The new status quo is professional lawn care, raking in $31.3-billion in 2003.
By MICHAEL VAN SICKLER
Published September 11, 2004
[Times photo: Mike Pease]
From left, Mario De La Cruz, Santos De La Cruz and Chris Sagnella with Lawn Enforcement Yard Management groom three yards in a row in New Tampa on Aug. 20. Professional lawn care is a booming business in the suburbs.
Blades of grass stick to legs and arms slick with sweat. Turf stains smear sopping wet T-shirts. The stench of freshly chopped St. Augustine sod hangs in the humid 95-degree air of a Florida summer."
Christopher Locascio takes a long swig from a water bottle and wipes his brow. Despite a rainstorm that stalled them 45 minutes, Locascio, Robert Bojinoff and Mario De La Cruz have mowed, edged and clipped weeds on 16 lawns since 8 a.m. It's just after lunchtime, and 10 remain.
"This isn't easy," Locascio said. "We sweat all day doing the same thing day after day. It's monotonous, it's hard, and we're treated like nobodies."
They toil anonymously along deserted, winding streets to look-alike homes. Locascio hasn't met half the owners of the yards he cuts. Families leave for work and school before he and his crew begin cutting.
What draws Locascio to this desolate sun-bleached landscape is money.
His company cuts 232 lawns a week. After he pays Bojinoff, De La Cruz and another three-man crew, he earns about $96,000 a year.
"I make more than a lot of the homeowners I work for," Locascio said. "Most people would be surprised to know that."
The phantom industry of professional lawn care is exploding nationwide, especially in the type of suburban enclaves found in Wesley Chapel, Tampa Palms, Carrollwood and Brandon. Fueling this surge are newer subdivisions with deed restrictions that dictate lawn standards to working families short on time.
For a rising number of households, the easiest way to meet community expectations is to hire a landscape company.
"My husband doesn't have time," said Andrea Traina, a 32-year-old who lives in Pasco County's Meadow Pointe subdivision. "And better a lawn crew do it than me."
That thinking is redefining what it means to own a lawn in America. Introduced to a growing middle class after World War II, lawns are now considered by almost half of this country's 58-million homeowners as too time-consuming or troublesome to maintain themselves. Yet everyone still wants a beautiful lawn.
The professional landscape industry grossed $31.3-billion in 2003 - nearly double what it made in 1998, according to the National Gardening Association in Burlington, Vt.
By paying others to tend their yards, U.S. homeowners are abandoning a popular 20th century pastime in exchange for free time and status, said Virginia Scott Jenkins, author of Lawns: The History of an American Obsession.
"Community and industry pressures have driven the cultural aesthetic of the lawn," Jenkins said. "But most people realize that keeping the lawn up is a lot of work.
"So lawn companies are about status. If you can aspire to hiring one, you've come far in this world."
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The industry will be hard-pressed to convert holdouts like Aaron Niec.
The 28-year-old financial planner said he enjoys doing his lawn on Treeline Drive in the Brandon suburb of Bloomingdale. Growing up in Flint, Mich., Niec ran a lawn service that helped pay for college, cars and beer.
"I never considered a lawn service," Niec said. "I'd rather take pride in making it look good than pay someone else to do it. Every week you'd have to write a check, and that's just one check I don't want to write."
In Tampa Palms, it's almost expected that homeowners have spiffy lawns and professionals to keep them that way, said Maggie Wilson, the community's taxing district consultant.
"I know of some guy who relaxes by doing his lawn," Wilson said. "And people whisper about him, saying he's cheap."
In some neighborhoods, hiring a lawn company is not a choice but a condition for living there. Sophie Patnaude said mandatory professional lawn care was a chief reason she and her husband moved to Sterling Manor, a 103-home, zero-lot line neighborhood in Tampa Palms. Each homeowner pays $98 a month for maintenance, much of that going to lawn care.
"My husband said he was never going to cut grass again," Patnaude said.
Developers and community managers for New Tampa subdivisions say the majority of homeowners hire companies for lawn service. On weekdays, lawn crews frequently outnumber homeowners on residential streets.
Scott Chapman said he's one of the few people on his Arbor Greene street who mows his own grass.
"I'm in a routine where I do it once a week," Chapman said. "But I really don't like to do it because it's so hot."
Chapman is what the lawn care industry calls a "do-it-yourselfer," albeit a reluctant one. The industry's goal is to persuade him and other holdouts to join the 24.7-million "do-it-for-you" households that spend an average of $1,267 a year on lawn service.
"People live in these communities where lawns have to be a certain way," said Locascio, the lawn man approaching six figures. "But they don't have the time anymore and they'd rather spend that time with the kids or doing something else. It's a lot easier hiring someone else to do it."
