I’ve been working on something similar at my own house so bear with me while I nerd out on drainage systems for a moment here.
That downspout extension from the house on the left’s gutter system is discharging too close to the concrete foundation wall. That along with the apparent lack of slope out of the side yard is causing excess water to build up between the two houses. If you look just above the grass line you can see that the force of that water pushing on the wall is slowly eroding away the concrete. It could already be causing major cracks in the foundation or other water related damages. If not corrected you could see significant settling of the house or even an eventual collapse of that wall. I would be surprised if the house on the right is not experiencing similar problems. You should put in a french drain and/or buried corrugated pipes connected to the gutter downspouts to mitigate that problem.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. I hope you and that bunny both have a nice day.
Good talk!
Now, do you happen to also know why American downspouts so often are square/rectangular and European ones (typically) round?
I remember asking my dad that question when I was a little kid, and he didn’t have a good answer, beyond “probably just a design choice”. That answer left me wanting more. Not to the extent that I’ve ever attempted to find a better answer myself, but still wanting.
I don’t know for certain, but if I had to guess it would be that they used to make round drainage pipes for agriculture out of Terracotta so the first gutter systems in Europe likely used them because that was what they had available at the time. Later systems likely kept the shape both to match what was around them and because people were used to it and expected it. For metal gutters manufactured through certain industrial processes it would be simpler to bend a flat sheet of metal into a rectangular shape and fasten it together rather than making a cylinder.
Again, that’s just a semi-educated guess but it seems reasonable to me.