The "Sitcom Suburbs" represent the widespread commodification of living which played on the desires of Americans to achieve the often talked about upward mobility of class. The suburbs were presented as the realization of the American Dream to a public who did not fully understand the big picture with regards to urban planning and development. It is in this context that Hayden's running themes of home, nature and community lie for the mid 19th century.
For the developers of the rapidly expanding suburbs in this era, the process of constructing and selling homes was strictly business. At this time the fiscal benefits of mass production and Taylorism reigned supreme in industry and business at-large. This bottom-line approach would be the type of thinking that would shape the design and construction of homes. Because of this homes were designed with little variation as a means to rapidly and efficiently construct neighborhoods while streamlining production costs and increasing profit for the developers. This resulted in the repetitious, uniform stamping of the landscape with virtually identical homes which has become the trademark of the suburbs.
Land was one of the few actual luxuries offered by the suburbs and as such received little attention from developers. Lots were commonly made as small as possible as a means to make room for more homes and ultimately extract more wealth from the land. The situation of the house on the land was decided in a similar fashion, with developers more focused on how they could save money on infrastructure, such as piping (if they even cared to include such things). Furthermore, yards were virtually barren aside from the grass. Occasionally the builders would include something like a small tree in the front yard. This is a far cry from the vision of suburban pioneers such as Downing; it is instead a cheap and inaccurate realization of suburban land dreams.
Community is perhaps the most spectacular failure of the Sitcom Suburbs. There simply was no room for such planning by developers since reserving room for municipal space (such as parks, schools and even shopping) meant sacrificing potential short term, bottom line profit. Though mass transit was absent in these communities, the popularity of the car made this feasible. Suburbs were homogeneous in the sense that they were usually composed of white families with males as the head of the household, but diverse in the way that previously isolated cultures now intermingled outside of the entrenched ethnic neighborhoods of the cities.
