Not everyone aspires to a quiet life in suburbia. But for those who do, it’s easy to describe them as desiring “a white picket fence” kind of existence. This particular type of property ...

I was drawing houses. One preschool-era picture even included details like shutters and a rose-covered picket fence. I wish I still had that one. In my hands anything could be shaped into a house ...

Beginning in the late 1940s, the white picket fence became synonymous with the American Dream. Lambert / Hulton Archive / Getty Images In little Taylor, Mississippi, outside Oxford, a developer ...