Sumerlin Park in Roswell, Georgia

June 27, 2007

I drove from Snellville to Roswell this afternoon.. a trip that took me through quintessentially suburban territory. I took the Ronald Reagan Parkway, Beaver Ruin Road, Jimmy Carter Boulevard, Holcomb Bridge Road, Sandy Plains Road, Five Forks Trikum.. I'm not making these up! Where else could I be but greater Atlanta?

On my hour-long drive I didn't pass through one recognizable "downtown". What I passed were innumerable strip malls, restaurants, and gas stations. Snellville and Roswell (along with small communities lying in between) do have city-centers, but they are small and inconsiderable.. tough to locate, actually. No real effort has gone into bestowing an identity upon these communities. People just want to live here, not worry about local government. I suspect that the home owner's associations are the form of government with which people have the most connection.

Old Roads today attempted to document some of the suburban communities in Roswell:

Driving along a main road one sees fancy signs such as the one above. These generally have a pastoral ring to them. The above development is not a "park" at all.. but a rather intensive housing development. This sign is accompanied by the following advertisement:

I find it humorous that even when we are talking about the purchase of houses from the $600s, there is still the need to rely on bright red explosions that proclaim: "only 2 homes remain". It is as if all the advertising techniques that would be put in place to popularize a roadside car wash get broken out to sell these glorified tract homes. I imagine that when one gets up to the really big money houses, this kind of roadside advertising declines.

What kind of culture is this in which houses for over $600,000 can be advertised from the side of the road? I can just imagine the in-car discussions: "Honey, pull over.. that one back there has houses with four sides brick and for only about $600,000!"

There is often only one entrance to these housing developments. No one wants through-traffic.. that might raise the unsafe factor and drag down home prices. The houses are huge.. God knows how many square feet. If we were looking for an image of the American dream as it exists popularly, this would have to be it. But what a poor dream and hollow dream!

Right across the street from the entrance to Sumerlin Park are homes of a very different quality:

That is a nice house (one in which I could imagine myself living), but it won't be confused with the mansions of Sumerlin Park. This house and others nearby are examples of relic neighborhoods. These are homes that probably do not belong to any home owners association. They were evidently built a good while before the invasion of the mansions. One must strain to imagine these suburbs as sparsely populated rural areas with scattered houses.. and now that the rural areas are largely filled in with new housing developments, these older houses stand as reminders of the past (a past the larger developments would love to erase).

Occasionally today I dipped into a fancily named neighborhood and found that instead of mansions it contained houses like this. I am sure someone could date this style of houses for me.. but I will just call it an early suburban wood gem. There were whole developments filled with houses like this. Here again I think we are dealing with a relic. These are the cheap developments that were once "way outside" Atlanta.. but which have now been overtaken by the mainline housing market. These inexpensive early suburban houses are now swamped by mansion developments.

Having entered one recent development, I drove up and up a steep hill. All along the street there were mansions.. none quite looking exactly the same as the others, but all looking about the same nevertheless. At the top of the hill the homes had a long view across the rolling hazy green of northern Atlanta. One house up there had a for sale sign out front. "As far as the eyes can see" is the promise on the real estate ad. And of course on the front porch there are two comfy looking rockers. It radiates a promise of self-satisfaction. It sure seems like wherever one looks in America, this is the life that people are after.