Our car culture makes a direct connection of style changes to the automobile and how fashions impact tract house designs.
Blight is a corollary of automobile centric growth. Because our car culture is based on the automobile; and fashion is a conscious marketing tool in the sales of automobile design, so follow decade period cycles to style trends of tract houses. Tract housing developments and strip malls are the direct correlation to urban sprawl expansion. Tract houses are directly affected by contemporary design criteria. As clothing fashion styles change from season to season, the tract house styles make major shifts every decade. Inasmuch as fashions quickly go out of date, each tract style becomes out of vogue after a decade and a new tract house area becomes popular.
What is blight and how it happens. Blight is the result of cyclic design changes within the car culture. Tract houses are designed by sprawl developers as fashion statements to maintain the status-quo of cyclic trends. The tendency of society’s car culture mentality follows patterns based on that era’s marketing popularity for sprawl development and abandons unfashionable areas. As the new areas are built-out over a decade, older areas are unable to compete with the newly created trend. These older areas hold a lower real estate value and are targeted as unwanted investment properties with lost pride of ownership and become poorly maintained rental properties. As they fall victim to several decades, the mass produced quality of these low value houses become target to first time home buyers and higher foreclosure rates. Once these forgotten areas gather low value rental status, many properties fall into foreclosure and become abandoned. When abandoned properties are boarded up and the chain linked fences become the norm, blight dominates the area.
Visual hostility is a term coined by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Ph.D., Chair, UCLA Dept. of Urban Planning, relating to her studies on the effects of the metro system in LA.
Abandoned neighborhoods are filled with visual hostility. This hostility is seen as empty lots, weeds, dead landscaping, trash, boarded windows, busted and blocked sidewalks, chain link fences, barbed wire, coiled razor wire, busted windows and graffiti. Concrete walls appear as prisons to those burdened and confined to living in these areas. Blight has a devastating emotional and mental attitude effect to children forced to grow up in these areas, as well as the adults. The behavior patterns mirror one’s surrounding environment. The residents of these areas are consequently affected with a mental attitude that has a visual onslaught of prison, poverty and war.
