99% Invisible - 177- Lawn Order

Episode Date: August 19, 2015

In communities across America, lawns that are brown or overgrown are considered especially heinous. Elite squads of dedicated individuals have been deputized by their local governments or homeowners�� associations to take action against those whose lawns fail to meet community … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When I've done this, I've filled this out. I'll leave it on the door so that the owner is aware of the fact that we made a visit. And that they need to take care of the lawn. They may not even be aware of the fact that the city of Gainesville has an ordinance that prohibits excessive growth. In communities across America, lawns that are brown or overgrown are considered especially heinous. Elite squads of dedicated individuals have been deputized by their local governments or home owners associations to take action against those whose lawns fail to meet community standards.

Call them lawn enforcement agents. Producer Sam Greenspan. This is his story. In 2008, a Lawn Enforcement agent stopped by a home in Hudson, Florida outside of Tampa. Maybe the agent snapped some photos, maybe there were some boxes ticked off a checklist. Whatever the agent's field methods, he or she went back to law enforcement HQ and sent out a letter. They sent out letters stating that, you know, you're a law enforcement, you have a lot

of bear spots, you have a lot of weeds. My sprinkler system was busted and I didn't have the money at that time to repair it. That's Joe Prudente, who with his wife Pat, owns the home in question. Law enforcement thought that the Prudente's lawn was too brown, too weedy, and not well maintained. This was not the first such letter that the Prudente's had received. But Joe Prudente says he is no deadbeat. Over the course of a few years, he had tried to keep a clean, green lawn as best he could.

He watered it. He put down grass seeds and grass plucks. He even dug up and completely replanted the grass in his front yard three times over. I've done it three, three times. The first time I had a company do it, it charged me like, you know, $1,200. And I said, I'm not doing this, you know, every time it died. Joe met with his homeowners association, but they were not cutting him any slack. So then finally they did some ruling that if I didn't put sod down the whole place, they'll law firm was sending it to the judge to the court. And see what would happen was so good, you know, were they going to lock me up? Then I

got to put me in jail for not putting grass down. I said, that's crazy. Shortly thereafter, Joe got another letter. It was a court order to turn myself in or get arrested. I didn't want everybody to see police coming to the house. Caught me away for, they probably go, oh, look at this guy, he's probably robbed the bank, you know, how neighbors are. So I did it the quiet way.

I turned myself in. At 66 years old, Joe Prudente, So I did it the quiet way. I turned myself in. At 66 years old Joe Prudente, an otherwise law abiding retiree from Long Island, presented himself to the Pasco County jail wearing a grandpa gone wild t-shirt. He was apprehended on allegations of failing to properly maintain his lawn to community standards. There was no bail. No bail until the side was done. Now fortunately for Joe, the local paper had written about the arrest and detainment of a senior citizen for having a brown lawn. Word got around and dozens of people came to help dig up and re-saw the Pradente's lawn.

Joe was released from jail the next day. Most cases of homeowners brushing up against lawn enforcement do not end in jail time. But Joe Prudente was not the only person to have ended up behind bars because of a landscaping issue. Frank Yose of Grand Prairie, Texas did two days in jail for having an overgrown lawn. And Gary Settle, a 75-year-old former city council member of Rizel Texas, had a warrant issued for her arrest until some neighborhood kids came by and mowed the lawn that she had been unable to take care of on her own. There's a paradox to the lawn. On the one hand, it is the pedestal on which sits the greatest symbol of the American dream,

the home. And homeowners are independent and free, and have domain over their own little corner of the American dream, the home. And homeowners are independent and free, and have domain over their own little corner of the world. And yet, and yet, the lawn is the least free will-controlled landscape insofar as people are constantly pressured, either by formal or informal institutions, into managing it just like their neighbors. That's Paul Robbins, director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University

of Wisconsin and Madison. And the author of the book, Lawn People, how grasses, weeds, and chemicals make us who we are. Grass may be a plant, but a lawn is a designed object. A lawn is an entirely designed object, that kind of imaginary nice clean green lawn. That's an entirely engineered landscape. And the reason we maintain this landscape, says Paul Robbins, is about everything except the grass. It's about everything else. It's about community. It's about proper moral behavior.

