by David Wann
You may feel isolated from people in your well-equipped castle, disconnected from nature, or short on time. Your diet of fast food and ready-to-eat meals conveys an abundance of calories but not much in the way of energy. The evening news upsets you and your stomach rumbles from job-related stress and unpaid bills. The relaxation you need may not happen since you’re not sleeping that well lately. You’re a mess! (We all are, really, because the culture we’ve created is off balance.) Like all of us, you want your home to be a place of comfort but it sometimes feels more like a house of detention.
Maybe it’s time to think differently about the way you live. For example, by literally thinking “outside the box” of your house or apartment, you can tap into intrinsic assets your neighborhood and town have to offer. Instead of consumption, you can have community. Though the housing market in general is sagging in 2007, the quest for housing alternatives is going strong. In every large metro area and many smaller ones, there are now “new urbanism” projects and traditional neighborhood developments where these kinds of features are part of the design: stores and public buildings; parks in central locations; narrow, traffic-calming streets; shade trees; front porches; small yards and common open space; and functional alleyways. The idea is to create a sense of place and encourage interactions among neighbors, just as in the well-designed neighborhoods of a hundred years ago, which often become a town’s flagship neighborhoods. Like Denver’s Washington Park neighborhood, which has a great park as a centerpiece and restaurants at the fringes, these neighborhoods are as strong as the bricks and hardwoods they’re made of. I lived in Wash Park for a few years, and I admired this sturdy, functional place.
There are also many examples of neighborhoods codesigned by the people who will soon live there. Since 1989, two hundred “cohousing” neighborhoods have been built or are in the planning stages, and I’ve lived in one of them for ten years. As described in chapter 5, there are even ways to give existing neighborhoods extreme makeovers, creating community culture out of what used to be just a collection of houses and streets.
I believe that neighborhoods and communities offer the best counterweight to the corporate dominance that takes away our voices. Whether or not we realize it yet, the grassroots power we collectively wield in our communities can tilt civilization in a more sensible, peaceful, democratic direction. Neighborhoods can be places where Americans make the transition from “me” to “we,” getting our priorities straight and becoming citizens again.
Writes mainstream real estate columnist Blanche Evans, “Homes are about more than houses—they are about proximity to jobs, services, community resources, schools, parks, dining, entertainment, friends, and family …”1 Three-fourths of Americans now say they’d give up their dream homes to live in great neighborhoods. Yet the habits of privacy and “the good life” are deeply ingrained in our generation. Many people don’t know where to look for a neighborhood rich in real wealth. Or if they already live in one, they don’t take advantage of it by getting to know their neighbors, being active in local politics and places of worship, helping to make improvements in the school system, or learning about the history and natural characteristics of the place they live in.
Where we live is one of the most tangible indicators of what we value. So the question, “What makes a neighborhood great?” is really asking, “What do we value the most?” There are many annual lists of Best Places to Live, most of which place the familiar categories near the top: jobs, crime, property values, cost of living, low taxes, and average commute time. Other qualities often considered are average income in the neighborhood, average education level, and average number of divorced residents. Toward the bottom of many a list are access to public and cultural amenities and health considerations.
These familiar lists seem to evaluate neighborhood assets largely in terms of income, appearance, and exclusivity—what we have rather than who we are. However, writer/editor Jay Walljasper looks at places through different lenses. “Cities can rank quite high in these categories and still be dreary, soulless places,” he believes. “Indeed, such qualities sometimes diminish the spirit of a community, as the push for a narrowly individualistic vision of the Good Life results in economic inequality, environmental degradation, social fragmentation, and lousy public services. A good place to live ought to offer more than just high salaries and low crime rates.”2
Walljasper looks for great spots to “sip latté, watch foreign films, and browse used-book shops.” In ranking the ten most enlightened towns in America, he and his team looked for communities “showing the way to a better future” and gave Ithaca, New York, and Portland, Oregon, the highest rankings. Access to preventive, alternative health care was important; as were strong evidence of civic involvement; diverse spiritual opportunities; homes that are affordable to the town’s hairdressers, janitors, and teachers; a celebration of regional culture and regional products: locally baked bread, locally grown produce, local artists; and governmental policies that reflect the specific needs of a place, such as Portland’s promotion of downtown development.
Where Do You Live?
We use the question, “Where do you live?” automatically, without really thinking about it. Sometimes the question just means, “How far do I have to drive to get there, and how long will it take?” Too often “where you live” means where you park your car, consume energy, watch three or four hours of TV a day, generate four pounds of trash, and argue with your spouse. Hopefully, in your case, it means something far more magnificent: where you have your best relationships, and your most creative ideas. Where you feel the most content and energized. Where you come to life.
