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Bringing Community to Your Front Yard and/or Sidewalk

2008-10-03T15:55:00-08:00

Local Governmental Approval
It’s not clear to me why local governments should care about what we put in our front yards, but, well, they usually do care. Sidewalks are a different matter, because they are government-built and maintained, and serve a public purpose.

In the case of my front yard in Menlo Park, first I, and then my landscape architect, have met with Menlo Park City officials (in the planning and transportation departments) many times to get preliminary approval for our draft design. This has taken a couple of months so far, not because these officials are not responsive, but because we’re proposing things they’ve never considered before. This process is going well, and I expect that we’ll get that preliminary approval very soon.

I stress the word preliminary because we haven’t submitted plans for exactly what we want to build yet. By asking what sorts of things would get approved before submitting final plans, we save a lot of time and money because creating final plans is time-consuming. Also, city planners usually prefer to have a chance to give feedback on elements of a preliminary design prior to considering a design for final approval.

Notwithstanding all this discussion of local government approval, I do not always believe that asking for approval is a good idea. Often, it may make sense to “just do it” and hope that you fly under the radar of local government bureaucrats. This is particularly the case if you believe that no neighbors will complain and if you suspect that the answer from the government might be “no” if you ask.

The history of the efforts in Portland I mentioned at the top of this article is relevant here. Mark Lakeman, one of the leaders of the first efforts at Share-it Square, told me he and his neighbors “just did it” at first, but in pushing forward, they found a sympathetic advocate in Portland city government. It was quite helpful that were able to show that a large majority of neighbors approved of what they were doing.

In fact, Lakeman and his colleagues were able to get a new law passed in Portland that allows for the kinds of changes to streets, sidewalks, and front yards in an area if at least 80% of nearby residents approve.

Neighbor Approval
Ultimately, the logic behind governments getting involved in what you put in front of your house is that they are representing the collective interests of neighbors. So, if your neighbors approve of what you have put there, it’s difficult for the government to argue against it.

In addition, you have to live with your neighbors, so doing things that they oppose would seem to be a bad idea, particularly since the whole point of the facilities I’m describing here are to promote good neighbor relations. In fact, the more neighbors see what you are placing in front of your house as theirs, the greater the likelihood that they will adopt it and even help you maintain it.

Certainly, Lakeman and his colleagues in Portland have done a masterful job in garnering community support for all their projects. The Share-It Square experience described above is but one example of the great work that the non-profit that Lakeman helped found, City Repair has done there to build grassroots support for community projects.

However, there are two primary reasons why you may delay trying to win neighbors’ approval until you have erected the new facility, or why you may want to avoid certain neighbors entirely. First, some ideas, especially very new and strange ones, are best communicated in concrete, tangible form. In other words, you may believe that, “once they see it, they’ll get it.” Of course, waiting until you have created the facility before showing it to neighbors risks the possibility that they’ll hate it and oppose it after you’ve expended a lot of time and money.

Second, asking neighbors “permission” makes them feel like they have veto power over what you’re doing. To mitigate this problem and still get a feel for what they think about your plan before you build it, you could mention it as something you’re doing, not something you need their permission for.

In the case of my front yard family room, I’m having casual conversations about what I’m doing (not asking for permission!) with selected individual neighbors, one at a time, as I’m working on getting official approval from the City.

Building and Installing the Facility
The facilities at Portland’s Share-It Square include a kids’ playhouse made out of tree branches, a stone & concrete couch, a wooden message board, a wooden tea stand, a wooden book exchange stand, and a wooden general item exchange stand. (You can view pictures here.)

These appear to be non-professionally made, yet quite functional. My guess is that neighbors created each of these in their garages from a combination of used parts and new materials.

If you have the time and inclination, creating things like this with your kids can be a very engaging weekend activity.

On the other hand, I’ve engaged a professional landscape design and build firm to design our outdoor living room and build all its components. I chose to hire a professional designer and builder because we’re creating an entire environment, not one individual item, so the task is more complex. I want everything to work together well and look aesthetically pleasing, too.

