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Someone alerted me to the fact that horizontal-slatted fences and big metal sans-serif house numbers have become markers of gentrification in the past decade, along with dark grey exteriors paired with brightly colored doors. I can't see the images in that last link, but it puts them in the context of house-flipping and even suggests many buyers will have to redo the hasty "renovations" to the houses themselves; whereas the article on the numbers makes the point that a generation of wealthy buyers probably find the fences and numbers reassuring.
The neighborhood I live in now is neither Southern California nor San Francisco, and only sprawl by the harshest definition: it's near the center of a suburb that was once a sleepy farm town, and until the 1930s consisted of more or less farm houses interspersed with workers' cottages for seasonal pickers (many on the grounds of the larger year-round houses) filled in with houses for people who ran businesses downtown or worked at city hall. The earliest California-style tract of houses (built on a kind of conveyor-built system, with a temporary sawmill on site and materials for the next stage being left at each house each day so that a team could progress from house to house doing the same thing at each) supposedly was somewhere here, to house war workers, and this neighborhood includes tracts of varying ages from immediately post-war to the 1990s, slotted in around the park and continuing streets that start out with older cottages. There are some duplexes, mostly clumsy adaptations but some purpose-built a couple of decades ago, and little apartment buildings of half a dozen units. All the older houses have gardens, a large number of them fenced, and many with a fruit tree, a pattern that was set when houses started replacing orchards (including a walnut orchard); there were a lot of people aging in place when I came here but house values have climbed ridiculously; and the most damaging changes this century in the neighborhood itself (apart from the tremendous pressure on the park from converting downtown overwhelmingly to apartment blocks 5 or 6 stories high) has been replacing houses with new monster houses occupying almost the entire lot. We don't get much of the grey-painting, but instead tan McMansions that look as if they are made of cut Styrofoam; and there aren't any painted ladies to mourn the loss of, but rather very human-scale houses with nice gardens, often tree-filled. So the fences add insult to injury, but "gentrification" doesn't really apply. They just come off as needlessly hostile.
Like this classic horizontal fence, all the worse for being solid. We can still see over it, and it wouldn't be hard to jump. The house behind it wasn't changed much on the outside; mainly the front door was repainted when it went up for sale, and repainted again by the new owners. They did good work on the back yard. But they face the park with a fortress fence replacing a picket fence.
Here, on the other hand, it's of a piece with the house, which replaced a small house with several trees in the front yard with an ugly dark grey monster.
The first house where I saw such a fence; it took them ages to install it, the wood is thick like railroad ties, and first it was painted bright yellow, then pitch black. The second photo (taken too late in the day, I'm afraid) shows the covered bench built into the side next to the driveway, which is nice. And they've stuffed increasingly more plants into the front yard, which softens the look a bit. But this is one of a row of up-down duplexes that already had front yards with high fences behind them so you can hardly see the inner yards and houses behind; the assault-resistant fence in Serious Black is privacy overkill.
Better, not only because there's a decorative top to the fence (thin slats), but because there are gaps between the slats so you get a glimpse of the grass as you're walking past. This one also has the large metal sans-serif numbers. The house itself, sadly, has been gut renovated so many times in recent years, I'm sure it's contributed three times its volume to the landfill, including the lovingly maintained white picket fence that matched the architecture a lot better.
This shows just how much the numbers and the horizontalism are display; how silly. (Modern duplex, sideways to the street with all the open space taken up by parking/maneuvering space in front of the garage. I guess I should pity them, with no yard to fence off, just that tiny patch of mulch around their tree.)
Here's a different take on the extensively renovated house: the flat-topped posts have solar cells, though I'm not sure whether they power an alarm siren or just lighting.
For comparison, the traditional privacy fence with decorative top. All of these are on one side of corner houses; you probably couldn't get away with them at the front, but note that the slats are thinner than in the modern horizontal fence. They look flimsier even if they aren't.
Two older vertical fances: the second one is double and may fall down before the termites finish eating it, the first is probably the ancestor of the horizontal fence. It faces the second picture from across the street, which is some kind of justice.
