In trying to stay busy over summer break, I have found myself cleaning. One of my newfound chores, alongside mopping, dusting, and pressure washing, is the time-tested, truly American pastime of lawn care. Once a week, I pop my AirPods in, turn on a narrated version of the latest Current Affairs article, and spend the subsequent two hours reining in the green that surrounds my house (with intermittent breaks for water and to empty the grass bag). 

However, as the summer has progressed, my mowing runs have become, much like the interstate, significantly more stop-and-go. The culprit? Apis mellifera—more commonly known as the honey bee. They love the swaths of white clover that populate my backyard, and as a result, I am forced to pause every thirty seconds or so and wait for one of the little guys to bumble away, lest it meet the fate of some of its less lucky brethren in service of an inch-tall, perfectly green monoculture.

It’s safe to say that at least five had met their untimely demise, at which point I began to stop wondering how I could avoid them, and instead, asked a much broader question: Why are we Americans so obsessed with our lawns—and is that still acceptable?

When you look out at a typical American “white picket fence” suburb, it may fill you with a sense of pride. A belief in a country that ensures anyone, regardless of their background, can achieve a better life through hard work and determination. A couple, able to sustain life with two children and a dog on a single salary, able to afford a house in a quiet neighborhood, topped off with a pristine, uniform, emerald-green carpet of weed-free turfgrass.

According to a 2005 study published in Environmental Management, manicured lawns cover more than 40 million acres of the United States—an area larger than Georgia—making grass the single largest irrigated crop in the country. Surely this must be the American Dream in action, right?

In fact, that landscape is not American-born. It was imported from colonial Europe. The grasses that make up this massive green carpet, like Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, and fescues, are entirely non-native, introduced to the United States by early colonists for livestock grazing as early as the 1600s.

In 1776, the concept of the “lawn” had yet to propagate in the soon-to-be States. Colonists were busy fighting a war, after all, and grass was seen as purely a utility—there was no time to maintain it. But while that may have been true for the average colonist, the same could not be said for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Both were obsessed with European landscaping and sought to recreate the sweeping "pleasure grounds" and manicured estates of the European aristocracy. Swaths of green sent a clear message that the landowner was wealthy enough to burn both time and resources on land that couldn’t be eaten. Although that’s not to say either was personally out in their fields, maintaining their imported aesthetic—estates like George Washington's Mount Vernon required the intense and repetitive labor of enslaved African Americans, who scythed the grass by hand.

An expansive lawn was the 18th century’s American Express Black Card—representative of highly exclusive wealth, denied to the common man. In fact, I think this comparison works on multiple levels, because to be even considered for any tier of American Express cards, you need a FICO score of 670 or above, making them virtually impossible to acquire for the 40% of Black consumers who have credit scores below 600.

It wasn’t until the invention of the mechanical mower by an English engineer named Edwin Beard Budding in the 1830s that such a luxury began to be accessible to middle- and lower-class Americans.

Just 30 years later, Riverside, Illinois, widely considered one of America’s first planned suburban communities, mandated that each home be set back 30 feet from the street, creating one connected, communal, and most importantly, attainable front yard. However, no American suburb will ever compare to that of Levittown, New York—Levitt & Sons’ blueprint of the modern American suburb, which popularized the "American Dream" of suburban homeownership, defined by its weed-free, closely cropped, monoculture lawn.

The Levitt family viewed landscaping as a means of “neighborhood stabilization,” or a way of protecting property value, so codified in property deeds of the 17,000 homes built was a stipulation that required homeowners to mow “at least once a week between April 15th and November 15th of each year.” Fall behind, and you could face fines, liens, and social stigma—a barrier to entry barely on the radar of wealthier homeowners who could hire landscapers (or lawyers).

But as American middle-class life modernized and urbanized, so did their methods for lawn maintenance. Merely mowing and weeding was not enough. The perfect lawn could not be achieved organically—no. It had to be engineered.

Traditional lawns are considered ecological "dead zones" because, due to their composition of non-native grasses, they provide neither food nor shelter to local wildlife and decimate local biodiversity. However, their inability to properly integrate into our country’s ecosystem does benefit one creature: capitalism.

The O.M. Scott & Sons Company capitalized on the postwar consumer idea of the "perfect green lawn" as a status symbol to market both fertilizers and herbicides to the suburbs, becoming a dominant force in both consumer weed and feed products.

But while these products were marketed to the average consumer, it was an open secret that these lawns were pretty much denied to “any other persons than members of the Caucasian race.” In fact, that exclusion is taken directly out of Levittown’s original 1948 leasing agreement.

