Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Coffee shops and the digital nomad (or, man without an office haunts local java huts)

I've worked out of my home for the past 16 years. This means that for almost two decades I've had an established space in whatever apartment or home I happened to live in that was set aside for me and my work debris. My latest space was in my basement - - for the past seven years; time enough to accumulate quite a bit of "stuff" and the urge to purge.

The June floods took care of that; everything in my office was lost except for my computer and hard drives - - a virtual "reset" button.

A digression: My friend Doug owns a dump truck (which is pictured at right; and, yes, my stuff filled the dump truck and the dumpster seen in the picture, plus another dumpster). He was nice enough to bring it over so we could fill it with the accumulated debris of my career-to-now. When he returned from his trip to the dump, Doug walked over to me where I stood. I was exhausted and probably looked like a man who needed an encouraging word.

After a beat, Doug said; "On the bright side, your stuff slid out really good at the dump. No snags or nothing."

As I buy replacement stuff, I confess that my purchasing decisions are ever-so-slightly swayed by whether the item will "slide out nice" if disaster strikes again...

Anyhoo, with my basement now a bare-to-the-walls construction site, I have to get out of the house to work. My desktop Mac is in my bedroom now, but there's just no way to work there while the kids are on Summer break. So, being a two-Mac sort of guy, I get out with my laptop and do the digital nomad shuffle, camping at coffee shops and bookstores.

After over two months of being a cafe hobo, I've become quite discerning in what spots are most conducive to productivity. That's why I read with interest Greg Kowalski's speculation that 5-Star Coffee might be closing (not confirmed. 4/25/UPDATE: The employees on duty this morning report that the owner has assured them "not to worry about anything." Is that comforting when 5star.pdf is online?).

I'm a guy who tries to support local businesses when given a choice, but as I noted mere days before the flood, Starbucks made itself very attractive by offering free Wi-Fi at their locations after years partnering with T-Mobile for goofy pay Wi-Fi. Just get and register a Starbucks Card and you get Wi-Fi (plus free syrup shots or something; I just get black coffee so I'm not up on all that).

Here's a meta-moment: a shot of my little digital hobo camp as this very second as I compose this post:

5-Star offers free Wi-Fi as well - - so why don't I always go there? Turns out that, in addition to my desire to "mix it up,"  there are a great many subtle features that make one coffee shop or book store cafe better than another on a given day. I'll list them here in Part II - - but, right now, I really have to do real work; I have a basement reconstruction to pay for, you know.

You CAN'T walk to school: Another example of poorly engineered streets in suburbs costing you money

ABOVE: Perhaps this familiar "road ends here; we screwed up" sign should be incorporated into Franklin's city coat of arms.

A recent story in the Washington Post describes a school district's attempt to contend with sky-high transportation costs by encouraging more students to walk to school, thereby lowering the amount of buses on the road burning expensive gas.

Here's the sad fact: Most post-World War II suburbs - - Franklin is certainly one of them - - have poorly engineered streets that are more akin to plumbing systems than useful transportation grids.

This is the curvilinear suburb, the familiar collection of curving, irregular streets inspired by, of all things, rural cemeteries designed in the first half of the 19th century. Rather than a regular, predictable, useful grid of streets that disperses traffic and provides multiple routes from "A" to "B," we live in "communities" designed by engineers to focus traffic on a few over-used arterial and collector roads. This leads to a common suburban phenomena: You can see it, but you can't get to it.

One had only to live through the recent flooding here in Franklin to realize that it takes very, very little to completely cut off access to whole neighborhoods because we lack a useful street grid. In the picture above, you can see that flooding on any of the red or blue roads - - collector roads - - pretty much seals the deal.

So, imagine trying to get kids who live close to school to forgo the bus and walk. You could take a compass and inscribe a circle that radiates a half-mile from the school in question, and decide that every student in that circle should walk or bike to school.

But you can't do that in Franklin; or, indeed, in many sprawling suburbs. As described here multiple times, there are kids attending Pleasant View Elementary School, for example, who get on a bus mere yards from the school's front door due to the sad fact that, even if there is a street route to school, it is so horribly unsafe that it's better for them to climb on a bus for a 12 second ride than brave the road.

