The man shows me around his living room with pride, and I smile and take pictures and try my best to act as though I’m seeing it for the first time, when in fact I’ve already been in this living room three times this afternoon. Because I’m scouting a neighborhood where all the houses look the same.
It’s a modern tract home development on the outskirts of Los Angeles, built five years ago, or maybe ten, or maybe it’s impossible to say with certainty anymore because it feels like the architects have finally figured out a model that defies dating and have been churning them out ever since.
In truth, the homes are not exactly identical. There are four or five models that repeat at intervals, each with its own small variations. All are a shade of beige, but some are sand-colored, some mocha. Every so often, a house design is inverted, as though it’s a mirror image of the one across the street.
But as this man leads me from the dining room to the kitchen, it’s a though his home is one of a kind, the center of his universe. He tells me how overjoyed he was to be able to afford it after moving to this country from India. He shows me each of his children’s bedrooms, clearly proud they don’t have to share. In his own room, he points out his view of the scrub-covered hills in distance as though it were a vista of the Rockies.
And as I take pictures, my frustration grows, because we are going to portray this man as a fool.
Because you’ve seen this neighborhood, the neighborhood where all the houses look the same, in countless movies and TV shows. And in virtually every instance, it is always used to inspire one particular reaction: ridicule.
In the movies, there is no more shameful place to live than the neighborhood where all the homes look the same. It is uniformly portrayed as an undeniable symbol of a character’s vapidity, their soullessness, their superficiality, their simple-mindedness.
“How could anyone live in a place where all the houses look the same?” we are meant to ask as we recoil in horror at the idea. It is nothing less than a suburban purgatory, a place where the days bleed into weeks, the weeks into months and years, and all is the same and nothing ever changes and so your first hour there is indistinguishable from your last.
Almost universally, if the fictional homeowner completes their inner character arc by the end of the movie as expected, their final triumph is moving out of such a neighborhood in favor of one that has been deemed acceptable: a classically unique home, situated amongst other classically unique homes. If their personal growth goes awry, the punishment is to remain.
Of all the tired locations I get asked to search for, I hate this one the most. I hate it because despite having scouted countless such properties over the years, I have never once met a single homeowner who resembles the soulless, vapid, superficial, simple-minded cliché who will be portrayed as living in their home.
A privilege of being a scout is that as you are photographing a person’s home, they will often volunteer intimate details of their lives with you, such as how they came to live there. And consistently, the reasons people offer for having chosen this sort of neighborhood could not be more universally understandable.
The desire for as large a house as can be afforded, with lots of space to raise a family. Access to good schools for their children. Low crime rates. Centrally located. Reliable infrastructure.
All are extremely aware of the copycat nature of their homes. It’s not a secret. They know. It’s not like in the movies, where the homeowner is inexplicably ignorant of the most obvious trait of their neighborhood, only to jolt awake to the monotony of design as the movie progresses.
Homeowners will often make light jokes about it up front, typically followed up with a “but what are you gonna do?” shrug. It easy to tell that they consider uniformity to be a minor trade-off for attaining highly regarded benefits that would otherwise not be available to them.
This is the fundamental issue that filmmakers seem terminally oblivious to. It’s not the 1950s anymore, when affordable homes were abundant, and living in tract housing was to some degree an aesthetic choice.
It is 2023, where homeownership is outside the reach of most average people, certainly in cities like Los Angeles. The idea of portraying a resident of such a home as some sort of tasteless automaton is the grossest condescension I can imagine. At the very least, I can say with authority that such a depiction has no basis in reality.
As my scout concludes, I thank the man for showing me his beautiful home, and then move on to the next one. Indeed, it is near identical. The only differences I can identify are an additional dormer window and a slightly different paint job.
But the woman I meet inside could not be more different. She’s younger, and recently married, and as she begins to share the story of why they chose this home due to her husband’s career in the army, any hope of simplistic categorization instantly vanishes.
As it always does. As it always will.
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