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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.

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.

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.

Why Are Cruise Ships Better Communities Than Our Neighborhoods?

2008-06-09T01:39:00-08:00

That means we’re eating in one of about eight restaurants, strolling around checking things out, hanging at the swimming pool, watching entertainment (piano players, bands, singers, acrobats, etc.), playing games (shuffleboard, golf, etc.), or Marco is playing at Kids’ Club. As soon as we get back to our room from anywhere, we go right out again to do something in the community.

Why is it that we’ve gotten to know more people here in one week than we’ve gotten to know in our neighborhood in a year? Perhaps in the list of reasons below we can find some suggestions to make our neighborhoods into better communities:

We’re trapped into spending time in the immediate community. Our rooms are small, there is no television to watch other than cable news, we have no Internet connections in our rooms, and unless we’re docked at a port, we can’t leave the ship. On the ship at sea, there is no cell phone service.
Everything is within short walking distance. The ship may be big, but it’s still only a couple of city blocks long, and inside there are 2000+ people and lots of publicly available attractions. So, very often when we have nothing in particular to do, we just walk around.
There are few dangers. We have no cars here, which makes walking and hanging out much more carefree. Also, because outsiders can’t get in here and leave at will, we don’t fear that someone will rob us or abduct our children.

I’m convinced that we can make our neighborhoods more like cruise ships for our children. I’ll address each of the points above in turn below:

Time: Living in a small home will force kids to go outside, but most important is limiting or eliminating their consumption of “screen activities” - i.e. television, videogames, and the Internet. As for limiting the distance kids can go, *not* driving them anywhere - i.e. letting them go as far as they can walk or bicycle - works well. And we adults should turn off our cell phones or ignore them when we’re roaming the neighborhood.
Short Walking Distance: Ideally, you should live in a place where everything that interests your children is within a walkable distance. Before middle school, this means friends’ houses, schools, and parks. Ideally, “parks” should include ample natural green space and sports facilities like basketball courts and a swimming pool. When kids get older, they’ll also want to frequent retail stores, so ones children are most interested in - convenience stores, diners, sporting goods stores, etc. - should be a walk or bike ride away.
Few Dangers: As for minimizing dangers from car traffic, new urbanist communities like The Waters are a great model. They force car traffic to slow down or to entirely avoid places where people walk. As for minimizing danger from outsiders, while we can’t seal our neighborhoods off from outsiders, if many adult residents are always outside, engaged in neighborhood activities, malevolent strangers will not be able to roam around anonymously. So, in other words, you and other adults need to spend time outside to make your neighborhood safer.

What do you all think of cruise ship communities as a model for neighborhoods? There are other examples, too - Club Med, places in the aftermath of natural disasters or power outages, etc.

My family and I have been on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean for the past week. It’s my first cruise, and I’m amazed at how quickly and effectively community develops. I’ve become cordial with dozens of people. My four-year-old son Marco has gotten to know about a dozen kids with whom he plays every day either at the swimming pool or at the kids’ daycare area, “Kids Club.” Thanks to those relationships, he has matured socially months in the week he’s been here.

When my wife, my two sons (4 and 7 months), and I are not on land exploring the port at which we’re docked, we’re always doing something somewhere on the boat. In other words, other than sleeping, we don’t spend time in our room.

The Waters: Self-Selection and the Pioneer Effect

2008-02-21T23:47:00-08:00

Of course, the marketing of community spirit should have at least some credibility, or else it won’t be believable. That’s where “New Urbanism” comes in. That’s the approach in urban planning and architecture that the creators of The Waters adopted. New Urbanists claim that attributes of design like high density, low or no fences, big porches, integrated retail, and narrow streets can help create community.

If homebuyers intuitively “get” how these attributes might create community, community-seeking homebuyers will want to live in a New Urbanist development like The Waters.

From what I observed, this is exactly what happened. Many of the first residents of The Waters I spoke with, who moved in two years ago, explained to me that they were looking for a place where residents would have close social bonds with one another, and they believed that the New Urbanist concepts described to them would result in a tight community.

