There’s 100 plus people in this photo of our new urbanist

neighborhood’s July 4th parade this year, amazingly none of them are actors!

My new urbanist neighborhood is a real place full of real people with real lives.  Our lives are not any less authentic than those of people living in “real” urban areas.  My life and the lives of my family and neighbors are not less authentic because our neighborhood doesn’t mix beautiful historic homes next to falling down crap shacks.  We are not less real because we don’t see grafitti and homeless people every day.  I am sick of “real” urban hipsters saying people in new urbanist neighborhoods are shallow for wanting a new home in a mixed-use neighborhood with good schools instead of living in the “real” gritty city and living an “authentic” life.

I like cities and I like city living.  Denver especially is a great city with many wonderful city neighborhoods but, I don’t want to live in them at the moment.  First, I can’t afford to.  Suburbs are cheaper than the city core at least in Denver and by a significant amount.  For what I paid for my brand new 2400 sq foot house, I could get an old 1200 sq foot bungalow in need of major repairs in one of Denver’s city neighborhoods.

The people who accuse new urbanist neighborhoods of being fake, well every neighborhood was new at one time–even your historic neighborhood.  I’ve read multiple articles written by urban dwellers–most, I’m sure who do not have children–asking why would anyone want the “fake” thing when you can get the “real” thing like them?  Because not everyone wants to live in the city, and they should be able to have the benefits of urbanism (walkable, mixed-use) if they want to live in the suburbs in a new house with great public schools.  Have a kid and then look at the schools in your urban area and then ponder your question of real versus fake again, your perspective will change believe me. 

People walk past my house all the time in my neighborhood and stop to admire my small garden (primarily the front and side of my house and my containers).  Sometimes they ask me “How do you do it?”.  I always have to stop myself from saying “It’s helps to be psychotically obsessive”.  What I usually say is more diplomatic along the lines of “I water a lot” or “it’s my hobby” but the truth is a bit darker I’m afraid.  I am obsessed with plants, flowers in particular.  While everyone agrees it’s good to have a hobby, sometimes I think I take it a bit too far.  A few of the things that exemplify this:

—I don’t like to go on vacation during growing season because I don’t like leaving my plants

—I would never get a dog because dogs can dig and one of my neighbors is always telling me about the destruction her crazy German shepherd is wrecking on her backyard (he ate all my petunias!  He ate the baby Aspen tree! etc..) I know I would probably have palpitations should such a thing occur in my yard so I just steer clear.  Fortunatley my kid only likes cats.

—I wanted a house with a very small yard because I knew if I got a house with even a medium sized yard I would probably drive myself insane (I do a pretty good job as it is with a lot of around 4500 sq feet).

—I’ve run out in golf ball sized hail to protect my container plants

—In May and June, I went to at least 8 different nurseries (multiple times each) looking for exactly the plants I wanted

—I was shocked when a fellow less hard core gardener in my neighborhood hadn’t thought about the annuals we might put in our pocket park.  It was March when I asked her.

 Exhibit A

Last year I spotted a pair of American goldfinches in my neighborhood.  They are beautiful birds with a lovely song, so I bought a special birdfeeder to try to entice them back this year.  I put up the birdfeeder in April and to my delight it worked, a pair of goldfinches started hanging around the feeder in May. I’ve been enjoying seeing them all year until yesterday when I saw them violently assaulting my gerbera daisies.

I have a large cattle trough on my deck filled with gerbera daisies that I wait very patiently to flower.  Sometimes it can take a few weeks between flower bursts, but I consider it worth it because I love their colors and how big the flowers are.  When they do flower, the flowers last quite a long time (two to three weeks).  Yesterday morning I was cleaning the kitchen and noticed the goldfinch pair that I usually see in front of my house at the feeder.  I stopped dead in my tracks in shock when I notcied what they were doing: hanging off the stems of the gerberas and dissecting brand new blossoms into tiny little pieces looking for seeds.

I didn’t know what to do–there was an ironic conflict going on in my head.  Finally I could stand seeing them pulling out petals no longer and went onto the deck and shooed them away.  Then I realized what must have happened.  Those little buggers were blackmailing me to fill up the bird feeder, which was running low.  So I’ve filled it hoping they will leave my flowers alone–but if they don’t, let’s just say I’m going to have to reevaluate our relationship.

I originally joined book club to try to expand my reading selections.  I read–a lot–but I read a rather narrow range of interests.  Non-fiction (usually science related, although not always), or science fiction.  I thought I should expand my horizons a bit, maybe find something enjoyable I wouldn’t normally read on my own.  This was a good idea in theory.

I read about six books I would never normally pick, books that book clubs all over the U.S. are reading, books that get great Amazon reviews, books that have a consensus: they are good.  Most of these fall into the category of “women’s fiction”–whatever that means.  I pretty much hated every one of them.  They bored the crap out of me. A lot of the books feature extended sessions inside the protagonist’s head: what they are thinking about, their demons, what they think of events.  Romances, moral quandaries and the like. The thing is, unless there’s some crazy space faring science/alternate dimensions/worlds blowing up/black holes or the story is actually true and not fiction, I can’t bring myself to care much.  Perhaps this is a side effect of having to read so many boring Thomas Hardy novels in high school.  

