My mom is the guest blogger today, she’s written a bit about the difference between my neighborhood–Bradburn Village in Westminster, Colorado where she spends her summers–and her retirement community, Pebble Creek, in Goodyear Arizona where she spends her winters.  Why they don’t have new urbanist retirement communities I don’t know.

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I’ve just returned from Colorado where I spent the summer in relative coolness – weather wise and major coolness neighborhood wise with my daughter, son in law and granddaughter.  They live in a new urbanist community and I spend winters in a retirement community in Arizona.  The difference is staggering.

While I have access to two spectacular clubhouses, pools, lap pools, workout rooms, tennis courts, bocce courts, golf courses, a state of the art theater, art studio,  in-house library, video rental and on and on, they have access to each other.

Any  day, I could  step out of the carriage house, my home away from home, and be greeted by a neighbor or two.  I never made it all the way to the pocket park, at the end of the block, without someone greeting me or joining me with their kids and/or dogs.  I loved it. Many times we walked to dinner at the local eatery or strolled to the local ice cream store.  Invariably we ran into neighbors enjoying their porches or just out walking the neighborhood kids and dogs in tow.

If only the developer of my community had thought about this in the planning stages, my community would have been perfect.  As it is, I love it, but I have to drive to the clubhouse to swim or play tennis or to participate in any activities.  I cannot walk to dinner or expect to see my neighbors sitting on their porch.  We don’t have any. We have very nice, beige houses that all look the same on very clean streets that all look the same – not a good idea when most of us don’t remember why we walked into a room, let alone a neighborhood.

I make sure my visitors have cell phones so they can call me when they get lost trying to find my house in the community or when they are out walking the neighborhood and can’t find the way home because every house looks the same.  I also tell them to knock on the closest door and ask the resident how to get back home. 

Without exception, all our residents are friendly and very helpful when a stranger shows up looking perplexed – we are all used to it.  Besides – that’s the only way to meet people in the neighborhood without getting in the car or golf cart.

Neighbor A had a crappy cheap builder sink that was chipped and she hated.  Neighbor B’s husband is a great contractor, can install/fix anything.  Neighbor A had Neighbor B’s husband install new sink, and he offered her a choice of caulking colors.  Not realizing caulking came in colors, Neighbor A selected black for her nice, new sink and was very happy with the results.  Neighbor A saw Neighbor B walking across the street and wanted to let her know what she thought of her husband’s great handiwork, so she opened her front door and yelled out across the street at the top of her lungs,

“I LOVE BLACK CAULK!”

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Said to me at a party:

“Yeah, I left the reservation for a birthday party the other day and I’m never doing it again”

 When you live this close to your neighbors, you better behave yourself

Let me start by saying 95-99% of people are nice, fun, reasonable and great neighbors.  Then there’s the rest.  Every neighborhood has them: the nutbags, the jerks, the clueless, the just plain unpleasant people who bitch about EVERYTHING.  The difference is, in a new urbanist neighborhood (well, at least mine), everyone knows who these people are.  Quickly.  Design that fosters social interaction means people are frequently out in public, assholes included.

My suspicion is, in a sterile, non-interacting subdivision, these people are relativley unknown (unless they are really extreme).  I was discussing this blog post with a neighbor at one of our events last night and she commented that “as long as they mow their lawn, no one will know what an asshole they are” in a non social neighborhood. They can hide in a way–not so in a community that interacts all the time.  I swear a pin can’t drop in my neighborhood without everyone knowing about it in short order.  There are pluses and minuses to this.  One of the pluses is that people who can’t behave themselves in a community move.  A community as social as mine (and other new urbanist neighborhoods I’ve heard) is somewhat self-selecting.  Sounds a little Orwellian, but frankly it works in our favor.  So, if you’re an asshole, do yourself (and us) a favor and move either to acreage, or to a faceless, anonymous beige subdivision where your jerkery will go unnoticed.