From The Book of Journeyman (1930) by Albert Jay Nock:

I have always lived close to the windward side of poverty, sometimes in pretty squalid surroundings, but I thank the Lord that I never had to live in a real-estater’s model suburb. I passed through one the other day, and I must say it was one of the most depressing sights I ever saw. Rows of houses built exactly alike on plots of ground as uncompromising in their uniformity as the squares of a chess-board. The only departure from uniformity was, as you would expect, where it would show most – in the color of the roofs. These were painted in glaring red, blue, purple, green, yellow, but no two adjacent roofs painted the same color.

It struck me then that here was the stock answer to the charge that American life is standardized and mechanized clear out of humanity’s reach. “Do you call us standardized?” These houses would say in indignation, “Just look at our roofs! You can see the signs of our sturdy individualism a mile away.” One wonders whether the interiors of these houses are all alike. Do the same pieces of golden oak furniture, turned out by the same factory, occupy the same relative positions in the same rooms? Moreover, is the life that expresses itself in these straitly limited ways as straitly regularized? Do all hands follow the same routine, internal and external, think the same thoughts, live, move and have their being, spiritual and physical, on the same terms? It is not improbable. Some budding Ph.D. in the social sciences might take for his thesis, “The Real-Estater as a Spiritual Force,” and make quite a good thing of it – good enough to astonish his professors, at least.