Products

Go to the archives

FARM/HOUSE

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jul 19, 2018
Category: Home

A friend said that if things don’t get better, we should get our hands on some real estate and live together, for the same reason so many people describe college as “the best years of our lives” — for the comfort and stimulation of life in a community.

I cringed. I tried this once, right after college. I’d published a book in my senior year, and I could easily have snagged a job at the Times or the New Yorker, but it was 1968 and the war was unhinging me on a daily basis, so I fled to a commune in Western Massachusetts. Soon enough the plumbing blew out. Heat was a wood stove. If you left a glass of water in the kitchen in January, you’d come down in the morning to find ice in the glass. And the gender ratio was tragic: 12 men to 3 women. Once, on mescaline, a guy threw himself on the ground and fucked the earth. I took that as a signal to leave.

A few years ago, decades on New York hamster wheel started to grate and I became interested in simpler, more human ways to live. A friend alerted me to small communities of small houses, built around a commons. Exactly! I read Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World, and, as my review indicates, I fell in love.

And then I got an idea. The countryside was blighted with residential communities built around golf courses. What if there were residential communities built on small working farms, which residents help maintain?

I did some research. Wrote the proposal you’re about to read. Copyrighted, trademarked the name. Looked for a developer. Didn’t find one. Finished my book.

Is this a proposal? Or a thought exercise? That depends on you. Are you in real estate? Know a developer who isn’t sentimental about golf courses?

Back when cars had fins and the middle class worked a 40-hour week, America took up golf. Real estate developers built golf courses lined with houses. Water sprinklers ran full-time.

No more.

27 million Americans play golf. If that were a huge number — it’s not — the key fact about golf is that fewer young Americans are taking it up; only 13% of Americans under 29 play golf. And over the last decade, 5 million Americans — 400,000 in 2013 alone — have abandoned golf. In 2015 (the latest year for which data is available from the US Census Bureau), there were 11,280 golf courses and country clubs in the United States, down 1,000 in just a few years. There has been a “gradual, but steady, market correction.” Translation: In 2013, 160 American golf courses closed. American golfers played 462 million rounds of golf in 2013 — the fewest since 1995. As brutal summers and water shortages become the new normal, the decline of golf may accelerate.

What will happen to abandoned golf courses? And as people flee rural America, what will happen to all those undeveloped acres?

Americans still want to look out the kitchen window and see green. But the green that increasingly delights them is a farm — and developers, seeing an emerging trend, are building “agrihoods,” residential developments with a working farm as the central feature. A few years ago, the New York Times published a feature article on this phenomenon, “Farm-to-Table Living Takes Root.”

I’ve looked at the web sites for several of these communities. They are predictably unimaginative: slimmed-down McMansions that just happen to be set on farmland. The developers’ goal, as The Times suggests, is exactly what you’d expect: “green space that earns a profit.”

FARM/HOUSE is so much more.

FARM/HOUSE would offer smartly designed homes, interesting neighbors, community gardens in the back yard — everything that many people dream of.

The design of the houses anticipates the environmental changes that many people want but few developers deliver. Solar panels. Rainwater collectors. Geothermal heat. And front porches, the forgotten glue of suburban communities.

Owning an energy-efficient, wired-for-media house is only the first reason to be excited by FARM/HOUSE. The bigger lure — and the heart of the advertising and marketing pitch — is what’s in the center of the farm: a garden. FARM/HOUSE is instant community; by luring residents out of their houses, it directly addresses the loneliness and alienation created by addictive visual media and Smartphones.

How popular is gardening in America?

At its current rate of growth, vegetable gardening will soon be our #1 hobby.

In 2009, 41 million U.S. households (38% of all households) planted a vegetable garden, up from 31% the previous year.

The number of organic gardens rose from an estimated 5 million households in 2004 to more than 12 million in 2008.

Millennials represent the fastest growing segment of the population to take up gardening. Largely because of their interest, the vegetable gardening category recently hit a six-year high in both participation and spending.

A New Yorker piece about community gardens connected to urban residential developments notes their appeal to buyers. A realtor says: “The way that these community gardens translate into home prices is self-evident. It impacts resale value.”

A community garden is a novel feature in suburban/rural developments. But its attraction goes far beyond its physical reality. In a rootless society, a garden symbolizes one of the deepest longings in American history: permanence, goodness, harmony with nature. FARM/HOUSE can literally be where people put down roots.

That makes FARM/HOUSE the new American dream: a movie set come to life. Tens of millions of us search for that dream everywhere: in farmers’ markets, in “authentic” products sold on Etsy, in vacations that are more about experiences than destinations. “Cheers” was the ‘80s, a bar “where everybody knows your name.” Now we want a small town where everybody knows us.

Who will want to live at FARM/HOUSE?

Boomers, of course, who are in no hurry to become sedentary retirees. They’ll relish the social life, the organic gardens, the porches that encourage after-dinner visits.

Younger couples and singles who fondly remember the good times they had in college will also gravitate to Farm/House communities.

Families that want their kids to get their hands dirty and develop a sense of responsibility to others will welcome a lifestyle not built around electronic devices.

And “eaters,” Mark Bittman’s smart upgrade of “foodies.” There could be — not on the property, but nearby — a profit center: a farm-to-table restaurant.

As the suburbs are gutted by an economy that is telling the middle class that they’re going to move down a level, this kind of community should appeal people concerned about their quality of life and who want to do something meaningful on the local level. On a farm, there’s no question about the fruits of your labor — the harvest is your verdict. And there should be a community center that houses a library, screening room, kitchen and more. This building would be an ideal place for tutoring local kids and educating them about nutrition and gardening. And for book club meetings. And and and…

Security? Alas, in a time when extravagantly armed psychos on a mission tend to target the good and the gentle, it’s necessary. Maybe the perimeter has a buried electronic system, like the kind that makes dog howl when they try to venture beyond home turf. And maybe this has to be a gated community.

FARM/HOUSE may start with a single community — ideally a short drive from a college town that has a hospital — but it could grow fast and sprout across America.

Sample marketing/advertising slogans:
– “I went to the farm because I wished to live deliberately.” [This is, as you know, a play on Thoreau’s famous line: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.”]
– “Grow your own. At Farm/House.”
– “Plant roots here.”

If you know any developers who aren’t sentimental about golf courses or if you have some improvements or better ideas… HeadButlerNYC@AOL.com