It's about participating in the life of a community. Even in the beginning, lawns were always about something else. The lawn, or really the idea of lawns, began with art. The Italians, for a while, were painting these sort of pastoral scenes, scenes full of grasslands and hedges. Grasslands and hedges that didn't actually exist. No, I mean, these are pastoral images out of somebody's imagination of what the landscape should look like.

And these paintings got popular among Great Britain's landed elite. They liked the paintings so much that they wanted to live in them. What the British were doing is designing their landscapes to look like what was trending in Italian painting. So life definitely followed art, in this case. A style of English garden developed where a prominent feature is a green lawn. And right away, everyone recognized that these soft, verdant grasses

were more than just a nice place to walk around barefoot outside. Elon was about power. Elon was a way for these English elites to show off. They were so wealthy that they didn't need this land to grow food. They could afford to let their fields go fallow. And could afford to keep grazing animals and sith-wielding peasants to keep it short.

When European colonists set sail for the new world, they took grasses with them. But lawns were still mostly for rich people and eventually public parks. It wasn't until the turn of the 20th century, with the first suburbs that lawn started appearing around the homes of the middle class. And here is where the lawn shifts from being about the flagrant display of wealth to a moral force for the good of civilization. Andrew Jackson Downing, considered by some to be the father of American landscape architecture, who is slightly older than the other guy considered to be the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted. I know you're thinking it nerds.

Downing wrote in 1850, quote, When smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country, we know that order and culture are established. There was kind of a social message, which is that if you make it look like this, we will make better citizens. As opposed to right having living in squalor and the urban areas are considered evil and myasmic and problematic. A well-maintained law, in other words, is the opposite of a broken window. Exactly. It's precisely that. Most people think whatever is going on outside the house, if it's civilized, manicured and well-maintained, Most people think whatever's going on outside the house, if it's civilized, manicured, and well maintained, reflects something that's going on good inside the house. With the start of the Great American Suburbanization in the 1950s, suddenly middle-class people were owning larger and larger swathes of land.

So covering it with grass was partly utilitarian. You know, you have this big piece of land. You gotta do something with it. But this connection between lawn and order only grew stronger and our lawns got bigger. We did an air photography study and you tax assessor's data for Franklin County, which is Columbus, Ohio. So it's a very typical American city. And we found that about 25% of the entire county

was turf grass lawns. That doesn't include football fields. It doesn't include golf courses. 25% A quarter of the entire city of Columbus is lawns. Grass living a completely unnatural life cycle. We don't like grass grow tall enough to go to seed, but we also water and fertilize it

to keep it from going dormant. We don't let it die, but we also don't let it reproduce. The author Michael Pollan wrote that lawns are nature purged of sex and death. Feed, weed, cut, repeat. Paul Robbins interviewed dozens of people about their lawns for his book. People told him that if their grass got too long, neighbors would come by and ask if their lawnmower

was broken, if they needed a borrow one. People who wouldn't move their lawn might find an aggressive neighbor had done it for them in the middle of the night or while they were out of town. Youmo, because everybody else does. The free market, American free neoliberal subject who had does as he or she pleases

would just say to hell with my neighbors, I'm just gonna let my lawn grow. But instead they do the communist thing, right? Which is collective management of what is essentially immoral commons. Like it's not your lawn. It's the whole community's lawn and irresponsible for this part. Deviate from acceptable community norms, and your community goes to war with you. Which is how you get cases like Joe Prudente being thrown in jail for failing to keep

his lawn up to quote unquote community standards. One of the guys in my say says, what are you here for, Grandpa? in jail for failing to keep his lawn up to quote unquote community standards. One of the guys in my seat says, what are you here for, Grandpa? I said, grass. He said, smoke in it or sell in it. But as much as the lawn seems to be rooted to the American landscape, we may be seen a transition, at least here out west. We're in an historic drought, and that demands unprecedented action.