In two recent articles I described how people are putting things in their front yards and sidewalks to promote community. First, I described my initial thoughts for an ”outdoor family room” for my front yard in Menlo Park, Califor…

When Communities Take Over Their Own Streets

2008-09-23T15:55:00-08:00

The first, and perhaps still the best, example of Lakeman’s genius is the intersection close to his house now called ”Share-It Square.” On the pavement of the intersection itself is a mural painted by nearby residents and refreshed or amended every year. Surrounding the intersection on the four corners the many structures shown in the photos below:

From the photos here, you can see that these structures are made, heavily used, and well-maintained by the residents themselves. In addition, note that many homeowners in the broader surrounding area have erected structures similar to these, so the idea has spread to the entire neighborhood.

Not only do neighbors frequent Share-It Square everyday to pass away free time, but they also use it for major events in their lives. Many important events have taken place there, including many weddings like Lakeman’s last year.

Practically all members of the neighborhood have come to embrace the changes there. In a survey a few years ago, an overwhelming majority (over 85% in each case) felt that crime had decreased, traffic had slowed, and communication between neighbors had improved. In addition, Lakeman told me that real estate agents claim that properties in that neighborhood are much more in demand.

So how you do this in your neighborhood? Won’t your city’s planning department shoot you down if you erect a couch or message board next to your sidewalk? And what about the inevitable resistance from anti-change neighbors? Is this only possible in Portland? I’ll address these questions in a subsequent article.

I had an amazing day in Portland, Oregon last week. I got a tour of sidewalks, front yards, and intersections all over the city where people have erected structures for people to interact and share.

Leading me on the tour was Mark Lakeman, the father of this movement in Portland. He’s founder the nonprofit community transformation organization, City Repair, and he’s also the founder and leader of Communitecture, an architectural firm that focuses on projects that build community relations.

I was quite inspired by what I saw. You see, the other broad-based efforts I’ve identified on to increase community interactions - co-housing and new urbanism - are quite limited in reach because both usually require building everything from scratch.

The innovations I saw in Portland, on the other hand, infused new opportunities for community interactions into existing neighborhoods at very low cost. The approach inspired by Lakeman is to add simple community-friendly facilities to sidewalks, front yards, and intersections. In other words, we can implement these ideas today, right at our present homes, to increase neighborly relations.

When Communities Take Over Their Own Streets

2008-09-23T15:55:00-08:00

Is Shunning Modern Technology Worth It?

2008-09-15T14:18:00-08:00

This is starting to turn out well, we think, but even if it does make them more community-oriented, is it worth it? After all, there are great benefits to these technologies. There is no doubt that some television can be quite entertaining, and driving in a car can be mighty convenient. In the meantime, very often when we go outside, there’s no one there but us because all our neighbors are inside watching screens or away from their houses in their cars.

Besides, we don’t want to isolate ourselves from our friends and neighbors who use these modern technologies. Recall that we want to spend more time with them, not less. So, are we just wasting all this effort? Perhaps all our efforts to limit our children’s exposure to these technologies will seem foolish in a few years when they start experiencing them at their friends’ houses.

My wife and I struggle with these questions. Certainly, a good argument can be made that the costs of shunning these technologies isn’t worth the benefit, and that, even if that’s not the case, we’re wasting our time trying to be different from everyone else.

So, we’re doing everything we can to tilt the odds in favor of success. First, we spent two and a half years searching for a new home in a neighborhood where it’s likely our kids will have lots of outdoor play opportunities with other kids their ages. Second, now that we’re here, we’re working very hard to build ties with our neighbors. Practically every day, we’re outside talking with neighbors.

Third, we’re investing a lot of time and money into building an ”outdoor family room” in our front yard. This will, we hope, significantly increase the outdoor fun opportunities for all children in our neighborhood, including ours.