Ideally, where you live is about a place and not just a house. A place where neighbors know and value you enough to be there for you if you need help, and where you can meet the universal human need to offer your own support and caring. A great place to walk, because a thriving pedestrian population results in healthy neighbors, cleaner air, human-scaled architecture, and lower crime. A great neighborhood creates less stress and offers more “social capital” and trust than a typical neighborhood; and it creates less stress on the environment by using less land, water, energy, and materials. While the general assumption is that a house in the upscale part of town would always be preferable, it may not necessarily have the most value overall. To afford that mini-mansion, you may be stretching your paycheck tighter than the rubber band on a toy airplane, spending many hours vacuuming unused rooms, and climbing ladders to squeegee endless, impossible-to-reach windows.
If we think about what we need to be happy, great neighborhoods can provide many of those needs directly. We need a sense of belonging and participation, a sense of security and safety; we need healthy food, connection with the no-worries feelings that nature bestows, and activities that we enjoy, to name just a few. Think of the places you’ve lived, and how they met or failed to meet needs like these.
I’ve been pretty lucky in the neighborhood department; I’ve spent at least half my years in places that really supported my growth. One of them was Larchmont, a small suburb of New York City with great connections. It’s connected to the ocean, by passenger rail to the city and all the culture that goes with it, and to a rich heritage that’s reflected in its sturdy, sometimes opulent homes. It’s linked with the Boston Post Road, developed in the 1670s from an old Algonquian Indian trail that King Charles II made America’s first official mail route. President Washington traveled this road through New England on his 1789 inaugural tour.
To live in Larchmont is to be into sailing, fishing, or at least swimming. Chances are the household includes commuters to jobs in the city that are stimulating—often linked with company headquarters, entertainment, or the financial sector. And then there’s upstate, a huge universe of forests, farms, and delightful small towns that don’t seem to notice that New York City’s on the same planet.
I learned how to drive in Larchmont, and how to play guitar (my dad brought a ukulele ba
ck from a Hawaiian business trip). I had my first job there at the age of fourteen—as a caddy at the local golf course. I kissed my first kiss, published my first poem, cut high school classes to go to Jones Beach and Greenwich Village, and watched my older sister and her friends dance to Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.” I watched my parents weave a network of friends from church and people in the neighborhood. We didn’t have a large yard, but my mom loved to take care of her azaleas and rhododendrons.
I went back to Larchmont a few years ago after thirty-five years away, observing again how great communities meet needs. I parked at my old house and spent a few hours walking through the old neighborhoods—even sneaking across the corner of a backyard the way I used to on my way to elementary school. I was a time traveler, on a spring day somewhere in my past. The dogwoods were in full bloom and the houses still echoed with the voices of my friends. Munching a classic hot dog from the same stand I went to as a kid, I analyzed this place through the eyes of a filmmaker (I’d recently produced several programs on sustainable communities). My old hometown had great bones: well-designed pockets of public space in each neighborhood; a great school; and big, old hardwood trees that forested the whole village. In fact, I recognized a few familiar cracks in the heaving sidewalk in front of my old house, created years ago by wandering oak tree roots (A grown-up kid would notice). The same steel steps and stone walls were still securely in place at my elementary school, and I wished the school was open (it was a Sunday) so I could try to retrieve a baseball card I’d flipped under the school’s metal threshold forty years earlier. (A coat hanger might possibly get it, and I just happened to have one in my suitcase.)
I tested a standard indicator of a great community, walking from my old house to the business center in a little more than five minutes, which makes it quite possible to pick up a quart of milk without burning a quart of gas, and say hello to neighbors along the way. A similar indicator still seemed viable in Larchmont—an eight-year-old girl could safely walk to the park or the public library. This indicator presupposes a library worth walking to, sidewalks to walk on, and neighborhoods safeguarded by the active presence of the neighbors themselves. I was tempted to try developer Andrés Duany’s blindfold test, in which you assume that slow-moving cars will stop if you cross a commercial street with a blindfold on. But my faith in modern-day Larchmont didn’t extend quite that far.
I observed with older eyes that the town offered a place for people, not just cars. I observed great parks, great attention to lush landscaping, increasing ethnic diversity, and the classic, fully functional railroad, still running right on schedule. To my delight, I reexperienced a town worth living in (if you could afford it), a town whose residents cared about its continuance. And I realized that community greatness is built on caring, good design, citizen participation, and a strong vision of what a community can be. From these desirable qualities flow a strong fiscal base and a satisfied population. Yet many of America’s seventy thousand or more communities don’t reach these goals, partly because the “factory” that builds and maintains communities (zoning regulations, building industry, government incentives, certain patterns of thinking) is out of step with what people need.
Since Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best days, America’s demographics and values have changed significantly, yet we are still platting and building neighborhoods and homes that assume upwardly mobile families live there with jobs in the city and plenty of time to take care of the lawn. In fact, fewer than 50 percent of America’s suburban homes (where more than half of Americans now live) are occupied by traditional mom-and-pop families; more than a quarter of our houses are occupied by single people. As author Joel Kotkin points out, “Roughly three out of five jobs in American metropolitan areas are now located in the suburbs, and more than twice as many Americans commute from suburb to suburb than from suburb to city.”3 The ethnic mix of the suburbs has changed, too, enriching the culture and diversity of its neighborhoods. For example, a majority of Asian Americans, half of Hispanics, and 40 percent of African Americans now live in the suburbs.