It's for that reason that I'm issuing an executive order, mandating substantial water reduction across our state. California Governor Jerry Brown declared in 2015 that our state would need to cut water use by 25%. We're in a new era. The idea of your nicely-green grass, getting lots of water every day. use by 25%. Here in California, the lawn is perhaps the most visible symbol of the drought. Water restrictions allow people to water only 2 or 3 times a week, down from 4 or 5 or

even more. In California, Arizona, Nevada, governments are actually paying people to rip out their grass. Prices range from $1 to as much as $4 per square foot of turf removed, which homeowners could then use to buy artificial turf or use it for zero escaping, which is landscaping with things that don't need water like rocks. Some people are also choosing to put native plants in their yards, which theoretically should grow with rain water only, and would help restore the ecosystem

that had been there before. Or you can just let your long go brown. California has a bunch of public service announcements that are all like, Get down with brown. We'll get through this rock just fine. Even our lawns. Join the movements and help fight the drought.

Get down with brown. Brown is the new green. Do your part to help California fight the drought. Nobody bought a home in this country to have a brown lawn. This is America. We have green grass for a reason here. That's the American dream is to have a green lawn. So invest a little bit in our service,

and you can have a green lawn during invest a little bit in our service and you can have a green lawn during that drought season. This is David Bartlett of Extreme Greengrass. He is decidedly not down with brown. I'm David Bartlett with Extreme Greengrass and we are turning her brown grass green. And he's doing this by literally painting a customer's lawn green. We are spraying on an all natural,

earth-friendly product that we manufacture called extreme green grass. Last three to six months. When we got there, the customer's grass was golden brown. It had been watered in six months. David uses a spray wand attached to a tank full of a liquid, which he swears as non-toxic. And as he's spraying, it's like magic,

like he's transforming a wheat field into a soccer pitch. Except the grass is still crunchy. Yeah, the crunchiness doesn't change. Unfortunately, if I could change that process, I'd be rich. You do anything besides the green? Yeah, we do white, that Christmas season. Maybe it looks like you got a snowy yard, kind of looks like you went up and got some snow from the mountains.

Yeah, any like, pank or purple orange? Pank, I'll do that for you, bro. David got into this line of work after a friend got him a similar service for his lawn as a gift. David had been working in landscaping and thought he could do a better job than the other companies he had seen. Lawn painting is actually not new, but if you've never heard of it, it's because it's generally only been used on golf courses and pro sports fields. It's only since this most recent drought that lawn painting has come home. When I first heard about lawn painting, I had assumed it would be scoffed at by the lawn

obsessives, the kind of people who had Joe Pardente thrown in jail. But a lot of extreme green grasses clients are homeowners associations. Lawn painting is becoming accepted by even the strictest lawn enforcement agencies. It kind of makes you wonder if we as a society are beginning to question the supremacy of the perfectly kept lawn, maybe we can finally quit lawn shaming each other. This is America, we can always find ways to shame each other. I think it's very, very interesting to see what's happening in California with people

getting on each other's case for having green grass. After all these decades of getting on each other's case for not having green grass, that's Paul Robbins again. Now we have a case where the drought has inspired people to really whack one another on the internet or whatever else sort of shame people for putting water on their lawn. See Twitter hashtag droughtshaming. Paul says it's good that people are looking to conserve water, but the moral architecture of drought-chaming is a little too familiar. It's just the newest trend on how people police each other's lawns. It's just another version of the same thing. Like moral outrage that people are not

doing their share is sort of a natural response to people's land management, just like it was for keeping a lawn green. And so if David Bartlett does his job too well, makes lawns look too much like they get tons of water, his customers might get drought-shamed by people who have gotten a little too down with brown. As they say, the grass is always greener, even when it's browner. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Sam Greenspan With Katie Mingle, Avery Trollfum and me Roman Mars Thank you to Isaac Brown and Eric Flagg, Directors of the Film, Gimme Green. That's where the tape of the law enforcement agent that you heard at the beginning of this story originally

appeared will have a link to the film on our website. Thanks also to Devin Brown, Robert Vogelsen, Brent Green, Sharon Hall, Braden K, Kelly Larson, Molly Peterson, Terence Smith, and Kelly Turner. We are a project of 91.7K ALWU San Francisco and produced out of the offices of ArcSign. An architecture and interior firm. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. We're all on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify, but you can listen to every single

episode of 99% Invisible and we have pictures and lots of other stuff there too at 99pi.org. you