These first residents have a very special feeling that also contributes to the community spirit at The Waters. I’ll call this the “pioneer effect” because these residents feel like pioneers. They came looking for community, but they came before there was any community. In addition, they all moved in there around the same time. So, they’re evangelists for The Waters, much like people who bought the first Apple Macintosh computers in the 1980s became evangelists for the Mac.

I experienced this pioneer effect firsthand in my visit at The Waters. These first residents were intently interested in explaining to me what makes the community spirit at The Waters so great. They are clearly evangelistic salespeople for their community. Twice during my late afternoon walk, people I never met before asked me if I was “the guy from Playborhood,” and then took the time and interest to their personal experience at The Waters.

In addition, in the videos about community on The Waters’ site early residents absolutely gush about how great it is there. Nathan Norris, the head of marketing who managed the creation of these videos, told me he was amazed at how overwhelmingly positive people came across in the videos.

The word of mouth marketing of these first residents is the best form of marketing because it’s highly distributed and inherently authentic. As Nathan Norris realizes, it’s The Waters’ greatest asset, and it gives that development a great opportunity to “scale” its strong community spirit from its present first village to the seven villages eventually planned for The Waters.
[I visited The Waters, a fledgling ”New Urbanist” community in Alabama, in early February. This is the last in a series of four articles about my visit there. The first three are The Waters: A Very Tight-Knit Community, The Waters: Kids’ Lives, and The Waters: How Town Planning and Architecture Help Create Community.]

Anyone who ever studied elementary economics can understand one of the primary reasons for the success of community spirit at The Waters: The supply of homes that are marketed for the great community around them is very low, while demand for these homes is very high. In fact, in the Playborhood survey we found that a large proportion of parents would be willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars, and many even hundreds of thousands of dollars, for a home with better neighborhood play prospects than their current home.

So, if a new development markets itself well as having great community spirit, it can attract lots and lots of families who want this. These families ”self-select” by buying homes at this development. Thus, the development ends up with a bunch of community-minded families, and, voila!, a neighborhood with great community spirit is born.

The Waters: How Town Planning and Architecture Help Create Community

2008-02-15T22:46:00-08:00

Short Walks: Each village at The Waters is designed so that any resident should be able to walk to any other point in the village in less than 10 minutes. Only one village, Lucas Point, is built today, but six more are planned.

Low or No Fences: There are few fences at The Waters, and those that exist are very short - say 2-feet high. Thus, it’s easy to see people in their yards, and it’s also easy to look through yards to other streets and homes.

Small Yards (front, back, and side): Houses are very close to the street, so front yards are small or nonexistent. Side and back yards are small as well. This makes it easier for people to see their neighbors when they walk outside their houses.

Narrow Streets: It’s very difficult for cars to go speeding through streets in The Waters because they are very narrow. And, because people are often walking on the street, cars often have to stop. Like in many old European cities, pedestrians can rule the streets at The Waters.

Integrated Retail Center: Retail shops are integrated into every village plan in an area called “Town Square.” The Waters made sure that a food market + restaurant was at Lucas Point from the beginning, even though there weren’t (and still aren’t) enough residents there to support it. Thus, The Waters subsidizes its food market + restaurant, The Market. Also in Town Square is a YMCA gym. So, residents can buy food products, eat a meal, have a drink, and work out at a gym without getting in their cars.

Integrated Recreation Facilities: The Waters boasts tennis courts, lakes with plentiful fish, a play structure, and a swimming pool all within easy walking distance to residences.

Numerous Great Common Spaces: Courtyards, open fields, docks, and common lake shore land including a sandy beach are very prominent and are well-used by residents.

No Cul-de-Sacs: Cul-de-sacs are highly desirable in many suburban towns because they are the only places where cars don’t speed by and endanger pedestrians. However, at The Waters, pedestrians rule over cars pretty much everywhere. So, cul-de-sacs are not needed as a sanctuary for pedestrians, and every house has pedestrians walking by.