Because it was assumed that Americans would always love our cars and never take account of how much we were consuming, builders accommodated a doubling of the U.S. population (between 1950 and 2005) with a drive-in design strategy. The idea of community was rarely part of the equation, and streets were laid out with little thought of such human needs as socializing, solar exposure, and exercise. Locating the new subdivisions on cheap farmland resulted in several dysfunctions at the same time: It not only paved and smothered the region’s best agricultural land but also put miles of resource-intensive travel between our houses and our jobs, stores, and friends.
Now, we’re faced with an ironic but pressing question: How do we strategically rebuild some of what we’ve just built to make it work better? In addition, how do we (quickly) refine the focus and priorities of new construction in the near future, because much will remain in place for hundreds of years? All new construction needs to be resource efficient, because the days of unlimited fuels, raw materials, and land are over. And it needs to enrich life rather than degrade it; to be less about buying life and more about experiencing it. The cultural components of American expansion have provided various ways to escape. The TV, automobile, and the suburb (country life without the mud) taught us we could always choose to be somewhere else. Consequently, we undervalue and underutilize where we already are.
Now that the brightness of the American Dream is flickering, making neighborhoods and villages livable and sustainable again should be a top priority. As we reshape existing components of suburbia, for example, we need to determine the best location for village centers, as well as who will fund their creation. Small businesses that convert existing houses and lots into stores is one source. Tax dollars invested in public infrastructure like community centers is another; and new alliances with utility companies may be a third. To avoid the high costs of adding power plants and water treatment plants, the utilities may fund capacity (including purchase and demolition of certain existing buildings) at the neighborhood scale. New, low-impact ways of generating electricity, such as large fuel cells (with pure hydrogen as a fuel source), would work well at the neighborhood scale. Such mini-power plants could supply electricity, pure water, and heat to networks of houses, generating neither pollution nor noise. This technology is still very expensive but its value may be much larger than its cost.
Instead of spending half a trillion dollars (EPA estimate) to repair and replace sewage infrastructure in upcoming years, wastewater utilities might begin to look closely at neighborhood-scaled “Living Machines” that mimic the way nature purifies sewage. Snails, fish, cattails, and other natural species live in tanks inside of greenhouses; the wastewater flows through them at a controlled speed. Because these systems perform as well or better than resource-intensive conventional treatment plants, some state environmental departments such as in Indiana have certified their use. I toured a Living Machine in Indiana, where wastes from about eighty employees at the PAWS office (headquarters of cartoonist Jim Davis’s Garfield empire) are efficiently treated. Since decomposition is quick and natural, the facility smells as earthy and sweet as its final stage—a crop of marketable roses.
Conceivably, a neighborhood’s homeowners association could become a for-profit business, leasing/owning and operating small neighborhood businesses and mini-facilities that make their neighborhoods far more sustainable. As Michael Schuman suggests in the book Going Local, community-owned enterprises are not only possible (the Green Bay Packers is one), but seemingly inevitable. Why not invest directly in our communities? Another force to be reckoned with is the confederation of Homeowners Associations; fifty-seven million Americans are now “citizens” of a quarter of a million private jurisdictions. What an opportunity to promote sustainability! Instead of just decreeing and enforcing what neighbors must not do (such as have sculptures on their front lawn or put up basketbal
l hoops), imagine neighborhood associations that begin to encourage resource efficiency and the creation of neighborhood culture!
One very interesting example is the Norwood-Quince neighborhood in Boulder, Colorado, where neighbors are determined to make the car an alternative form of transportation. Neighborhood resident Graham Hill is leading the charge. Expert in out-of-car experiences from electric assisted bikes to Segway scooters, Hill and his neighbors have taken one step after another—often literally—to make their neighborhood people-friendly. Out of 210 households in his neighborhood, for instance, 130 have Eco-passes for the well-managed bus system. The city provides discounts for neighborhoods that participate cooperatively.
The neighbors also have excellent pedestrian access to a shopping area, open space in a nearby park, several bike-pedestrian walkways, and even a solar-lit walkway paid for by a neighborhood mini grant from the city. “We observed that many neighbors weren’t walking to the Boulder Market at night because the street was too dark and seemed unsafe,” explains Hill. “So we applied for a grant to install solar-powered lights with battery storage. Now pedestrians can be seen—and can see—even at night.”
Forty people in the neighborhood are members in a car-share club—essentially car rental by the hour—and more than fifty have become members in an electric bike-share operation; the electric bikes are powered by solar cells incorporated into a bike shed.
The neighbors are now looking into creating better access by linking several existing pathways with easements through the edges of several private yards. To dramatize the efficiencies of muscle-power versus fossil fuel power, Hill and his colleagues staged a race between the mayor, who rode a bicycle, and the county commissioner, who drove a hybrid car. After each ran several compulsory errands, the bike-riding mayor won.4