Little boxes made of ticky tacky

Little boxes all the same

My neighborhood borders on the sprawl that has filled in Missoula’s less desirable spaces, like next to the freeway and along the railroad tracks. I live near both, in the somewhat grungy, keeping-it-real Northside. The Northside Proper is old, and it doesn’t apologize. 

But some edges of the grunge are polishing themselves by rubbing up against newer residential spaces. There’s one of these at the end of my street, and y’all, it is so weird. If I walk to the end of my long block and cross Scott Street, I’m in it. 

This whole neighborhood has the feel of a candy aisle in your local gas station market. Rows and rows of chocolate bars that look different on the outside, with their colorful wrappers and logos, but all about the same size and weight, nestled in boxes the same height and depth, arranged uniformly along each shelf.

Here it is! The weird street! The eye doesn’t notice, until it does, the matching horizontal white trim across the fronts, and the porches on every house.

The backs of the lots are absolutely identical: garages the same size and shape all the way down the line. On the front side, the houses at first appear to differ from each other. Gables, dormers, and eaves poke and point this way and that, giving the impression of varied architecture. But there’s something strange about them as a group; for example, all have a nice front porch with a couple of polite chairs but I am certain that nobody sits in them. Many have a cutesy sign out front: “Welcome!” leans against the porch wall, faux-casual. “The Delaneys, est. 2017” hangs over a doorbell. It looks staged, like the neighborhood in The Truman Show.¹ All the steps are set the same distance back from the sidewalk, and all the houses are uniformly spaced, close together. I’ve never seen anyone outside.²

So not long ago I was walking over there, and it was March so it was dark when I was out at 7:00 pm. Of course I looked into the innards of these houses whenever not shuttered down against prying eyes. After a short while, I began to realize that it didn’t matter which house I stood in front of: as long as I could peer through the front window, I saw into the kitchen, and all the kitchens were identical. I initially noticed the spatial repetition because the fridge doors were invariably covered in magnets and shit, but it was fact: the refrigerator hunkered in the same spot in every scene. These houses have matching floor plans, but sport varied fronts to fool the viewer into thinking they’re heterogeneous. They’re not.

Impossible not to think of Camazotz from A Wrinkle in Time

Each time I walk through that neighborhood I am reminded of the short story “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury. In his futuristic dystopias he liked to include two things: humans hypnotized by TVs, and the loner who enjoys sauntering at night.³ Clarisse was that character in Fahrenheit 451. “The Pedestrian” opens like this:

To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o'clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do.

The theme of this story is to demonstrate what happens when a person chooses to spend time thinking, rather than being told what to think night after night by the TV, while slack-jawing on a sofa. It’s not a good outcome for the thinker.

Many dystopian sci-fi works cover this concept, a world in which humans can no longer think for themselves. You’ve got Bradbury and L’Engle, above; classics by Orwell and Huxley; think about the films I, Robot, The Matrix, Wall-E, and the darker Minority Report and then, one of my all-time favorite and most terrifying books about this which I referenced in another newsletter, Feed by MT Anderson. We’re not exactly there, I don’t think, but…a more plastic existence is certainly in the headlights.

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I get that it’s easier, more efficient, and more profitable to build a housing development using a small number of floor plans. Maybe living in a cute little neighborhood where everyone has agreed to sort of match each other is a thing some people seek out. Truly I’m not sure where I want to live. Currently I’m in a townhouse which is worse by far than these places, in that I share walls with my neighbors and there is zero yard, and not even a second exit in case the front door is on fire. I’d like a single floor so I can’t fall down the stairs, which has happened, and some space for a bird feeder that doesn’t hang off my own back wall. Some of those little houses have all that.

But there’s something weirdly disempowering about opting to live in a place that is so engineered. Give me a rambling cabin with an addition off the side and a pond in the back yard out by Cyr. Or a tiny house in the Flint Creek valley near Philipsburg - anything that isn’t a planned development reminiscent of the Levittowns of the past. Maybe even a little place in the hills above Missoula.

Levittown: Suburbs built post-WWII were planned out like this and often featured identical homes.

It’s hard, because firstly I can’t afford any such place as those. Upper six and low seven figures, minimum. Second, I am nearing the age where I have to think about things like hiring others to plow a driveway and repair a roof, reduce fire fuels around my home and manage my yard. Townhouse living is actually much more reasonable for all that.

Still, I yearn to be free of the people encroaching on my life. I want my own space, with a little tree, and a wild yard. A place for friends to visit on a summer night. A place that's uniquely mine, one that invites bees and hummingbirds, one where I can hear a song sparrow without the interstate as backdrop, one that doesn't make me feel like a cog in a machine that is a city.

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For further research, please listen to the 1961 classic song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds. Lyrics:

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same

There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same

And there's doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school

And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

1. A movie everyone should see, the perfect modern example of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave which I used to deploy in my high school English classes so we could discuss “how do we know what is real?” Tricky.

2. The first photo in this post makes me a liar, as there is a guy walking from front door to truck way down the sidewalk.

3. You might enjoy a more erudite take on this topic than mine. Thoreau lectured/essayed about this back in the 1860s.