 

ABOVE: If you're a kid that would like to walk or ride a bike to school, that little red strip is a virtual gauntlet. 

That's not to mention the many homes from which you can hear or even see the school your children attend, yet you cannot get there on foot without taking some circuitous route that invariably forces you to cross or use a busy collector road where traffic averages 45- and 50-miles per hour - with no sidewalk and a shoulder regularly used by vehicles for blind, full-speed passing of turning cars.

 

ABOVE: Playing "chicken" on Drexel in the bike/pedestrian lane on a blind rise.

Has Franklin learned its lesson? No. A July 15th city memorandum describes a five year road improvement plan that concentrates on merely widening arterial and collector roads.

And we'll keep paying for buses that transport kids 275 yards down the road.

More Kids Might Walk To School - washingtonpost.com:

Shoppes at Wyndham Village: On-site mosquito hatchery has issues; developer "reimbursed" nonetheless

Sendik's (Wyndham) Grand Opening, originally uploaded by johnruexp.

Item 4 on the 7/8/08 Common Council agenda: "Reimburse the Shoppes at Wyndham Village for the City’s share of the cost of the storm water management facilities for the reconstruction of W. Drexel Avenue from W. Loomis Road (STH 36) to S. Lovers Lane Road (STH 100)."

The council voted to "reimburse" Shoppes at Wyndham Village (Carstensen Development) $98,000, their share of creating an up-to-standards stormwater basin engineered to handle, hopefully, what the previous wetlands used to take care of. Alderman Wilhelm was the sole "no" vote.

Why vote no?

I wonder if anyone at the Sendik's grand opening yesterday wandered over to the east side of the store - - where the 200 year-old trees used to be.

What's wrong with this picture? Evidently, NOTHING, because Tuesday night the City of Franklin Common Council voted to immediately "reimburse" Carstensen Development $98,000 for what is at present a messed up, steep-grade, kid-eating (fence, anyone?), bank-eroding stormwater basin.

Did they fulfill the landscaping requirement? Look closely on the middle left side of the photo. Those two dead trees evidently represent the landscaping efforts to date.

Is it engineered correctly? The caved-in edges show you what happens when there aren't root systems and connective wetlands in place during torrential rain events like what we saw last month. If you've ever visited or seen pictures of the Grand Canyon (or, for that matter, my basement), you know that water goes where it wants to go and will make a path if one is not provided.

But the money was paid, even though it is obvious to the naked eye that this basin has issues that have yet to be addressed by Carstensen Development. Will they address those issues now that they have been paid, in effect, "on trust."? Let's watch closely.

In the meantime, ponder the implications  - - and cost savings - - of a thoughtful site plan that would have embraced the natural conditions on the site rather than try to wrestle them into submission.

In other news, the position of City Development Director will not be immediately filled because the city cannot afford the $83,137 salary.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

One of the many concepts that were reinforced for me while recovering from this month's flooded basement adventure was the idea that adversity can bring out the best in your neighbors. In my case, my next-door neighbors opened their house completely to me and my family as we struggled to put things back together without running water or electricity. They also let me stay in their guest room so I could get up every couple hours at night to pour gas into the generators so the sump pumps and fans could keep running. (And, I shouldn't neglect to mention, introduced me to a Mexican dish that is incredible, and may soon become a staple in our house as well.)

This great op-ed ran in the New York Times recently. It's about a guy who decided to ask all the people in his neighborhood if he could stay over night at their house, just to see if that exercise might bring down some of the walls we erect around ourselves in modern communities. It makes for a very interesting piece.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

By PETER LOVENHEIM 

THE alarm on my cellphone rang at 5:50 a.m., and I awoke to find myself in a twin bed in a spare room at my neighbor Lou’s house.

Lou was 81. His six children were grown and scattered around the country, and he lived alone, two doors down from me. His wife, Edie, had died five years earlier. “When people learn you’ve lost your wife,” he told me, “they all ask the same question. ‘How long were you married?’ And when you tell them 52 years, they say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful!’ But I tell them no, it isn’t. I was just getting to know her.”