While we’re having fun doing all of this now (house-hunting was not fun!), my wife and I do believe that we’re racing against time. Once our oldest is in school and starts hanging with friends a lot, he’s going to compare his home life with that of his friends, complete with television, videogames, computers, and car rides to all sorts of activities.

We really hope he and his friends agree that our life in our neighborhood is “cooler” than his friends’ lives. Our dream is that our house and the surrounding neighborhood become the hangout of choice for our son and his friends. We’d even settle for a tie - if our son spent half his days hanging out at his friends, and half in our front yard and neighborhood.

Televisions, videogames, and computers. Our two boys (4 and 10 months) have barely ever seen any of them. Cars? Well, yes, they ride in cars everyday, but they also ride bikes with me - the oldest on his own bike, the youngest in a trailer - practically every day to go to school, to go to a park, to pick up groceries, or just to play.

Among other motivations, my wife and I are attracted by the idea that limiting exposure to these technologies will cause them to participate in our neighborhood far more than they would otherwise. We think that’s a very, very good thing.

Facilitating Character Development in Our Neighborhood: A Different Approach to Parenting

2008-09-08T10:35:00-08:00

Our oldest is four, so we’re still trying to figure all this out. We haven’t yet encountered much of the parent peer pressure that afflicts elementary school parents.

We very much want our kids to have some measure of autonomy to decide what they do, with whom, and when. Of course, we want them to be safe and smart, but most importantly, we also want them to have a strong sense of who they are and what they can contribute to the world.

William Damon writes of the crisis of American children’s lack of a sense of identity in his recent book, The Path to Purpose. He describes today’s youth as being unusually lacking in a sense of purpose in their lives. “They report an inner life of anxiety and a sense of feeling trapped in a life that is not under their own control. They feel disappointed in themselves and discouraged by what life has offered them thus far. They despair at the emptiness and meaninglessness of their daily activities.”

Madeline Levine writes of the problems of alienation in current adolescents in The Price of Privilege. The book is devoted to discussing a swelling tide of adolescents who, “indulged, coddled, pressured and micromanaged on the outside, . . . appear to be inadvertently deprived of the opportunity to develop an inside.” Levine adds, “They lack spontaneity, creativity, enthusiasm and, most disturbingly, the capacity for pleasure.” Many end up very depressed, listless, or even suicidal.

Today, Levine writes that fewer and fewer adolescents

. . . are able to resist the constant pressure to excel. Between accelerated academic courses, multiple extracurricular activities, premature preparation for high school or college, special coaches and tutors engaged to wring the last bit of performance out of them, many kids find themselves scheduled to within an inch of their lives. . . As a result, kids can’t find the time, both literal and psychological, to linger in internal exploration; a necessary precursor to a well developed sense of self.

Wow… That’s a breathtakingly eloquent argument against the hyper-involved parenting approach that’s in vogue these days.

So, my wife and I have figured out what we don’t want to do, but that still begs the question, what do we do?

Well, our basic idea is to try to be facilitators for our children to find their own identities and achieve their highest potential while teaching some absolute guidelines for safety and morality.

As facilitators, we want to bring our children into challenging situations, model behavior for them, and then provide them with the opportunity to start doing parts of these things on their own. It’s important that we do this in our own neighborhood, so we can monitor and guide the process as we feel we need to.

I’ll give you an example. My son Marco just turned four, and practically every day he and I ride our bikes in our neighborhood. In a few short months he’s gotten very agile on a bike, and his judgment has improved tremendously.

He’s still a four-year-old, but his maturity on a bike is very impressive. He and I regularly cross El Camino Real (a large six-lane road) together, and my wife and I now let him ride the sidewalks and street in front of our house without our watching. We still check in frequently, but due to lots of maturing through experience, he’s proven to us that he can handle it.

In addition to riding with him, I spend a lot of time walking with him to neighbors houses for chats and impromptu play sessions. Because he’s become so comfortable in front of our house, we’ve encouraged him to go knock on our next-door-neighbors’ doors himself when he hits a ball into their yards and wants to retrieve it. So far, this has worked out quite well.

