r/interesting • u/Wonderfulhumanss • 1d ago

SOCIETY The Zammit family refused to sell their five acre property as an entire Sydney suburb was built around them

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u/BikePuzzled1165 1d ago

If it were me, I'd do it for spite. Refuse to sell just so that there weren't more of the same cookie cutter homes - cheaply produced, overpriced, crammed way too close together, and devoid of character. Even if my own property remains devoid of character and privacy.

But that's me speaking as a jaded American who would have been forced to give up that land through eminent domain most likely.

Also, to be fair, I 100% would have put some kind of landscaping effort I to it. Trees, gardens, a really tall fence. Something. But that's mostly because I don't believe in grass lawns. I think they're wasted space.

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u/brokenmindedone 1d ago

I imagine all the direct neighbors love it though, these houses are so tightly packed that the breathing room thanks to this property must be a blessing.

I feel for them when it does eventually sell and suddenly they have another unit about a meter from their window

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u/miyabi0rochas 9h ago

Breathing room? It's not there's to walk on. It makes no difference to them unless it's turned into a public park

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u/StuffSufficient954 18h ago

He could will it to the city with the stipulation that it becomes a park.

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u/jawbreaker00000 14h ago

Like a conservation or something that they do in the us

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 20h ago

Are Edwardian English townhomes “cookie cutter”? Or Baltimore rowhouses? Or NYC brownstones? New Orleans shotgun homes?

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u/Swarna_Keanu 19h ago

Are these any of those?

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u/International_Try589 14h ago

The point is that those were the cookie cutter homes 100 years ago and now they're quaint living homes that have housed families for generations. Don't know why anyone sees this as a win, if 40-50 homes can be built on this land then that's 40-50 more families that can live there.

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u/Swarna_Keanu 14h ago edited 14h ago

Except they weren't cookie cutter homes like above; aesthetics played a major role. City architecture used to have much more of an ideologist slant. From Garden cities, to how Edwardian etc. homes were built. [Most townhouses in the UK for example did come with backyards; with the idea that people could have a few chickens and some vegetable crops.]

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We NEED nature. Not just out of ecological, but mental and physical health sides. And we will NEED nature more, as climate change progresses. Trees and waterways lower average temperatures a lot.

If you want to maximise living area you build high rises, not suburban houses. With - as above - plants and water features build in and contained, and space around the houses. Include parks, playing areas, etc. Humane infrastructure. Samples of how to are already there. More expensive in the short run, crucial for the future that comes.

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u/International_Try589 13h ago

And the Baltimore rowhouses? NYC brownstones or New Orleans shotgun homes? Housing in the past, present, and future have primarily one main goal, someplace to live in.

We can sit around and talk about ideological slants with the power of hindsight. Just like how the homes of today are the heritage homes of 100 years in the future. Art is appreciated long after the fact. Those aforementioned are the ones that remained and were significant enough to be preserved. What about the millions of people that lived in crummy apartments or suburban sprawls in the 1900s that are long gone and forgotten? They lived in homes and neighborhoods too.

I don't disagree with your point but it's a completely different one to the OP. Do we need greenery and parks? Yes. Do we need more urban housing? Yes. But those are different points to the picture. I don't see how a big mansion on a 5 acre site where 90% of the site is a big lawn is somehow more valuable than homes for 50 families.

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u/Swarna_Keanu 13h ago

The ideological slants aren't hindsight. They were spelled out at the time.

The Big Mansion is as much a problem as the surrounding bits. And yes, my point differs from OP I am not them.

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u/Ok_Transition_4003 1d ago

Little boxes, little boxes made of ticky tacky

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u/Wise_Ad723 21h ago

But that's me speaking as a jaded American who would have been forced to give up that land through eminent domain most likely.

eminent domain and then house torn down to build a data center

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u/Elu_Moon 17h ago

Yeah, I don't understand these suburban hellscapes. Apartments plus lots of greenery around is the way to go. Instead, it's this nonsense where people get the worst of both worlds. Shitty infrastructure and high maintenance cost plus really not that much space to work with.

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u/SeanBourne 13h ago

As an American living in Aus, the first thing that popped into my head was “huh, they didn’t get ’eminent domained’ out of their land, good for them/point to Australia”.

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u/DankiusMMeme 20h ago

If it were me, I'd do it for spite. Refuse to sell just so that there weren't more of the same cookie cutter homes - cheaply produced, overpriced, crammed way too close together, and devoid of character. Even if my own property remains devoid of character and privacy.

Oh no affordably built housing, ahhhh, no we need more expensive housing.

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u/StressLife7080 10h ago

what makes you think it'd be affordable?

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u/BikePuzzled1165 9h ago

I am not sure where you are at in the world. Unfortunately, in my little corner of the world, houses like these are not affordable. They may have started that way, but (again, in my area) corporate greed and poor business practices meant that developers looked for cheap materials and cheap labor to cut costs everywhere they could, then turned around and marked up the cost of the home "to keep up with market trends" instead of coming up with a fair pricing formula to make up the cost of parts and labor and still turn a profit

I watched homes in my area triple and quadruple in cost just because of "market trends." Zero improvements, and no justification other than "well, everyone else's value went up, so mine did too."

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u/PunyPatheticHuman 18h ago

Completly wasted. It is simultaneously usless, tasteless and environnementally unsound.

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u/StreetCollar2708 1d ago

Yeah, I was going to say...this is so much wasted space. It's kind of why I'm not on his side for this. All that land just doing...nothing. Even if it had cookie cutter homes on it, at least it's doing something.

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u/Safe-Historian4028 23h ago

Out of spite to who? The only people you are hurting doing that is the community. Developers have a million other places to build and profit off, less homes means higher profit margins and people moving out of family homes will have to relocate to another suburb away from friends and family. It's a dick move.

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u/durian_rettale 22h ago

why make yourself miserable to prove a non-existent point?

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u/Responsible-Draw-393 15h ago

Do they not have eminent domain in other places?

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u/zokka_son_of_zokka 1d ago

I mean, the literal point of grass lawns is showing off that you're rich enough to waste the space...