reaction to the processed food industry. The sprawl of cookie cutter housing that surrounds us is like fast food - standardized, homogenous, and wasteful. It contributes to a too fast life that is bad for us, our cities, and the environment. In the same way that slow food raises awareness of the food we eat and how these choices affect our lives, Slow Home provides design focused information to empower each of us to take more control of our homes and improve the quality of where and how we live.
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