This seems like a letter from a bygone generation, struggling to understand something that has been obvious for a long time: lawns consume a lot of space and require a lot of work to maintain, while offering pretty much nothing in return unless you're really into the whole '50s-60s retro suburban thing. The question is not "why are lawns shrinking," the question is "how long will it take before people stop putting up with this silliness."
Fields and parks > lawns.<p>Admittedly, there's a desire for me to be able to have sizable lawn to continue to foster and adopt abused and/or neglected dogs (fostered 5 and counting, one adopted he's a 50kg cuddly play thing... Seriously. Get a big dog and surprise yourself).<p>But, even I don't need a large lawn for that. I need something large enough that it isn't required to clean daily to prevent my furbabies rolling around in their own filth.<p>The urban sprawl, two tier property system in Australia is terrible for this. Houses have huge lawns or none. And the areas neglected more so than most for lack of shared greenspace have huge homes and huge lawns with less and less dedicated public spaces.<p>Atypical of wealthy suburbs actually (I'm looking at you, Tarragindi) there's little public recreational area because when the suburbs were designed in the 60's, home owners put fences up and declared it mine.<p>Edit: too many words or too little.
In the town I grew up in (South Africa), there was a planning law that prevented the footprint of a house from being larger than a certain size. It had been that percentage for years and I'm hoping that it doesn't change because it's helped the area stay green and lovely without becoming overly built up.<p>Do similar planning laws exist in other countries?