So, I’m a book club failure.  I can’t decide if I should keep torturing myself by reading these books, just so I can attend the fun social aspect without looking like a loser, or if I should just give up and realize–I like what I like.

Wife: Patina       Husband: Poor 

Useage: Wife–”That table has a wonderful patina”  Husband–”You mean it looks poor”

Wife: Industrial     Husband: Prison

Usage: Wife–”I love that bunk bed, it’s very industrial”.  Husband–”It looks too much like prison”

Wife: Cottage     Husband: Messy

Usage: Wife–My garden is cottage style.  Husband–You mean it’s messy with stuff all over the place

Wife: Modern    Husband: Expensive

Usage: Wife—-I love that Nelson bubble lamp, it’s so streamlined!  Husband–Why is something so simple so expensive?

Wife: Rustic      Husband: Poor

Usage: Wife–”I love that rustic look.”  Husband–”It looks poor.”

Every major metro area in the U.S. has sprawl, but in Phoenix, it’s an art form.  There are very, very few places you can get to without a car, and everywhere there now looks the same: beige adobe, red tile roofs, one endless soulless strip mall and big box bonanza after another.  I was in Phoenix recently to attend my best friend’s wedding.  We stayed at a four star resort in north Scottsdale (which was desert when I lived there).  There are houses all around this resort, but little else.  A trip to the grocery store is a 15 minute drive, one way (I timed it).  Most of Phoenix is this way, nearly devoid of character and totally slaved to the car, no human scale at all.

We saw a sign while driving to the grocery store that said “mixed-use development!!!” under this is said “retail AND office space!”.  This is what passes for “mixed use” in most of Phoenix.  My husband commented that is was similar to the “We have both types of music: Country AND Western” famous line.

There are a few bright spots, downtown Scottsdale is a human scaled area which is just now adding housing (VERY expensive condos but they are cool), the Willo neighborhood close to downtown Phoenix, Verrado–a new urbanist neighborhood in Buckeye (way the hell out west of downtown), and downtown Tempe which has housing in walking distance to offices and retail.  In Denver though, there’s a million walkable neighborhoods (new and old) with great access to public transit, not to mention the investment we’ve made in our rail line that will connect all the metro area.  I feel Denver is much more progressive, enviornmental, and human oriented city than Phoenix currently is.  I’m glad I live in a place that values me more than my car (at least in SOME places!).  

Now the Burmese, they ate pigs.  Yeah, pigs.  Small pigs, but still, PIGS.  One warm summer day, I got to work and was greeted by the nastiest smell in the universe.  The large female Burm had upchucked her pig.  I had to clean it as the other employee was incapacitated by repeated bouts of his own barfing (poor guy).  So yeah, it was as gross as you can imagine.

Fast forward four years and I have a kid.  For those of you who don’t have children, let me describe some of the things that will get on other things with a small child around.  They will piss on the floor.  They will barf on the sofa, the car, your bed.  They will wipe boogers on the walls.  They are friggin gross.  However, because of my prior experience and survival of cleaning up huge snake vomit, I was inured to this aspect of child rearing.  So there’s a silver lining to snake barf.

“We had to listen to the same band five songs in a row and then turn it over for another five songs”. LOL.

There have been people moving out of Bradburn since we’ve lived here the past four years.  A lot of that time it’s because of a job change and the people who are moving really don’t want to.  One lovely couple that lived on my street got a job offer they couldn’t refuse in a Midwest state and hated to leave but luckily found another new urbanist community in their new state and love it there also.  Other times moving is due to divorce or other sad life events.   But there have been a few that have moved because they just thought it was time, they wanted something different.

I have to admit when people tell me they are moving and I ask why (because I’m nosy like that, ask any of my neighbors) and they don’t say a reason that’s really beyond their control, it comes, like a reflex almost to me (I say it in my head, not out loud)–”How could you? Why would anyone want to leave?”.  Sometimes I joke our neighborhood is like “Hotel California” (the “you can check out but never leave” part).  I also silently think–if you can’t be happy in this neighborhood I can’t imagine you will be happy anywhere–which is of course, judgemental–different strokes for different folks and all that.

Moving often doesn’t allow for people to develop a true connection to place, which has a variety of negative effects–social isolation, less community involvement, less care for the environment.  I can’t help to think this is part of the reason so much of our grand country looks like unmitigated crapola–endless series of strip malls, big box stores, horrific, cheap housing that isn’t.  It looks like that because people don’t really care too much–they’re just going to move somewhere else soon.  Except there isn’t anywhere “else” really in this country–it all (with some exceptions of course) pretty much looks the same–crappy.

“Is there any scientific proof the Tooth Fairy exists or is it just the parents?”

She hasn’t asked about Santa yet, but I’m sure it’s coming.