The architecture of the suburban single-family home reproduces the latent paranoia of the American Dream. Dominated by the car as the vehicular circulatory system branches and plunges into the heart of the home in the form of the two-car garage, a family travels a great distance home to be confronted, from inside, with the window of a neighboring house. Amidst material wealth, a distinct sense of individual scarcity persists. Thus, to dismantle the fences which reify the speculator-developer property lines; to peel away at the ground level the exterior building envelope whose planarity repeats that of the property line, of mine vs. yours; and to brace the newly softened houses with common lateral supports, so that the houses begin to lean on each other, structurally and socially: these actions are simultaneously obvious yet inconceivable. Six single-family houses in a prototypical D.R. Horton development called Southtown in Vacaville, California serve as a case study. Their boundaries could diffuse, newly exposed wood framing acting as a filter for visual pathways between houses, private property spilling out into common land and common place. A certain degree of vulnerability creates fertile ground for mutual trust and a different understanding of the meaning of abundance.