My wife tells me the same things about wanting a lawn for the kids to play with. It’s only recently that she has opened up to alternatives — from having native grasses and ground cover, to shaping the terrain.
I live in suburban US in a
major metropolitan area, and I grew up here. When I talk to people around me maintaining lawns, they don’t think they are signaling wealth either. But some look at me like I am crazy for developing a front yard with native plants. I am not assuming nor am I projecting.
That signal for wealth is largely unconscious. Used to be, those lawns were maintained by sheep. It was a sign of wealth when you can have a lawn that was not pasture. Then people got their own patch of lawns, didn’t have sheep.
If you were to propose to people to get rid of their lawn, there is usually an unconscious resistance coming from wanting that aesthetic. But rarely are those aesthetics and why it is pleasing ever examined. Instead, there are nebulous notions about property value, or about how a trim, neat lawn reflects the work ethics, or caring about one’s property. It’s stuff that has been conditioned.
Furthermore, I was responding to someone from Nigeria. From the perspective of someone whose community have to dig for their own water or sewage, running water is a huge deal. I recall a Netflix documentary of one Indian woman’s fight with the local government to get flushing toilets for a school.
Those people who are not consciously signaling wealth are instead taking the wealth for granted, not even knowing the history of lawns. The point still stands: 70% of residential water purified to drinking water standards are used to water a lawn. From the perspective of communities where you have to fight tooth and nail to get purified drinking water at all, that’s not so admirable.