The ideal of a perfect lawn was built on a racially segregated foundation, and this wasn’t unique to Levittown. Around the same time as the mechanical lawnmower was taking off, General Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15, also known as "40 acres and a mule," was granted, promising newly freed families plots of land and a loan of an army mule to help establish economic independence among previously enslaved African Americans following the Civil War.

While an estimated 40,000 formerly enslaved people settled on the land, the order was short-lived, as it would be annulled by committed white supremacist Andrew Johnson not even a year later, shattering the prospect of generational land wealth for Black Americans at the exact moment it could have been established—and just as the American suburban ideal began to take shape.

Dr. William “Sandy” Darity Jr., an economist at Duke University, calculated the cost of this broken promise. Using data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, Darity identified the exact gap between the average net worth of white households and Black households. In his recent assessments, the average difference exceeds $840,000 per household.

By his calculations, to distribute the necessary funding to erase that average wealth gap across the roughly 40 million Black Americans who descend from enslaved people, $14 trillion is owed in total, a direct result of the United States’ denial of equal citizenship to Black Americans for nearly 249 years.

Nonetheless, 51 years and a 5-hour flight later, you’ll find yourself in Berkeley, California. It’s 1916 now; racism is still all the rage (what a shocker!), and the future of the movement is being spearheaded by real estate developer Duncan McDuffie, who is credited with building our nation's very first exclusionary single-family residential zone classification. He, much like the Levitts, used explicitly racist covenants to enforce segregation in his own developments.

...As extra assurance for buyers seeking a permanent, high-quality exclusive neighborhood, '[o]nly persons of the Caucasian race... except servants' could live there. McDuffie began recording such covenants in Claremont Park in Berkeley in 1905. […] Such restrictions were a crucial “shield,” McDuffie explained, “permanently protecting…homes and stabilizing and increasing…land values. […] They deny entrance to undesirable neighbors and…inharmonious houses.”

Here’s what set him apart, however: McDuffie was the first to invent a public zone that outlawed anything except a single-family house on a single lot. 

In 1916, when California passed the City Planning Enabling Act, the mayor of Berkeley appointed McDuffie as the Chair of the Berkeley Civic Arts Commission, the body tasked with building the city's planning framework. He publicly stated that his mission was to "utilize the precedent of private restrictions to create public zoning"—he wanted the government to legally enforce the same race-based discrimination he had built into his private developments, anticipating the courts would eventually strike down his explicit racism.

When the Supreme Court did so in 1917, developers used his single-family zoning as a technically legal proxy to achieve the same result by banning cheap, multi-family housing—duplexes, apartments, and commercial stores—effectively pricing out the minority families he had no intention of renting to.

And it must have pleased McDuffie to know that it wasn’t just him zoning out people of color, because the federal government was dancing to the same tune.

Created in 1933 under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was originally designed to rescue homeowners defaulting on their mortgages during the Great Depression. Despite whatever benevolent grounds it may have been founded on, however, as a product of its mission, the agency created color-coded (and color-conscious) “residential security maps” of over 200 American cities to assess lending risk, denoting green areas as "Best," blue as "Still Desirable," yellow as "Definitely Declining," and red as "Hazardous.” This would go on to be known as redlining, and its impact is still visible to this day. Redlined neighborhoods have significantly less green space, more asphalt, fewer trees, and higher surface temperatures than greenlined neighborhoods—a denial of both nature and nurture.

The most surefire way to get your neighborhood redlined? Merely the presence of Black people. HOLC documents flagged areas in cities like Boston as red due to—in their own words—“the infiltration of Negros,” regardless of the area’s housing quality or access to services like transit and schooling.

When the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was established a year later, it had a different mandate—not to rescue existing homeowners, but to expand homeownership by insuring mortgages so private banks could lend more freely. While the FHA and HOLC were separate bodies, they had the same discriminatory policy.

In a blatant cover-up, the FHA destroyed its set of graded maps in 1969 following two lawsuits filed in federal court alleging discrimination, eliminating the primary documentary record of its own geographic racism. What we do know, however, is that, through its official Underwriting Manuals, the administration advised appraisers to rate neighborhoods poorly if they contained "incompatible racial and social groups," explicitly stated that "a change in social or racial occupancy generally contributes to instability and a decline in values," and warned against the "infiltration of inharmonious racial groups."

Additionally, it refused to insure homes in or near Black neighborhoods, and actively favored new suburban construction over urban properties, simultaneously accelerating urban decay and white suburban growth.

If a neighborhood was redlined by either agency, banks refused mortgages, the FHA refused insurance, businesses left, and investment dried up. Residents were trapped in rentals or forced into predatory loans. Meanwhile, suburbs were being built with federally backed, low-interest loans, available almost exclusively to white families.