Finally, as I’ve written earlier, we’re working on making our front yard into an outdoor family room. The big idea here is that our kids will gain confidence and social skills as they entertain guests who come to their home turf without the invitation of parents.

So, we’re working hard for our kids, but we’re not doing the things that “model parents” around us are doing - choosing friends, setting up playdates, coaching their sports teams, working at their schools, or driving them to lots of structured activities. Instead, we’re trying to build a strong foundation in our neighborhood for our kids to develop their confidence and their own identities. Of course, since it’s right outside our front door, we can get involved anytime we feel we need to.

We’ll see how this works out, but thus far, we’re quite excited by the possibilities…

Model parents of today love their kids so much, they choose friends for them. They set up play dates for them. They coach their sports teams. They work in their schools. They plan myriad structured activities for them, and then they take them there.

This is how we define excellent parenthood in the 21st century. The more involvement in our kids’ lives, the better.

I’m a bit embarrassed to say my wife and I don’t want to do any of these things. Any. We don’t want to choose our kids’ friends, set up play dates, coach their sports teams, work in their schools, or drive them to tons of structured activities.

Does this mean we’re bad parents? Well, maybe, but not necessarily.

Learning Through Unstructured Play, part 2

2008-09-02T15:48:00-08:00

I could always find a coin to flip, and I could instantly be absorbed in the drama of the game. Who would win—heads or tails? Would heads start off with a big lead and then lose it to tails in the last few flips? Would the results be the same at 10 flips, at 20, at 50, 100, 1000? It was like my own easily-staged Olympic games, and it was awesome.

So, OK, I was a really nerdy kid if that’s the kind of thing I did for fun. But it wasn’t just fun; it was education. Looking back, I’ve realized how much I learned:

That sometimes what you expect to happen, happens—and sometimes it doesn’t: “Heads will come up for sure this time …”
That sometimes what you expect to happen becomes what you want to happen: “Come on, heads!”
That sometimes what you want to happen changes: one minute you want the underdog to upset the balance (“Come on tails, you can do it!”) and the next you want the status quo to reign supreme (“Heads! Heads! Heads!”).
That improbable events are probable: 4 heads in a row?, 5 tails in a row?, 6?, 7?, 8?—flipping a coin a thousand times makes these events seem normal.
That there is power in large numbers: you might get 9 tails out of 10 flips, but you’re never going to get 900 out of 1000.
That events are different from trends: events happen now and you react to them (“Heads with its sixth flip in a row—cool!”), but trends happen before, now, and next, and you think about them (“Tails took the lead, then heads came back, then tails jumped ahead, and I bet heads will take over one more time before I reach 1000 flips …”).
That scale and chance can change what you see: looking at flips 711 through 720 (9 heads, 1 tail) or 701-800 (62 heads, 38 tails) might make you think the coin is unfair or that the person flipping the coin is cheating, but looking at flips 731-740 (5 heads, 5 tails), flips 201-300 (50 heads, 50 tails), or flips 1-1000 (504 heads, 496 tails) would make you think otherwise.
That numbers can represent many things: I can use the number 1 to mean “heads was flipped” (and 0 to mean “tails was flipped”), but 1 can also simply mean that something happened once (“1-1” would mean “heads was flipped once,” while “1-0” would mean “tails was flipped once”), or it can mean “most often” (“1: 1-1/1-0” would mean the number one result that happens when flipping a coin twice is 1 head and 1 tail”), etc.
That data inherently select from and reduce reality: if I say that “Out of a thousand flips, heads came up 504 times and tails came up 496 times,” that obscures all of the up and downs (10 lead changes), amazing runs (10 heads in a row), and interesting patterns (heads-tails-tails-heads-heads-tails, etc.).
That data can be easily manipulated because they select and reduce: “If I just focus on this set, then it would look like …”
That a person who creates data or even one who observes it can change it if they’re not careful: “That flip didn’t count because it dropped off the table.”
That the minute you want something to happen you are biased: “Come on tails! Heads—oh, well, that didn’t count because it was partly on the notebook.”
And that everyone—for reasons they may or may not be able to explain—is biased sometimes: “Mom, why do you always pick heads when I ask you to call it?”

