Urban Living
I finally finished installing soffit venting yesterday which should improve the ventilation in my attic which should reduce the load on my HVAC which should reduce the power we use. That isn’t my point, though. When I finished and cleaned myself up I really felt like having a sandwich. It was a beautiful day and I thought I’d go to the local neighborhood grocery store, Kings Red and White, for bread. I could have easily walked the extra half block to Compare Foods, which is much larger but non-local. Or, I could have walked the opposite direction and gone to a panaderia or one of the other tiendas on Roxboro. I talked to a couple of neighbors on the way there, read some fliers on King’s local events board, and walked home with a couple of neighborhood kids. The algorithm at Walk Score seriously underestimates my neighborhood.
That little hike to the store reminded me of house hunting. We bought the house we did, in the neighborhood we did, partly for the ability to walk to stores and restaurants. Another important factor was proximity to the regional mass transit stop so I could catch the bus to work. I was reading the Atlantic this morning and The Next Slum? seemed to sum up perfectly why we didn’t want to live in a cul-de-sac suburbia.
We have friends who live in a giant, sprawling suburban McMansion development of enormous houses and it’s always so surreal to me. I’ve been in their neighbors houses and always had the impression that they’re just squatters. To a household, they all seem to have 1,000 square feet of furniture in their 5,000 square foot homes. With soaring ceilings and yards of the same paint throughout the houses I always have an unsettling feeling and can’t imagine how the occupants find it comfortable. On the edges of their development the houses are going to rent and crime is starting to rise. The article above could have been written about their completely un-walkable ‘neighborhood’.
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April 28th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Reading this post made me quite happy, since it’s always good to learn that one is not alone in making such conscious decisions. When we moved to Kansas, alas, circumstances led us to buy a home that for us qualifies as suburban. Thankfully, this city only has 50,000 people, so suburban is a relative term here. My wife and I ride to work (riding to work with your wife is a real treat, I have to say), and my daughter walks the five blocks to her school. Our house was built in the era right before it became fashionable for a family of four to live in 3,000+ square feet, so by today’s standards, it’s practically a bungalow. Our furniture fills it, and we’re slowly nixing the banal white and tan shades of paint.