Omaha By Design: Omaha, Only Better

by Ken Mayer

When I was a kid, my dad hosted a weekly poker party. We lived in one of those post war prefab houses known as “cracker boxes.” One week, a regular dragged in looking a bit sheepish. The customary good-natured interrogation revealed that he had just shared an embarrassing moment with a neighbor lady exactly one block away.

Seems he had walked into her house thinking it was ours and sat down, presumably waiting for a beverage, when the poor woman walked into her living room, fresh from the bath, wearing only a towel. This became a source of ribbing from dad and the boys for some time.

It was an understandable mistake because those houses were excruciatingly similar. They had to be. The returning GIs were putting tremendous pressure on the housing industry with demand that had been pent up from the Depression and World War. To meet that demand quickly, houses had to be literally manufactured and assembled on site.

By the early ‘60s, those houses had become known as “Little Boxes” all made out of ticky tacky in a tune written by Malvina Reynolds that became a hit for Pete Seeger. The song was a political satire about the suburbs and the associated conformist middle-class attitudes.

I think back to those days sometimes when I’m in some of our city’s suburbs. Construction is certainly of better quality; cracker boxes and ticky tacky aren’t used any more. Even though the way we have chosen to present the public side of our private residences isn’t as painfully cookie cutter as back then, there’s still a real sameness to things.

It’s especially disturbing when I hear about a homeowners association suing an owner because he put solar panels on his roof, or a sanitary improvement district that prohibits backyard vegetable gardens. Suburban conformist middle-class attitudes, déjà vu, I guess.

I have trouble understanding what’s going on with this apparent effort to make a neighborhood seem like some kind of theme park. How can we teach our kids to be tolerant of other races, creeds and religions when we are actively intolerant of people who grow vegetables in their backyards or put solar panels on their roofs?

Are appearances and conformity that important to us? This seems odd, considering the architecture of the houses and their weekly routines. Besides the sameness in any given development, one of the strangest features to my eye is the garages. Why would anybody see devoting a third to half of a house façade to what is clearly nothing more than vehicle storage as pleasing to the eye?

Perhaps the most disgusting aspect of the residential streetscape citywide is the public display of refuse on a weekly basis. Seems to me any sort of argument about general neighborhood aesthetics is quickly refuted by the weekly placement of garbage along the street, complete with the dance of rolling and tumbling trash cans for most of the day after the nasty bits have been hauled away.

Maybe our time as members of homeowners associations and sanitary improvement districts would be better spent looking at ways to get something truly valuable and useful accomplished instead of trying to get the little boxes and their owners to all look and behave the same way.

Let’s consider having a Place Game to improve a park or other public space, or look at ways to make better use of rain water, or plant sustainable low maintenance landscapes, or experiment with alternate sources of energy or, heaven forbid, look into bringing back the alley as a place to get cars off the street and leave garbage to be picked up.

But whatever you do, at least try to be a good neighbor. Live and let live.