Clearly I couldn’t articulate all of these concepts at the time, but I am certain that I grasped them intuitively, and I believe that activities like these prepared me to understand the deeper ideas I was exposed to later in high school and college. I know that flipping coins for hours is unlikely to be the unstructured play activity of choice for most kids, but I’m sure that others would come up with even more instructive and enriching things to do with the everyday objects in their own family rooms. Sometimes we forget that learning is not merely about receiving information and experiences designed by others, but is fundamentally about us taking an active role in our environment. All kids should have that chance.

For those of you with an interest, here’s an example (referred to above) of a thousand coin flips, with 1’s designating heads and 0’s designating tails. See if you can find the streak of 10 straight heads.

00100001111010000110001100001000101011011111010010
10111000110110001100101110001010010100010100011111
01111000010110110001110110010010110010011010001101
01001000100110011000010100000011110110101011011111
1001010011101101100101110001001010101000010001001
01100000100111011011010111010101101101110110110010
001111011010001111111001101011001010100001101011111
01000000011010110000010011101110100101000110001100
00100001111010000110001100001000101011011111010010
10111000110110001100101110001010010100010100011111
111100110110010100011010110000011001100101011101100
01100010010000000110010011110100111111100010010101
011110010110000110110011111110100010010111000000011
01110011111000010100001101011010100000011101011000
100001111111111011101111000101011101001110001010110
110110011111010110101101111101001101000111100111011
11011111000000101111000001000010110001001101010011
001110010001000101011011101111001111010111001110010
10011001011010000100000010010101111000010001100111
000100111010111111010101010100101010111111100

Imagine flipping a coin a hundred times. Then doing it again. And again—in fact, flipping it a thousand times. Well, when I was a kid I did. More than once.

You might think that this was the product of one of those dreary summer days when the rain is falling in buckets and none of your friends can come over to play. Nope. This was a staple of my play repertoire—right up there with ...

Learning Through Unstructured Play, part 1

2008-08-21T14:25:00-08:00

My wife and I visited Jamie’s parents one Sunday afternoon. Jamie had been a student of mine, and his parents were graciously making us dinner a few weeks after the school year had ended. From the outside, their house was a typical, nice upper-middle-class home, and from the front hall it seemed like it was about as neat and homogenously decorated as most nice homes are these days.

But when we entered the kitchen we got a glimpse of something different: the apparatus of various science experiments covered what would normally have been sparsely adorned counters and niches. And the kitchen table, which had clearly been the laboratory workspace for these experiments, was only partway to being transformed back into an eating place.

Then we turned toward the living room, which looked more like a museum diorama of a medieval keep. With the exception of a small area reserved for sitting on the floor and working out engineering dilemmas, it was covered in an elaborate system of tunnels, towers, drawbridges, and dungeons—all made out of boxes and packing tape.

Jamie’s parents, somewhat abashed by this unusual architectural monstrosity (or masterpiece), apologized for the mess, explaining that ever since they had moved into the house they had let Jamie use the moving boxes and any new packages that arrived in the mail to create this fort. They tried to justify this practice by saying that it saved them money on furniture, that it kept Jamie occupied during their long work hours, etc. I told them they didn’t need to justify it to me because I thought it was about the coolest thing I had seen since I was a kid making forts in my room.

Dinner was fun, Jamie talked nonstop, and I realized that caterpillars cocooning on the kitchen counter, crinkled carrots being monitored for mold in a jar on the table, and a cardboard box castle in the family room are the tangible evidence of parents with the right instincts to raise a curious, creative, problem-solving, passionate kid. Oh, and a happy one, too.

