chargirlgenius | Great American Small Towns

At the doctor’s office yesterday, I picked up a copy of Ideal Living magazine and started flipping through. A couple of headlines had caught my eye: Great Walkable Cities and American Small Towns. Wow! Was this a magazine that actually got it? After a little research later, I learned that it was a magazine for “the second half of life.” Great! Living in a walkable community means that seniors still have the freedom of mobility even after they stop driving.

Turned out that the walkable cities article was aimed solely at vacationers, not at people looking for a place to live. The article did stress the health benefits of walking, but mostly of strapping on your sneakers and going out for exercise, nothing about the natural amount of movement you would get simply by being in a diverse and vibrant urban environment. Not bad, but not what I was hoping. Next article?

The highlighted blurb pointed out that people have been more interested in Main Street lately, since all of the Main Street/Wall Street discussion last fall. Funny they should say that. :-) In any case, it was a nice article about the virtues of many southern “small towns”, including places like Charlottesville, VA, for example. These weren’t small towns in the sense of everybody knowing everybody, but more accurately small cities that had good downtowns and established neighborhoods, cafes, good civic life, public events, markets, etc.

I did notice the ads. The ads on the facing page were for high-end developments somewhat proximate to these small towns. “Estate-sized” lots, golf course, every home comes with a standard spa, “you don’t need a horse to enjoy blah blah blah acres”, gated community, HUGE new homes. These ads had nothing to do with living in a small town.

And then came the end of the article. For each town, they had a list of communities that you would want to live in, that offered “Amenity Living”. Now, since this was a magazine for seniors, I can imagine that it might mean communities geared towards seniors, but combined with the ads, it struck me that amenity meant things more like gated neighborhoods and a spa in every house*. And really, does a place like Charlottesville have six or eight senior communities in the nearby area?

In other words, “Come! Visit our small town, which is nice enough to drive into and go antiquing, but you’d really want to live someplace else.”

Doesn’t that just destroy the whole point? Isn’t one of the grand things about a vibrant town, that you have everything that you need right there? Within walking distance? Is nobody willing to live in a mixed community anymore? No, let’s move all of the rich seniors out of town, where they can’t walk to anything that they need, and are stuck when they lose the ability to drive safely. Instead of a corner store or deli or bakery where people of all ages and income levels can have casual contact on a regular basis, these communities have unused clubhouses and senior centers that just don’t fulfill that basic need.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for people choosing where they live. If they want to live on a golf course, that’s fine. If they want a community where you can have a horse, great. But it seems to me that the only communities that we value anymore are these sorts of places. Why isn’t this magazine extolling the virtues of actually living within these small towns? Don’t they recognize it?

As a somewhat related aside, I’ve been reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Thanks to some of you for the recommendation. I’m not that far in – I tend to only get through a few pages each day while drying my hair, but it’s fascinating. I find myself wondering about the places she’s referring to. The book was written in the 60s, and while it’s somewhat dated, many of her points are timeless.

The current chapter discusses the sidewalk life of a diverse city neighborhood. She makes an interesting point that living in a city neighborhood with a lively sidewalk environment actually affords people *more* privacy than living in a suburban neighborhood. Simply put, you can have frequent, but casual contact with many people, without having to get close to anybody that you don’t choose. When there is an active public sphere, you can have acquaintances, human contact, yet not have to invite anybody into your private space, physically or metaphorically, if they’re not people that you actually want to get closer to. This makes perfect sense to me. Even when we had neighbors, we never saw them or spoke to them, because we had very little opportunity for casual contact. If we’d wanted to have any contact, it would have involved entering into their private space, or inviting them into ours.

It would be nice if we, as a society, valued real towns as a place to actually live and work, instead of just a place to visit on the weekend. A street lined with antique shops filled only on the weekends is just a shell of the real community that it should be.

*Never mind, to Ideal Living, an “Amenity Community” has nothing to do with senior-specific facilities: “If you are searching for your ideal home in your ideal destination, look no further. Master-planned communities changed the housing market when they began to be developed more than 50 years ago. The most popular and desirable new homes today are being built within master-planned communities. Tour top amenity communities in the Southeast and Southwest in the following pages. Whatever your desire, you’re sure to find it here.”

These include: “Resort like amenities include tennis, swimming, walking trails, health club, clubhouse and a playground.” Or “full-service marina, on-site restaurant, private helipad”. And most especially, they all have golf. Nothing wrong with golf, but why is it so much more important than everything else? Oy.