We only know this much because the HOLC was a temporary agency that had already wound down by the mid-1950s. The Federal Housing Administration is still present today, and so is its impact. According to the Federal Reserve, the non-Hispanic white homeownership rate is 75.0% as of Q1 2026. The rate for Black home ownership in the same timeframe is 44.0%—just over half.

The gap between Black and white homeownership is now wider than it was when race-based housing discrimination was legal. In 2020, Black homebuyers were denied mortgages at a rate 84% higher than white applicants, and Black borrowers who did receive loans were subject to higher interest rates and less favorable terms. 

Data from the 2019 American Housing Survey revealed Black homeowners with household incomes between $75,000 and $100,000 received higher interest rates (4.215%) than white homeowners making $30,000 or less (4.16%).

Interest rates typically have an inverse relationship with household income, so if a household earning nearly triple the income is also paying higher interest rates, it signifies a significant structural issue.

So, these people had nowhere to turn but lower-income housing projects. Projects that were themselves a product of the same discriminatory logic, built in redlined areas on cheap land, were explicitly designed without private outdoor space. Whatever green space was present was communal and institutional—not yours, not personal, and not a lawn in any meaningful sense—not nearly the American Dream they were promised. 

But the thing is, the people pushed into these neighborhoods didn’t just lose the lawn, they lost the clean air, the trees, the parks—they lost nature itself. The same political powerlessness that made a neighborhood easy to redline made it easy enough to run a highway through. Environmental racism and housing discrimination are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is just a drop in the $176.7 billion bucket that makes up the landscaping industry. 

The very same industry that has eliminated 150 million acres of ecologically productive habitat, including vital native plant species that specialist bees and butterflies depend on. The incessant need to have a perfect lawn results in land that provides nothing beyond aesthetics. In fact, my lawn's despicable "weeds”—its dandelions, clover, and wildflowers—were doing what they naturally evolved to do. My “obligation” to mow them down, however, is not natural—it’s quite the opposite.

On the topic of lawn care, pesticide and fertilizer runoff doesn’t stay in the suburbs. It flows into the rivers, streams, and groundwater that downstream communities depend on. Lower-income areas, disproportionately made up of people of color, are far more likely to rely on municipal water systems fed by those same waterways, and far less likely to have the resources to filter or avoid contaminated water. The lawn chemicals of wealthy suburbs literally flow downhill into poorer neighborhoods.

As if poisoning one vital resource of the human body wasn’t enough, nitrogen fertilizer runoff causes algal blooms, which in turn deplete oxygen in the water and create dead zones. This destroys local fishing, something many lower-income and Indigenous communities rely on.

Two down, one to go: a single gas mower running for an hour emits as much pollution as driving a car 300 miles, and that pollution frequently drifts into denser areas with less green buffer, and I’m sure you can guess what that means.

Finally, the heat island effect ties it all together. Monoculture lawns, despite being green, actually contribute to suburban heat islands because they replace far more ecologically complex native landscapes. And, yep, you guessed it, redlined areas, which have more asphalt and fewer trees on average, suffer the worst heat islands.

The very people locked out of the green are the ones who bear the brunt of it, quite literally subsidizing the aesthetic with their water, their air, and their health.

We cannot keep doing this. We need to embrace native grasses. Once established, they require far less water, fertilizer, and mowing than traditional turfgrass. They restore habitats for bees, butterflies, and birds. They’re cheaper to maintain long-term, which means they actually reduce the burden on working and middle-class homeowners.

What is stopping us?

HOAs. It’s always HOAs. They’re known for fining residents for "naturalized" lawns because they’re seen as "messy" or "unkempt," which is exactly how class stigma works, protecting the standard that serves as a proxy for race and class separation.

In this sense, the native plant movement is actually a quiet form of resistance, restoring natural ecology and reducing economic burdens all at once.

House Resolution 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, which would create a commission to study reparations, was first introduced in 1989 by the late Representative John Conyers (D-MI), and for almost three decades, the bill was essentially stalled. In 2021, the bill passed out of the House Judiciary Committee for the first time since it was first introduced in 1989, but never advanced to a full floor vote. Although it was reintroduced by Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) in 2025, the bill faces an uphill battle and is highly unlikely to advance through Congress because it lacks the necessary legislative support under the current Republican-controlled House.

While it seems we will be unable to address the historical effects of systemic racism that have plagued the American government since its inception at a federal level, we can work to reduce its impact through the introduction of native grasses.

As I write this article, it is nearing 3:00 a.m., at which time my sprinklers will leap into action, and I am confronted with the irony of putting digital pen to digital paper to deconstruct the American Dream as it quite literally plays out in front of me, arcs of water working to nurture the product of centuries of racist policies which have only worked to my benefit—like it or not.

In fact, just two days ago, I mowed (and weed-whacked) yet again. This time, however, I did not see as many bees. I don’t know if that was a good thing.