Big Porches: Residents live a great deal on their porches, particularly during summer evenings, when it’s not uncommon for neighbors or passers-by to come over and pull up a chair.

[I visited The Waters, a fledgling ”New Urbanist” community in Alabama, in early February. This is the third in a series of four articles about my visit there. The first two are The Waters: A Very Tight-Knit Community and The Waters: Kids’ Lives.]

I admit that I was skeptical of New Urbanist claims that town planning and architecture could, by themselves, play a strong role in creating community ties. However, after visiting The Waters, I’m a believer. Even though the number of children below 12 is average or below average - 30 for 110 residences - kids play far more here than in other communities in North America.

There are other important factors that have contributed to this outcome which I will discuss in the next and final article on The Waters, but in this article, I describe some of the most important features of The Waters’ design that create community:

The Waters: Kids’ Lives

2008-02-14T11:16:00-08:00

Many residents liken The Waters to a vacation resort for kids, and I can’t disagree. Kids have the best of both worlds - urban living with a high density of people and kids on the one hand, and country amenities like a lake, a sandy beach, and plentiful open space and woodlands on the other.

What’s interesting is that, while kids at The Waters have very active social lives with each other, the community doesn’t have a particularly high density of kids. The community currently has 30 children between 0 and 12 in a community of 110 homes. That’s probably a bit below average for the United States, but because homes are so close together and because the kids are allowed to roam rather freely, they get together rather frequently.

The only real downside to kids lives at The Waters is that they have no neighborhood school, so parents have to drive them to various schools in the Montgomery, AL area. Thus, kids there don’t walk to school, and they don’t have a shared school experience.

The developers of The Waters are currently working very hard to bring a neighborhood elementary school there. They have designated a location, and are working with other local officials to make it happen. The earliest this school would open, if it does indeed clear the remaining political hurdles, would be Fall of 2009.
[I visited The Waters, a fledgling ”New Urbanist” community in Alabama, in early February. This is the second in a series of four articles about my visit there. The first one is The Waters: A Very Tight-Knit Community.]

The Waters truly is a “Kids’ Paradise,"as they claim in their marketing literature. Kids have a great life outside, throughout the community. I can confirm this from my own observations even though I was there in the middle of winter. Residents assured me that I would see even more kid outdoor activity if I were there in the summer.

In the day I was there, I saw many, many instances of kids wandering on their own, comfortable and safe. Certainly, parents are very involved in their kids’ lives there, but they don’t hover over them the way they do in most places. In fact, parents routinely “pinch-hit” for each other, watching each other’s kids.

The Waters: A Very Tight-Knit Community

2008-02-11T12:17:00-08:00

This is astounding. Think about where you live. When you walk down your street (do you even walk down your street?), what are the chances that you’ll have a conversation with someone? How about two or three? At The Waters, virtually any time of day, any day of the week, at least one friendly neighborhood chat is almost guaranteed.

Even I, a total outsider, was greeted by many people during my solo strolls through The Waters. Note that some of these weren’t just polite hellos to a stranger. At least two people greeted me by asking me if I was “the guy from Playborhood,” and then proceeded to talk about the Playborhood ideal of kids playing outside and how great a community feeling The Waters has. And a few others struck up a conversation after meeting me just once, when they were introduced to me by Nathan the evening before.

Besides the amount of social interactions I witnessed at The Waters, the other phenomenon I want to convey is the spirit of spontaneity there.

In The Waters’ video about community (click on the image above to see it), resident Amy Neuenschwander says, “There’s no need for planning ahead if we live within walking distance of each other. So, you hang out at the pool on a Saturday, and at about 4 o’clock, everybody starts getting hungry and we decide whose house to go to. All families just come together, and ‘bring what you have.’ It’s very easy to enjoy each other’s company when it’s that low-stress. The kids entertain each other and the parents all get to have parent night, too.”

