The traditional look of Orange County is going away, and it is being replaced by a different look. That new look is influenced by the attitudes and choices of a younger generation of home owner who is not pressured by the traditional trappings of home ownership in order to modify their living spaces. A perfect example of this is the grass yard which is disappearing more year over year, pretty specifically because younger people realize that is is pointless and wasteful to have one. The whole concept of keeping your outside of your home clean and good looking is based on the use of traditional elements, and this same goal can be achieved using more modern concepts that offer huge improvements over grass. Artificial turf is the most obvious example, an improvement over traditional grass in both the lack of a need to spend your time caring for it as well as the elimination of the water waste that goes with it. Young people are beginning to look on older people with yards with disdain, that they are wasting a valuable resource for no reason except to look good. While there is not much that young people can do in order to change the attitudes of older people with regards to wasting their own money, they can refuse to buy their houses. This means that property values of homes with traditional yards are falling while those with alternative living spaces are rising. They can’t force you to remove your yard and replace it with a better alternative, but they can refuse to purchase it from you. This attitude shift creates a new look of the entire community that reflects the new attitude. You either evolve with the times or you are eliminated by them.
Young people do not want to spend their time on the weekends mowing their lawn, and they want to pay someone else to do it even less. They look at the time that needs to be spent caring for a lawn as a complete waste of time they could spend doing something better, and every moment that they are forced to care for their lawn makes them want to remove it more and more. They will take any replacement over grass any day, anything from pavers to artificial turf or even concrete. These surfaces do the exact same thing as a grass lawn and yet you do not have to put in the efforts to upkeep it that the grass requires. As a result, we see homes for sale with artificial turf lawns going for more money than those with grass lawns. Young people are recreating the attitudes of America towards wastefulness by simply not purchasing the products of things that they view as wasteful. This exercise in power creates a dynamic shift in society towards the attitude of the future, and it appears that the home of the future will have artificial turf instead of grass. So are you going to get up with the times?