Lou had said he gets up at six, but after 10 more minutes, I heard nothing from his room down the hall. Had he died? He had a heart ailment, but generally was in good health. With a full head of silver-gray hair, bright hazel-blue eyes and a broad chest, he walked with the confident bearing of a man who had enjoyed a long and satisfying career as a surgeon.

The previous evening, as I’d left home, the last words I heard before I shut the door had been, “Dad, you’re crazy!” from my teenage daughter. Sure, the sight of your 50-year-old father leaving with an overnight bag to sleep at a neighbor’s house would embarrass any teenager, but “crazy”? I didn’t think so.

There’s talk today about how as a society we’ve become fragmented by ethnicity, income, city versus suburb, red state versus blue. But we also divide ourselves with invisible dotted lines. I’m talking about the property lines that isolate us from the people we are physically closest to: our neighbors.

It was a calamity on my street, in a middle-class suburb of Rochester, several years ago that got me thinking about this. One night, a neighbor shot and killed his wife and then himself; their two middle-school-age children ran screaming into the night. Though the couple had lived on our street for seven years, my wife and I hardly knew them. We’d see them jogging together. Sometimes our children would carpool.

Some of the neighbors attended the funerals and called on relatives. Someone laid a single bunch of yellow flowers at the family’s front door, but nothing else was done to mark the loss. Within weeks, the children had moved with their grandparents to another part of town. The only indication that anything had changed was the “For Sale” sign on the lawn.

A family had vanished, yet the impact on our neighborhood was slight. How could that be? Did I live in a community or just in a house on a street surrounded by people whose lives were entirely separate? Few of my neighbors, I later learned, knew others on the street more than casually; many didn’t know even the names of those a few doors down.

(Read the rest at NYTimes.com)

FLOOD NOTE: Get that well water tested!

If you're like me and don't have city water (we have drinking water delivered), be sure to get your well tested.

Our results came back yesterday via a phone message: "Your water is bad." The message went on to explain that I should  run my garden hoses for 24-48 hours to flush it until he can rechlorinate the system.

I finally caught our well guy on his phone this morning.

"Oh yeah," he said. "You have E. Coli in there. Haven't seen that in years."

What?!?!?

"E. Coli?!?!?" I sputtered. "I've been brushing my teeth with that stuff!"

"Oh, no no no, sir. You aren't gonna want to to do that," he replied. "Any ingestion is bad news."

E. Coli?!?!? Fortunately, the rest of the family left town; I'm home alone.

"Wait a minute," he suddenly said. "Did I say E. Coli on the phone message I left you? I think that's someone else. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was another house."

"'Pretty sure'?"

"I have to go out to Yorkville; I'll call you when I get back to the office and let you know."

And so it goes. Wish me luck.

UPDATE: All clear.

FLOOD NOTE: IRS may cut you a break

As noted in the online video I watched at the Small Business Administration website (and via tip from Kevin Fischer), the IRS is willing to cut a break for persons affected by the flood.

As a self-employed writer, I could certainly use a few extra months to pay my first quarterly tax bill. We bought a new furnace to replace the drowned one with our stimulus check ...

Flood note: Manage your cel phone bills

In the aftermath of the flood, many people who lost land lines but still had to communicate are finding themselves way, way over their cel phone's maximum minutes and well into the .40¢-.50¢(!) per minute territory that comes with "overages." I ended up 200+ minutes past my limit even after expending a pretty good supply of the "rollover" minutes I had banked.

The expenses are piling up, so this is one you can and should nip in the bud.

Tip: Call your cel phone company and let them know you are in an area declared a Federal Disaster Area. Often they will forgive the extra minutes. In my case, AT&T (the only company you can use with an iPhone) agreed to backdate a plan upgrade for me so I'm billed for the next-higher service plan this month, which keeps me out of overage trouble. That'll cost me $20 more on one bill (I can switch back immediately, and there's no charge for plan-switching); much better than the $80-$100 I'd get socked for if I paid the per-minute overage rates.