A front yard in Vancouver has spurred debate over the city's green agenda.
Jane Armstrong writes, "When Sara St. Vincent looks at the tangle of yellow kale flowers swaying in her front yard, she sees a nutritious vegetable, soon to be part of her dinner plate. What her neighbour, Ken Dyck, sees are unsightly weeds, eating away at his property values."
Comments
Don't you mean NIYFY?
They've got their front yards under control; they're worried about your front yard.
Re: "One neighbour's garden is another neighbour's blight"
It seems like the opening salvo in this kind of battle came with Xeriscaping, domestic landscaping to reduce the need for irrigation. Recently it shifted to HOA UN-friendly, energy-saving practices like clotheslines and feed-in solar generation, or even hardscaping that would supplant Kentucky or Bermuda grasses - the stuff of iconic lawns.
Now we have the prospect of front yard gardens! Who once said that the lawn is "nature under culture's boot"? On the contrary, the lawn, or what would have been the lawn, is clearly fertile ground (pardon) for experimentation. Thinking in terms of lawn is so 20th century.
What we have is innovative dynamism meeting a dearth of imagination on the part of policy-makers and old-school guards. Here in California it is more complex. From Sacramento there is a push to mandate sustainable practices, such as mandating tighter irrigation regulations for commercial (and the largest residential) users.
Seems what we have is a push from the top meeting pressure from below, at the household level, for doing things differently.
I suspect that the old way of regulating these things will yield: If it's not a matter of health and safety (i.e., sanitation or fire access and such) it will be increasingly difficult to proscribe these new approaches to solving problems that are by-definition global.