This isn’t just propaganda - I saw all sorts of spontaneous gatherings in the one day I was there.

Residents tell me that on summer evenings, many people gather outside The Market, the restaurant & cafe in The Waters’ Town Square, and drink and talk past midnight. Even in the winter, when I was there, the interior of The Market is often full. In either case, summer or winter, groups of people at The Market aren’t autonomous islands like they are in most American restaurants. Rather, people in different groups know each other, so groups expand and contract as some people hop from conversation to conversation.

Indeed, The Waters has an incredible sense of community, and in three upcoming articles I’ll be discussing the causes and effects of this in more detail. I’ll be discussing: 1) kids’ lives, 2) how town planning and architecture help create the community spirit there, and 3) how the self-selection of community-minded residents contributes to The Waters’ community spirit.
[I visited The Waters, a fledgling ”New Urbanist” community in Alabama, in early February. This is the first in a series of four articles about my visit there.]

I spent only one and a half days at The Waters, but in that time, I had more interactions on the street with neighbors than I’ve had in the seven months since I moved to my current home in Palo Alto, CA.

My host there, Nathan Norris, said “hello” to pretty much everyone he saw, and had at least a short chat with at least a third of them. He probably had at least a half dozen conversations with different people during the hour and a half he walked me around on the one morning I was there. Sure, Nathan is one of the founders of The Waters and is a resident there, so he should be popular, but he wasn’t the only one talking to people there.

In fact, I’d venture to say that very few people were alone in the various outdoor venues I witnessed.

Kids’ Outdoor Club: The Next Best Thing to Neighborhood Play

2008-01-31T16:29:00-08:00

Set in San Francisco’s absolutely gorgeous Golden Gate Park, Kids Outdoor Club is a place where parents can drop their kids off on any weekday, school day or summer, to play unstructured games and frolic in the woods with other kids.

Scott Wilkinson, head of the Club, lives in a Playborhood in San Francisco, a cul-de-sac of 36 dwellings where 53 kids from ages 0-17 live. Still, he knows that his neighborhood is an exception, and even there, playmates aren’t always playing outside. So, his three kids, ages 8, 7, and 4, join him at the Club every chance they get.

Wilkinson started the Kids’ Outdoor Club in 2006 to get kids exercising, into nature, and away from the stress that has come to dominate kids lives these days.

Children from 2 to 12 frequent the Club, and Wilkinson and his colleagues do a good job of keeping all of them engaged and active. On rainy school days, only a few kids might show up, but on sunny school days, one or two dozen play at the Club. In the summer, the Club is like a summer camp, drawing dozens of kids.

Kids play games like capture the flag, chase, and tag, and older kids play pickup games of traditional sports like football, ultimate frisbee, and softball. In addition, Club counselors take the kids for excursions into Golden Gate Park’s abundant wild surroundings for hikes, tree-climbing, and boat rides on Stowe Lake.

Boyyy, I don’t know about you, but after hearing about the Kids’ Outdoor Club, I wished I lived in San Francisco!
OK, so your kids don’t have opportunities for neighborhood play right now, for whatever reason. OK, you’re working on making this happen, but it may take a while.

What can you do in the meantime to get your kids playing outside without those silly miniature-adult uniforms? Here’s what San Francisco parents can do: send their kids to the Kids’ Outdoor Club.

One Person can Make a Playborhood

2008-01-25T07:34:00-08:00

Lots of interesting ideas came up at Playborhood’s Neighborhood Forum in Palo Alto last night. It was great to hear from people with a variety of perspectives on the challenge of giving our children more time – and space – to play, especially in our neighborhoods.

But here’s one message that really stood out for me: Often the things that truly make neighborhoods special come down to the efforts of just one person.

A good example is the work of Karen Harwell, profiled here recently. Karen has turned her garden into a place where neighborhood kids get to plant, grow and harvest fruits and vegetables of all kinds.

Continued on Playborhood Palo Alto / Menlo Park