>Like, sure single family homes in suburbia tend to look the same. You know what also looks the same from the outside? Apartments. Literally all you can see for

>Like, sure single family homes in suburbia tend to look the same. You know what also looks the same from the outside? Apartments. Literally all you can see for each one is a window and maybe a balcony, and they all look identical. It really kind of depends. People focus on the "And they all look just the same" element of the song and glance over the fact that they're "made of ticky-tacky." In an urban setting large solidly built structures slowly form accretions and extensions to them that slowly help a neighborhood develop character and personality over time. Large apartment blocks that don't permit something like that, as you see in lots of East Asian countries where they had to throw up tons of housing REAL fast, can also end up looking really bland and dehumanizing. But then you go to a place that has had time to really develop character as multiple generations of residents have written over them without ever fully erasing what came before and you end up with beloved urban centers like New York or Paris. The suburban development model doesn't really allow for that. The houses can get extensions in theory, but often deed restrictions or HOAs insist on things adhering to specifically defined code about how they can look and what they can do. The conformism is a willful aesthetic choice rather than just a pragmatic shortcut.