Jamie’s a smart kid. He reads a lot, does well in school, and impresses adults with his vocabulary and insightful questions. These traits set him apart, for sure, but Jamie has something else—harder to describe—that sets him further apart. It’s this: he reminds me a little of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Not that I know personally what Da Vinci was like as a kid, but I imagine he had a boundless energy to discover and create. That’s what Jamie has; he’s a whirlwind of ideas and inspirations. And the best part is that his parents are letting him follow these inspirations and discover for himself how things work.

Less Pressure, Better Lessons

2008-08-14T11:49:00-08:00

In my first game, I struck out, then struck out again, then struck out again. In my second game, I did the same thing. Struck out, struck out, struck out—in fact, I struck out all season until my last game, in which I walked and scored a run. To his credit, the coach kept playing me because I tried hard and was good in practice, but I just couldn’t hit during the games.

Why couldn’t I hit? I believe it was because I had dozens of opposing players, their parents, and their supporters yelling at me. Sometimes they yelled the typical, “No batter, no batter, no batter” kind of stuff, but I’m sure there were other jibes—and maybe even a few encouraging words from sympathetic on-lookers—mixed in, too. It didn’t matter: the pressure was simply too much for my shy eight-year-old self. So, since I never tried out for a baseball team again, you could say I pretty much sucked in my career as an organized baseball player.

A few years later, my friends and I played pickup wiffle ball almost every day all summer, and I played much, much better. Unfortunately, though, every game seemed to end the same way, with one of us getting mad and storming off because of a “bad call” or someone trying to cheat (often the player who did the storming off). I really wanted to play more, but it seemed like we only ever ended up playing a few innings before someone’s feelings got hurt.

One day I realized there was an easy solution to this: Always Tell The Truth. I knew deep down that I tried to cheat just as much as anyone. I would want to be safe so much that I would insist I had been safe no matter if I had seen my buddy’s foot come down on home plate before mine. I would want my hit to be a home run so much that I would say it had cleared the raspberry bushes even if I had seen the red smudges on the ball after I had picked it up. So, you know what, I thought, if we just always tell the truth, it’ll even out in the end, and we’ll get to play for three hours after dinner instead of one.

So the next day I told my friends that I would always tell the truth when it came to disputable calls. They were dubious, but I stuck to my word. If I thought I was safe, I would say so, and if I thought I had really been out, I would say so. Eventually they figured out that they almost always agreed with my call, and that I really was being honest. So, one by one, they started to tell the truth, too, and for the rest of the summer we got to play at least twice as much baseball—with only a few tantrums thrown in—than we would have otherwise.

Structured, high-pressure baseball was a failed experience for me. I don’t think I learned anything other than that I would probably fail when the pressure was on. On the other hand, in pick-up games in my friends’ backyard, I learned that sometimes sacrificing your own selfish desires and being totally honest gets you what you want in the end—more fun and better friends.

These lessons have never left me, and, though I have subsequently learned to thrive under pressure, it wasn’t organized baseball that taught me that. It followed directly from the belief, developed out of moments like my truth-telling baseball epiphany, that I had some neat ideas the world just might benefit from hearing.

It’s become conventional wisdom that organized sports teach kids very valuable lessons. In my childhood, though, informal pickup games were far more valuable.

I grew up in New England with parents who had been Red Sox fans all their lives, so a love of baseball was part of my identity from the beginning. It was cold in pre-Global Warming Maine, so we didn’t have too many opportunities to play, but we did our best. I would often play with my friends from down the road all afternoon and all evening after dinner—or, if they weren’t around, I’d throw a ball against the garage wall for hours on end by myself.

I gradually built up some good baseball skills with all of this practice. In third grade, my dad became the assistant coach for the farm team at my school, so I tried out for the team. I made it, and the coach started me at shortstop, one of the most important positions.