Hedges are underrated. This one had just been trimmed; it's mostly oak or toyon and growing through a chain-link fence, and is a formidable barrier.
And this shaggy monster (picket fence for scale) consists of the large-leaf invasive privet we have here and is impossible even to see over; who knows what goes on in that house. This is what I would recommend to the nervous new home-owner afraid that the local little old ladies, geeks with power skateboards, bicycle-riding urban farming families, and workers using the street to walk to the farmers' market downtown might let their dogs pee on their lawn or look at their expensive abode.
The neighborhood I live in now is neither Southern California nor San Francisco, and only sprawl by the harshest definition: it's near the center of a suburb that was once a sleepy farm town, and until the 1930s consisted of more or less farm houses interspersed with workers' cottages for seasonal pickers (many on the grounds of the larger year-round houses) filled in with houses for people who ran businesses downtown or worked at city hall. The earliest California-style tract of houses (built on a kind of conveyor-built system, with a temporary sawmill on site and materials for the next stage being left at each house each day so that a team could progress from house to house doing the same thing at each) supposedly was somewhere here, to house war workers, and this neighborhood includes tracts of varying ages from immediately post-war to the 1990s, slotted in around the park and continuing streets that start out with older cottages. There are some duplexes, mostly clumsy adaptations but some purpose-built a couple of decades ago, and little apartment buildings of half a dozen units. All the older houses have gardens, a large number of them fenced, and many with a fruit tree, a pattern that was set when houses started replacing orchards (including a walnut orchard); there were a lot of people aging in place when I came here but house values have climbed ridiculously; and the most damaging changes this century in the neighborhood itself (apart from the tremendous pressure on the park from converting downtown overwhelmingly to apartment blocks 5 or 6 stories high) has been replacing houses with new monster houses occupying almost the entire lot. We don't get much of the grey-painting, but instead tan McMansions that look as if they are made of cut Styrofoam; and there aren't any painted ladies to mourn the loss of, but rather very human-scale houses with nice gardens, often tree-filled. So the fences add insult to injury, but "gentrification" doesn't really apply. They just come off as needlessly hostile.
Like this classic horizontal fence, all the worse for being solid. We can still see over it, and it wouldn't be hard to jump. The house behind it wasn't changed much on the outside; mainly the front door was repainted when it went up for sale, and repainted again by the new owners. They did good work on the back yard. But they face the park with a fortress fence replacing a picket fence.
Here, on the other hand, it's of a piece with the house, which replaced a small house with several trees in the front yard with an ugly dark grey monster.
The first house where I saw such a fence; it took them ages to install it, the wood is thick like railroad ties, and first it was painted bright yellow, then pitch black. The second photo (taken too late in the day, I'm afraid) shows the covered bench built into the side next to the driveway, which is nice. And they've stuffed increasingly more plants into the front yard, which softens the look a bit. But this is one of a row of up-down duplexes that already had front yards with high fences behind them so you can hardly see the inner yards and houses behind; the assault-resistant fence in Serious Black is privacy overkill.
Better, not only because there's a decorative top to the fence (thin slats), but because there are gaps between the slats so you get a glimpse of the grass as you're walking past. This one also has the large metal sans-serif numbers. The house itself, sadly, has been gut renovated so many times in recent years, I'm sure it's contributed three times its volume to the landfill, including the lovingly maintained white picket fence that matched the architecture a lot better.
This shows just how much the numbers and the horizontalism are display; how silly. (Modern duplex, sideways to the street with all the open space taken up by parking/maneuvering space in front of the garage. I guess I should pity them, with no yard to fence off, just that tiny patch of mulch around their tree.)
Here's a different take on the extensively renovated house: the flat-topped posts have solar cells, though I'm not sure whether they power an alarm siren or just lighting.
For comparison, the traditional privacy fence with decorative top. All of these are on one side of corner houses; you probably couldn't get away with them at the front, but note that the slats are thinner than in the modern horizontal fence. They look flimsier even if they aren't.
Two older vertical fances: the second one is double and may fall down before the termites finish eating it, the first is probably the ancestor of the horizontal fence. It faces the second picture from across the street, which is some kind of justice.
