I live in a small, gated city in Los Angeles with 1 acre minimum lot sizes and rigorously enforced exterior styles, like white paint and single-story elevations

I live in a small, gated city in Los Angeles with 1 acre minimum lot sizes and rigorously enforced exterior styles, like white paint and single-story elevations. The average lot size is closer to 2 acres. You could snip the street map in one place and have a tree, meaning most streets end in cul-de-sacs. With a couple of exceptions, canyons have not been filled or bridged for roads; roads respect the preexisting contours of the land. The city isn't walkable at all—and it's on average 1 hour from my office in Santa Monica—but the open spaces between houses, the lack of terraforming abominations you see in other hilly developments in LA, and the white ranch motif make the neighborhood "nice" to me. Much of what I personally find "not nice" about modern neighborhoods is the clumsy imposition of our collective human needs—architectural, infrastructural—on the land itself.