Looking Green vs. Being Green: Lawn Painting and the American Housing Crisis

While the suburban American front lawn has never been an icon of sustainability, it may have reached a new low. As a result of the recession, the housing crisis, and the upswing of foreclosures across the U.S., business is surprisingly good in an often-overlooked sector of the economy: lawn painting. There are, believe it or not, a wide variety of companies routinely hired by banks to clean up, trim, and paint the front yards of foreclosed houses. Business is booming, particularly in places like Nevada and California, where no one's around to water the grass.

Lawn painting, believe it or not, has been around for a while. Managers of football fields and golf courses have long employed this technology to keep their grounds looking artificially green and it has been a fairly common practice for real-estate agents looking to spruce up the homes they're trying to sell, particularly in times of drought. Climatic and financial.

For companies like Green Genie and GrassBGreen, the grass certainly seems to be greener on this side of the housing market collapse. Charging 25 cents per square foot of lawn, Green Genie makes between $250 and $300 painting the average American lawn. The Green lasts about four months. The companies assures customers that a painted lawn is safe for pets (and people) and that the color won't come off if it does happen to rain. This year, GrassBGreen.com has reported record profits.

At first glance, lawn painting seems just about as far as you could possibly get from "green" behavior. (Even if it is, chromatically speaking, "greening" the neighborhood.) In what is almost a parody of suburban life, this bizarre incarnation of "keeping up with the Jones' " involves employing chemicals, literally, to fake an illusion of prosperity. Hardly in line with Sustainability's penchant for earnest behavior, and all-things-natural.

Or is it?

Let's not forget that the American front lawn, despite the fact that it is plant material, is anything but natural. It requires excessive amounts of water and time, genetic manipulation, fertilizers, and pesticides. All of this is suddenly unnecessary if you opt for fake green over the real thing. Less water wasted, fewer pesticides polluting the neighborhood, decreased commercial demand to engineer the "perfect" species (or is it brand?) of grass.

This hardly means that painting your lawn constitutes "green" behavior, but, in comparison to the alternative of growing a lawn, it might not be such a bad idea.