Facepalm

It looks like it went from a warm, shared neighborhood to mismatched, isolated islands.

The saddest part to me is the loss of the matching fence style and what appears to be a shared gate to access the sidewalk. The neighborhood I grew up in had a lot of connected yards like that, and it was really nice.

This.

When studying architecture, one of the things I discovered is how well modern buildings can fit together with pretty much any older style... but it has to be done with a little bit of finesse. The lack of a gate and ugly lawn here are pretty bad.

The house on the left though... That's a crime against good taste.

House on the left? You mean the small blue barn?

Yeah I'm honestly a bit more upset that they painted that beautiful brick house neon blue

If they had brought the house forward a bit they could have a normal size front area, and a bit of back garden which is more useful. Could even have divided up the land a bit better to leave some space around the house on the left. I guess it was done this way so as not to block the view of the house on the left, but the whole thing just seems like bad planning and bad taste.

Getting rid of grass isn't a bad thing. Pavers isn't great, but grass is horrible.

The hip new development near me, which is packed with townhomes and some restaurants and businesses in the middle, has so many $50K-$80K SUVs parked along the road.

I think you could legitimately criticize how the property on the right now has a ton more asphalt. It is impermeable and absorbs a lot of best from the sun. This small amount probably isn't noticeable, but if everyone else in the neighbordhood did this the whole area would be a heat island and have flooding/drought issues.

Also it's hard to see the Before yard because of the fence, but what little green is left in the After looks like a monoculture of grass that I suspect is not native. Not great for pollinators. Once again, the kind of thing that doesn't make much difference for one house but makes a huge difference when it gets popular.

I really like the blue paint job on the left. It's fun and interesting without being obnoxious.

I think it’s nice that that huge swath of useless lawn is now another home. Everyone wants more and cheaper housing until it messes up the look of their own neighborhood I guess.

Yes. In France we enforce local urbanism rules to ensure neighborhoods and cities are globally nice-looking and restrict land usage. It's good.

Well I'm guessing one of the houses sold their land so it's their own fault anyway.

Yeah I see freedom here. The basic freedom everyone claims to love, to do whatever you want in the domestic sphere so long as it doesn't harm anyone.

I also actually like it, but I have atypical tastes.

The only constant in life is change.

is that a quote from somewhere?

The feeling of looking outside and seeing the tons of cars pass by while your father yells at you about how "phones are bad, people are addicted, they won't even go outside anymore"

That's a lot of asphalt.

Sad that 2 families without taste live (on the same space) instead of none.

Is have to see the interior of the new one because the front room looks like a waiting area

Probably absentee owners that want a no- to minimal-care landscape that won’t cost them anything to maintain or become an infrequently maintained eyesore and catch the council’s attention for fines.

You ain't whatever and I love you

After the turn on their side of the fence, it's even at a third height. Nothing matches!

The floor is slanted.

There are a bunch of changes to that blue houses that don't look right. That roof looks totally fake, and so do other changes.

Also, the fences along both sides of the new house look old and weathered. They aren't newly installed. I suspect there are several years between those photos.

Why couldn't they have removed a fireplace when they upgraded their roof? They could just want one in a living room while removing the one in the bedroom or something.

I don't see anything changed on the house on the right, it is nothing but a lightning change.

It does not have the telltale signs of AI. The background still has plenty of the same features. Even the trees on the right have grown over time.

What irritates me in the lower image is the shadow, or better the lack there of. The upper left window of the blue house had sharp shadow inside the room, but literally nothing else in the image has. The streetlights, the traffic cone, the property walls etc. nothing has shadows like the window has.

You got a good eye, wow.

Every new development I see builds houses right on top of each other like this to maximize profit.

To find houses spaced like the 'before' pic, you basically have to find neighborhoods built 30+ years ago.

This looks like the UK, and fire concerns are very different here than in the US on account of differences in climate and construction.

The external faces of those buildings are all brick and/or concrete, and not terribly susceptible to fire, so fire would have a hard time breaking out of one building and into the next

The UK has a population density almost 8 times that of the US. Our houses get ram packed together.