I seem to regularly read posts where people build on other people’s property or there is a dispute where the property line is, is it not standard practise to fence your property?
In Australia there is a saying “good fences make good neighbours” and it is standard to have your property clearly fenced, usually as a part of the building process. Possibly the front yard may not have a fence that rubs parallel to the road for aesthetic reasons, but there seems to always be side and back fencing to clearly mark the property line.
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Very common. Helps keep the dogs in the right yard, too.
It’s common if it’s allowed but there are also a lot of HOAs that won’t let people put up fences for petty aesthetic reasons.
It’s very common. Lots have pets and children they want to keep on the property. And there are some states and local laws that can hold you liable even if someone trespasses on your property and hurts themselves. Like where i’m at we were destroyed by a hurricane and although some peoples home no longer existed they had to put some type of fence around their pool because they can be liable if someone enters their property and falls in the pool.
It’s not standard. Lots of people have fences, especially if they have dogs or kids they want to keep in, or a pool they have to hide, but even then it often only goes around the back yard, and the front yard is unfenced.
Where I grew up, almost no one had a fence – tree-lines were used to mark the border between us and our neighbors, and the dogs used an “invisible fence”.
Common but not standard, if that makes sense.
I’ve never seen a fence in the front yard in my small town of 4000, but about 50 percent have them in their back yards. People with small children, dogs and swimming pools need them
In the suburbs i have lived in they are common around the back yard, but uncommon around the front. Having one around the front is trashy unless you are on a major road or have a ‘compound.’
I’d say maybe 1/5 of houses around here have fences.
How common it is varies regionally, but it certainly isn’t rare.
Also, that’s not really an Australian saying. Robert Frost, a New England poet, use it in one of his best known poems. Maybe the saying predates him, but I’d bet he made it a whole lot more popular.
Yes, it keeps in small kids and dogs.
I think nearly every house in my neighborhood has a privacy fence around the back yard. A few of my neighbors have a fence around the front, but that is less common
It depends on the owner’s budget. Houses aren’t built with fences, so after buying a house, if you want one you’ll have to pay to have it built or build it yourself.
Backyard fences are common.
Front yard fences are less common as many municipalities don’t allow them. More urban areas tend to allow them and more suburban areas often do not.
regional for sure. IN Texas it is completely commonplace….but when I lived in Small town Wisconsin…a fenced back yard looked weird.
So where I grew up in the mountains of Colorado (basically smaller towns but proper towns none-the-less) fences were rare for personal property or used to define a particular area (aka for horses, etc). Sometimes they would have these little ornamental Victorian era fencing that did nothing but denote where their property line was, but even that was not super common. Mostly bushes were used for property lines. Cut to where I live now in farm country and there are definitely fences. Mostly backyards are fenced and front are left unfenced like my house. And I have had a survey, the property line is where the fence is so probably the original builder of my house did that long ago.
We have almost the same saying “tall fences make good neighbors.” We like our privacy, and having fences or other permanent markers can help with property line disputes, even generations down the line
In California, Bay Area where I live, it’s 95% fenced yards
I was surprised to visit my wife’s home suburb near Chicago and see many unfenced yards
I had my yards fenced before I moved in.
Where I live it’s really common. Almost every house has a fenced in backyard. And those that don’t look like they are because of the surrounding fences, unless they are a corner lot. And there isn’t a gate to close off the yard. I for sure have 2 on my street that aren’t completely fenced in. I can think of at least 1 other that isn’t in my neighborhood, and it’s pretty big. Because of building codes it’s not down the sides or in the front, unless it’s a smaller fence.
Some neighborhoods have HOA’s that might not even allow fences, or they have to be a certain type. A friend had to get a plastic fence material and it was really expensive. Friends in other states don’t have fences, and it seems fairly normal in their areas not to have them.
Where I live, it pretty much depends on whether or not you have pets. I just moved from a neighborhood of townhouses where it was pretty split, probably half fenced and half not. The fences were either privacy fences or some were just chicken wire. But the ones with fences were pretty much all dog owners (though some dog owners didn’t have fences and just let their dogs roam, which wasn’t great, given the road right next to the development).
Now, I live in a more rural area where people have animals so just about everyone has fences. There’s a farm behind me with horses and a house across the street with chickens, so they both have fences. My next door neighbor and I both have dogs, so we each have a fence, as well. But if you find someone around here who doesn’t have animals, chances are they won’t have a fence.
> In Australia there is a saying…
Yeah…one coined by an American poet, Robert Frost, in 1914. His poem “Mending Wall,” is the (as far as I’m aware) undisputed source of this phrase, or at least brought it into common usage.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall
Depends on if you have pets, young kids and how close you are to a main road. I would say it’s pretty common.
Idk about the suburbs, but in my small town every house seems to have a fenced in yard with atleast one dog in it. Lot of chickens too. You need a fence for your animals and to keep the critters out of your garden. Maybe suburban people don’t have as many dogs and gardens? I doubt they have their own chickens, it would surprise me if they did.
In our region, as others have pointed out, theres often trees/shrubs instead of an actual fence. Part of it is also dependent on the size of the lot. I have little kids so part of our yard is fenced, but our lot is half an acre- we can’t afford to build a fence around the whole thing. Also, you mentioned suburbs in the title, but it’s worth mentioning that as you go outward from cities, lots get bigger, neighbors get farther apart, and there’s just no need for fences in many places. I live right in the heart of a small town. If I look out my backyard, most of my neighbors have a privacy fence against the road (to help eliminate noise) but either don’t have any fences from each other or else just have a short picket fence or a line of shrubs. If I wanted, I can see down 3-4 houses, but I just… Never look. It’s none of my business.