Hedges are underrated. This one had just been trimmed; it's mostly oak or toyon and growing through a chain-link fence, and is a formidable barrier.
And this shaggy monster (picket fence for scale) consists of the large-leaf invasive privet we have here and is impossible even to see over; who knows what goes on in that house. This is what I would recommend to the nervous new home-owner afraid that the local little old ladies, geeks with power skateboards, bicycle-riding urban farming families, and workers using the street to walk to the farmers' market downtown might let their dogs pee on their lawn or look at their expensive abode.
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Hedges and fences
I agree with you that a traditional white picket fence or a hedge would be much more attractive. Some hedges also provide space for wildlife, though I'm not sure that privet hedges do more than provide an occasional perch for small birds. I wonder what the drought-resistant equivalent is.
With the different climate where I live there's a concern that householders taking out vegetation in their front garden are reducing soakaways, increasing the chance of flooding. Usually they replace it with ugly block paviours to provide more parking space.
Given the perfect growing conditions in your area it also seems a shame that people are not planting fruit trees to replace the ones they have pulled up to enlarge their houses. Do they not expect to live there long enough to enjoy the blossom and fruit? Or do they prefer an open lawn for chucking a football around? If I had a garden in your area it would have an orange tree and probably apricots and plums too, perhaps trained against the fences/walls if there was not much space.
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Re: Hedges and fences
I've been very interested in the vegetable gardens that started appearing in front yards during the Obama years (Michelle Obama encouraged them) and how they took off during the COVID lockdown. But the vast majority of the neighbourhood gardeners were the elderly who are now mostly gone, and the new residents are either techies who don't have the time or the inclination, or young parents of a different generation from those the tracts were mainly built for, who have two jobs and different interests. Until the COVID lockdown and even during it, there was a large amount of daytime gardening by landscaping crews, whose main activity is cutting and pruning everything. And fruit trees are not popular because they create "mess". Even where the house doesn't get expanded or torn down, the fruit trees are being taken out as the heirs move in or the house is sold, even when it's prepared for showing. There were several apricot trees in the neighbourhood, but the only one I noticed this spring was a replacement planting about 10 years ago. The house over our back fence had a back-yard orchard; all but one tree is gone, including the parent for our plum tree, which was the old style of unpackable golden plums with very delicate skins. The apricots used to be the old style with small fruits, although at least one had been planted in the 1920s rather than surviving from the orchards the valley was famous for. More and more, I see the remaining citrus trees being neglected; some don't even get watered, and you've seen some with their fruit just lying there in pictures I've put up here.
That shaggy privet hedge has been there since I came here, probably decades before that. It used to be 18" – 2' shorter; I had a clear view of a marijuana plant in the kitchen window one or more changes of ownership ago. And yes, hedge owners have to have the gardeners run the electric hedge trimmer at least twice a year or they get cited for blocking pedestrians. (And the pavements in this city tend to be narrow.) But the privet here isn't what's used in London for hedges. It's an invasive tree that starts off with larger leaves and where it has space, they become something like 4" long. The flowers are the size of lilac flowers. (I may go looking for a good info page.) I think using either it or oak for a hedge is quite brave and people may be rightly concerned about overshadowing, but if they really want privacy and solidity ... Birds do use the privet, and the local oaks, for nesting, and before the camellias outside my side window were drastically pruned for the termite tenting, I'd frequently see a bird peering in at me. But hedges are less important for birds here than in England partly because of the balance of species and partly because there are still a lot of trees. I suspect the birds are also safer from raccoons higher off the ground, but I also admit I don't know what goes on in the depths of the hedges we do have, partly because this house doesn't have one; originally there was a rickety wide-spaced fence on the far side of the driveway, along which the plantings were clearly chosen to be a visual and physical barrier, but are more a thicket than a hedge: catoneaster and camellias. That's hospitable to wildlife and I like the look, but it takes up space and if we were trying to get more than one vehicle up the driveway, or an electric car to a charger in the garage, there would need to be serious pruning several times a yer.
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Re: Hedges and fences