Well, I've owned two of those California stucco houses in my lifetime. One we bought in Fresno in 1976, and it had almost the same appearance and floor plan as the house my ex-wife bought in Sacramento in the 1990s. We painted the house soon after we moved in, so it didn't stay pastel for very long. There must be tens of thousands of houses in California with that floor plan. Urban planners call them "snout houses" because the garage door sticks out closer to the street than the rest of the house. When you drive down the street, all you see are garage doors. But hey, it was a fairly comfortable and serviceable house.

The other stucco house was in a small tract, and I haven't seen any houses like it outside that tract - so that one didn't have the sameness of the Fresno house.

But the Daly City houses Malvina sang about, were an extreme example. They were built on land that had once been breathtakingly beautiful, and they were of very poor quality and extreme sameness.

The California land developers sold the people a bill of goods. They could have and should have made much better use of the precious land in this beautiful state. I just can't see the song as snobbish. The developers did a dirty deed, and they deserved to be criticized. They destroyed miles and miles and miles of the Golden, Rolling Hills of California - and it's a shame.

And yes, there is much of that sameness in the people of urban California. When I worked temporarily in Los Angeles in the 1990s, I was amazed that so many well-paid, professional people had no life outside their job, their commute, and their time spent with their personal trainers. Why bother earning all that money if you don't have a life?

The people Malvina described in "Little Boxes," don't live in little boxes any more. They live in big, expensive boxes, which is why they can't afford the time to sing or hike or enjoy unstructured time with their children. The opening of Weeds, which uses the Malvina Reynolds song, is a perfect depiction of modern, urban California.

That's why I moved away from Los Angeles.

-Joe, in the Sierra Nevada foothills-