In East TN it’s not uncommon but definitely not the majority. A lot of people have fenced in BACK yards and not front. Or just a privacy fence that doesn’t entirely enclose their back yard, or a row of trees to give some privacy.
I’ve lived a lot of places. Fences can be common depending on where you are. Never had one growing up. Every place in urban Providence I lived had a fence. Fences in Chicago. Fence in Columbus. No fence in either place I have lived in Maine. Where I live now no one in the neighborhood has a fence except the one family that built a tennis court. It has a chain link fence around it.
If you would like to know about Rhode Island spite fence law I can easily inform.
It’s pretty standard in more dense areas, but in the suburbs and exurbs you see fewer fences, though still somewhat common
Despite what mass media may make it seem, suburbs are not uniform. In fact you can still live in city limits and still live in a suburb. And you can still live in a very urban area and still live in a suburban town, city, or county.
I live in a suburban city just outside of Indianapolis and I’m in a 900 square foot apartment. Across the street from me is the older part of the city. Lots are smaller and a lot of people don’t have fences. Now this is a fairly affluent burb so as houses get remodeled a lot of them do end up putting a fence in the back if they have room, but many don’t.
Now if you live in a suburban development like is pictured in the AAA banner, then yeah, almost certainly those back yards are going to be fenced at least. Though they usually aren’t built by the developer so it’d be up to the homeowner to front the cost, determine property lines, and so on.
And yes, property line disputes are a real thing, and not just for fencing. Indianapolis is currently in the process of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars buying property to expand a rail-trail. Its a very tiny bit of land but also very valuable, and the old railroad right-of-way doesn’t apply to government projects like trails, so they have to buy these slivers of property from the property owners.
Fences are not standard because they’re expensive. Back in 2016 a fence was $12K -$15K. 75% chain link and 25% metal. People just put down their life savings as a down payment for the house, no money left for a fence.
I made the mistake of putting up a fence within my property and now I’m afraid my neighbor thinks it’s her property. Have to call and pay another $500 for the surveyors to come and put spikes again
My HOA lets you go from the back corner of the house to the back and rear sides of the property. Our lots are like maybe 1/6 of an acre though, so it makes the yard feel tiny. Because there is some inaccessible property behind our house, I have extended my backyard beyond my lot line and probably couldn’t have a fencer do an install there.
Technically though, we’re not supposed to build 3 feet from the property line for the easement (I don’t remember the exact distance as it’s different on the front and sides of the property. In my neighborhood, the homeowners that actually followed this rule are in the front of the neighborhood so there’s all these stupid 6-foot-wide alleyways between neighboring fences. And then one side will mow theirs and the other won’t and it just looks ridiculous.
I live towards the back of the neighborhood, and on one side the neighbors put up a fence before they even moved in and it’s on the property line. We’ve had two families live on the other side and I just keep hoping one of them will put a fence on their property line and then I’ll have the sides done and can just keep going my extra distance back.
>the front yard may not have a fence that runs parallel to the road for aesthetic reasons, but there seems to always be side and back fencing to clearly mark the property line.
That’s generally how it is here but there’s no hard and fast rule. If you have a fence in the front or no fence at all it wouldn’t be weird, just less common than an open front yard and a fenced in back yard
If you buy a new house here it usually does not have a fence because they are very expensive, like 20k. Many people add them later on though, either for privacy or to keep dogs, although the invisible dog fences are becoming more popular.
I’ve never lived anywhere in California that didn’t have fences in the suburbs. Even on bigger plots in qthe country we fence albeit it’s usually piggies and barbed wire to keep animals in. Fence lines often serve as the parcel lines too.
It depends on where you live, even within the same cities. I lived in a community where one of my neighbors put up a fence and everyone was outraged. Some of them said it wasn’t approved by the HOA that wasn’t official (at all), that it blocked views (no it didn’t), and some took offense that they may have done it to keep kids out of their yard. I lived three houses down and couldn’t have cared less. I have two kids. They can walk around a fence.
Fences are required for pools, but even then people are jerks. My uncle put one up around his pool and someone called the city to tell them their fence was not the correct size. Who knows that kind of thing? It was too tall, evidently, by 10 inches. He had to rip it all down and replace it. Again, jerks.
Yes and no. Alot of them arent fenced at all, but the ones that are are only the back yard
Common but not standard in my area. Most people with kids and/or dogs will have a fenced yard, but otherwise not. The type of fence also varies a lot. HOA neighborhoods will usually require a specific type of fencing. A lot of the mid range neighborhoods around here like those solid white PVC privacy fences, solid wood privacy fences, or split rail fencing (what mine has). Some will do chain link fencing in lower income areas, or fancy black metal fencing in higher income neighborhoods. My MIL’s neighborhood actually does brick walls with black metal gates, very nice looking but uncommon.
Nobody does it. There aren’t enough kids to pay to go around and whitewash them. Plus they hide our impressive yards, which are very high on the list of things to maintain.
We don’t have fences but we do have 20+ ft tall and wide privacy hedges
Not really. Most suburb homes are not fenced