Thinking about how formative it was to me living in a liminal space, small town planning wise.

Like, I lived in a housing development, but one with shared walls and organized as a condominium (then a still fairly novel form). It was built in the late 70s on the edge of our small town, which went four blocks uphill to a main drag of about eight blocks perpendicular and then four blocks down the other side of the ridge it was founded on in the 1700s

There was maybe one similar development from around the same time down the road, and then as you spread out and forward in time there was stuff infilling along farm roads in the 60s but increasingly the big cul-de-sac stuff, Toll Brothers pioneered the three-car garage and lofted great room with 2nd staircase there in my youth.

Cause even when I was born it was the only place in a farmland of fields, maybe a few villages and hamlets with a church a bar and two stores, all development since the 50s lining the roads between them, like the opposite of place, by now it’s the only place in an intermediate-suburban conglomeration

Like it felt in the ‘80s under Reagan we were re-enchanting America, and specifically small town America, and Doylestown could draft off that, even though the idea of being an oasis of humanity didn’t really fit – we’d had a daily commuter train to Philly since the early 20th century, in some of the oldest and thickest-developed non-urban American landscape there is.

And '80s/early '90s culture was about the suburbs, by which they basically meant the completely distinct geography of the San Fernando Valley, but we could see ourselves in that too

And then later was exurbs, the commuter region beyond the Valley, and if nothing else we were sure that, Home Depots and big-box “Category Killer” stores by then

(The first one I recall, closer to Montgomery County, was a Toys R’ Us. I realize now they were pioneers of the form, cause what’s a product category particularly suited to the kind of people who move to an outlying bedroom community without a thick established retail sector but with open space to build big box stores along truck routes? That’s right, children’s toys. The move into apparel and furniture with Kids R’ Us didn’t leverage any existing supplier connections, it leveraged their site-finding and real estate acquisition specialization.)