Screen Time Might Be Good for Kids’ Brains, But You Should Still Pull the Plug

2008-07-28T16:36:00-08:00

Johnson argues that these complex screen activities strengthen IQs considerably more than old-fashioned, less complex activities of decades gone by. I haven’t read his book closely enough to evaluate that assertion, but I do agree with the fundamental assertion that children are not wasting their brains away sitting in front of screens.

All this doesn’t mean that you should give your kids as much screen time as they want. In spite of my acceptance of Johnson’s central thesis, I still maintain that parents should severely curtail or eliminate screen time for young children, and ration it for tweens and teenagers. Here’s why:

Very little kids - e.g. pre-reading age kids - need to get a firm grasp of the physical world before they explore “screen worlds.” More 10-year-olds than ever, I’d conjecture, have a hard time dealing with real people and real world situations. That’s a big problem.

If left to do whatever they please, many children will not acquire adequate social skills to deal with real people in the real, physical world. After all, the default in most communities is for kids to stay inside and escape into screens. I’d argue that all kids will end up getting exposed to screen activities whether their parents like it or not, so parents are wise to embargo or at least ration these.

Our bodies clearly prefer physical exercise to the sedentary lifestyle of a videogame nerd. As kids mature into adults, and then to middle-aged adults, their brains are going to need their bodies to be physically active. A brain of massive intellectual capacity is of little use if it’s attached to an obese body with diabetes on dialysis.

Anytime too many people start agreeing with each other, I get suspicious. So, recently, I’ve grown a bit uncomfortable with the fact that many parents agree with my assertion that screen time (TV, videogames, and computers) is bad for kids.

I started to think about all the benefits of screen time. Steven Johnson has written an entire book making this case entitled, Everything Bad is Good for You.

Essentially, Johnson’s argument is that a great deal of kids’ screen activities today are quite complex. Videogames like World of Warcraft or online social networks like MySpace or Facebook demand cognitive skills beyond the reach of most middle-aged adults. I would add, parenthetically, that the least complex screen medium, television, is falling out of favor among children at a rapid rate.

High Gasoline Prices are Good for Children

2008-07-09T22:59:00-08:00

Three recent articles illustrate this point. First, this article in The Wall Street Journal discusses how housing prices in the central cores of large American cities are not dropping while prices in surrounding suburbs are.

Second, this article in The Atlantic Monthly contends that suburbs without compact town centers or efficient public transportation links to the city center are falling out of favor, to become, the title suggests, “The Next Slums.” Home prices are dropping rapidly, with many homes remaining unoccupied while waiting to be sold.

Third, this Wall Street Journal article details the city of Sacramento’s new plan for “smart growth” - i.e. clustering the places where people live more closely with the businesses where they work and shop.

In essence, there is currently a movement away from car-dominated communities toward walkable communities. The Atlantic article discusses how residential developers these days are responding to these trends in demand by building not only lofts and condos in city centers, but also new communities in suburbs that are compact and walkable. The latter are often dubbed “traditional neighborhood developments” or “new urbanism.”

A few months ago, I wrote a series of articles on one such community called The Waters. In the article on Kids’ Lives, I describe how the design of that community creates a great environment for children to grow up. It seems like every child plays outside practically every day with friends. The community was designed to be walkable - with all sorts of places of interest within a 5-minute walk, and with streets that strongly discourage fast car traffic.

If $5/gallon gasoline convinces even a small percentage - say 10% - of Americans to move to communities like this, I think it’s well worth it. It’s just a shame that it’s taking an economic crisis for us to consider a lifestyle that’s so much better for our children.

Adults drive cars. Children don’t. They walk or ride bikes.

In suburban areas built mostly for cars, adults in cars dominate. On the other hand, children suffer. They usually stay inside or wait to get driven by their parents because: 1) most places of interest are not within walking or biking distance, and 2) the streets are unsafe for young pedestrians or bicyclists.

Fortunately for children, high gasoline prices are making adults less interested in driving their cars, and more interested in walking.