It seems that just about everything has come to a standstill except building. There are active constructions sites all over the place, one of them virtually in our backyard. A big house is being shoehorned into the last remaining patch of woodland . It makes sense that, under the present administration, the last industry to close down would be real estate development. There is something touchingly optimistic about this suburban building right now. It suggests the confident anticipation of willing buyers with mortgages, and the money to spare for furniture and home appliances, alarm systems, and all the other things necessary to turn an empty patch of land into a profitable real estate deal. Builders, like tree farmers, must gamble on the long-term future. There’s not much variation in the design of these new homes. You see the same architecture all over Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. It’s as if, in the great suburban explosion of the 1950s and 1960s, the developers had set