Dirt kicked up from new subdivisions has been raining down on neighborhoods for months, coating swing sets, sullying patio furniture and turning people's backyards into grunge pits they would rather avoid.

"Spring, summer and fall came and went, and we were not able to go outside," said Angela Oliveros, whose backyard borders an old Apex farm that a developer has cleared for homes. "It has been excruciating."

The buyers of new suburban castles rarely realize it, but developers throw around a lot of soil for them. Before anybody plants a manicured lawn, men in big, noisy machines must chop down trees, strip the topsoil and flatten hills.

The move to regrade suburbia is a significant change in how builders and developers, who created space for the nearly 15,000 homes built last year, do their work. Instead of clearing space for neighborhood roads and homes a few acres at a time as they once did, they bulldozed hundreds of acres at once.

Developers say that clearing and grading huge plots of land reduces building costs, allows them to put homes on smaller lots and reduces nuisance flooding. Reshaping the land also gives them more control over the layout of subdivisions -- at times allowing them to plant more trees than they tore down.

But the work can make life messy for neighbors. Nicole Mercer's backyard in Cary was too filthy to use for part of last year as workers terraced around 130 acres of hills behind her home for a neighborhood that the builder Pulte plans to fill with about 300 homes. Grime covered her deck and sent her son into occasional asthmatic fits.

"Everything is caked with dirt," Mercer said. "If you wash it off, it doesn't do any good because of the ongoing dirt."

Complaints about grime have not slowed the bulldozers in Wake County, where workers stripped bare more than 3,000 acres last year, according to county and local records.

Developers were particularly busy reshaping the land in Cary, according to town records. Last year, they cleared about 1,344 acres of wooded hills and molded them to accommodate homes, shopping centers and offices.

Although the results quickly disappear under buildings, grass and saplings, many who catch a glimpse of these suburban mini-deserts come away jarred. New subdivisions look more like strip mines than the green neighborhoods depicted in builders' sales pamphlets.

Just south of Research Triangle Park, for instance, a bare stretch of dirt hills has been created by workers clearing the way for hundreds of homes. The developer, Del Webb, hopes to sell them to baby boomers. One day last month, the streets near the model homes were coated with mud, and a bit of orange grime clung to the homes' window sills.

"It almost feels like you're in a different city," Cary Councilman Jack Smith said after visiting the vast cleared area a few months ago.

During dry periods, especially, these moonscapes make life miserable for neighbors.

Beverly Mitchell tried to keep up with the grime last year while Standard Pacific cleared about 60 acres near her Apex home. She stocked up on paper towels, kept Windex at the ready and vacuumed every day, but it wasn't enough. Dirt piled upon dirt.

"I am furious," she said.

New town policies

Town leaders are also unhappy, in part because builders and developers used to clear land for new neighborhoods in phases that kicked up less dirt and left more mature trees standing. Developers started clearing and flattening vast swaths of land only in recent years after town planners started encouraging them to cluster homes on small lots.

In response, Holly Springs leaders said in November that they would discourage plans that called for extensive alterations to the roll of the land. The Cary Town Council voted last year to triple the town's grading fee to $500. And, last month, Apex regulators began putting together proposed rules that would bar developers from clearing and grading more than a few acres at a time.

Angela Oliveros and her husband, Carlos Tavares, say all they want is somebody to power-wash their house. They figure that is the least the developer, Standard Pacific, could do for covering them with dust.

Standard Pacific agreed. On Thursday, the company handed Oliveros, Tavares and 18 of their neighbors $150 checks. With that, a company spokesman said, they should be able to spray away the grime of development.

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