A Good Neighborhood Has Kids and Dogs Update

I didn't mean to suggest that everyone in a neighborhood has to have a dog or kid. Egads. Just that it's a good idea if the neighborhood has a good amount of them. People with dogs and babies are easier to meet.

Here are some other people types who help strengthen the bonds of neighborliness by being easy to meet: shop keepers, meticulous sidewalk sweepers, musicians who practice on their porches, artists who paint en plain air, front yard gardeners, and transit riders.

I started with the kids and dogs element, because kids and dogs need public space, in particular parks. Without a park within a block or two, parents might not consider a house suitable for raising kids (except for a house with an unusually large city yard.) This is true for dogs as well. I think the case can be made and has been made that parks contribute to social cohesiveness which helps stabilize the neighborhood, reduce violence, and increase happiness. So it is a policy issue, something individuals can't do for themselves but must do as a community.

For attracting the second group of people, it takes good design and a little organization. At least some of the houses in the neighborhood should have porches, little front gardens, or places to sit. Having public transit nearby is also a plus. In my neighborhood we have organized sidewalk sweeping twice a year, in spring and fall. It's one of the most social occasions of the year. Some gardeners have participated in a City Garden Contest which rewards their efforts in beautifying the neighborhood. Last summer we experimented with Porch Happy Hour rotating among a variety of porches. A neighborhood plan which allows for some shops within walking distance will give everyone a chance to meet up.

A Good Neighborhood Has Kids and Dogs

There is a new field or at least a new emphasis in Psychology that deals with positive emotions and happiness that is called Positive Psychology. One of the measures psychologists use to gauge happiness is social connectedness. People are happier and feel more safe when they know their neighbors and have more social interactions with the community around them. Sounds reasonable.

After High School and College, where there are tons of daily social interactions, the number of social relationships starts to drop off. It's very difficult to maintain that rich social network. People are not as free with their time as in student days, they have responsibilities to their own families, they seem more reserved about forming friendships.

One sure-fire way to meet your neighbors is to get pregnant. (Ha ha, insert your own joke here.) The comments start flowing after that, welcomed or not. There is no end to the conversations just about pregnancy and childbirth. Next you have a little baby and you will talk to many more people. As they grow up, you can trick or treat your way around the neighborhood and actually meet every single person. People who have ignored you or rushed past you for years will stop and talk to their disarming tiny neighbors when they are outside on the sidewalk. After that come discussions about schools, time together at the playground with other parents, and babysitting requests. The presence of children breaks down all kinds of social barriers and gets conversations going.

One thing I noticed after having my first child was how much I had to rely on others. I was flat on my back in bed for 6 weeks straight after #1 was born. People brought me food, did my laundry, changed the sheets on my bed. I cried, both for their kindness and for my own feelings of dependency, because I had not felt so inadequate since I was a young child myself. After I was back on my feet I came to realize it was a permanent state: parents are incredibly needy of help every day! My friends, neighbors, teachers, coaches, instructors fill in for me all the time. On the flip side, while I am dependent on them I try to reciprocate as best I can and get involved in the schools, the dance studio, the Meeting House, the carpools, the sleep-overs, the requests for cookies. Instant (well, alright it took ten years or so) community!

The second way to meet your neighbors is to get a dog. This is simpler. Get a puppy, take it for a walk. Meet everyone there is. Ask your neighbor to let the dog out when you work late, offer to watch their dog when they go one vacation. Plan a play date at the off-leash area. Learn the names of all the neighbor dogs.

Having a good complement of kids and dogs in a neighborhood strengthens the bonds between neighbors and adds layers of interconnected dependence. It makes the neighborhood a better place to live and makes the people in it happier.

Knowing this, what can the neighborhood do to make sure it is a good place for kids and dogs?

Kids in the City

Are kids happier or healthier being raised with more space? The popular wisdom seems to be that if we could afford it, kids would have their own rooms, their own bathrooms, their own study space and their own media rooms. And if we can afford a little more, a larger room would be better so they could have their own lounge area for their friends or more organization of their stuff. All that stuff is a pipe dream for most row house dwellers - are suburban houses more kid friendly?

What about outside the house. Are kids healthier or happier with fenced yards, 1/4 acres, 1/2 acres, 10 acres?

Are the suburbs inherently more wholesome than the city? Less diverse and interesting? Of course you are going to tell me: "It depends." I'd like to know what research is actually out there, because Americans are pretty much deciding that cities aren't for kids.

I have no hard opinions on this subject and I assume that people will decide what's best for them and their kids. Obviously, it depends on a bunch of things about the particular area, some of which can be controlled or compensated for and some which can not. There are suburban neighborhoods that have urban walkability and community and there are some dreadful urban communities where you'd need a car to get anywhere. My house is near a huge park with a two mile loop that feels like the country side. Since we have no yard, I wouldn't have bought this house without it.

100K House has a post about this topic that I wish I had written. And alpha-mom made the move to Suburbia and regretted it, but many of her commenters did not.

Charles Village, Baltimore, Maryland

I was happy to read that Charles Village was voted as a top ten neighborhood by the American Planning Association. I lived in Charles Village for 8 years, never owned a car, and had little reason to ever leave our little enclave, except to get to the Charles Movie Theater.


When I think back on my days in Charles Village, I realize we didn't know how good we had it. Those row homes that line Charles Street, St Paul Street and Calvert Street were so large and fabulous. Most of them were broken up into apartments with one on each floor. I had 6 different addresses while I lived in Baltimore, always moving into the apartment with some slight advantage over the previous one.

There were many things these apartments had in common like beautiful bathrooms - all ceramic subway tile walls with a row of hand painted fancy tiles with relief images of grapes or oak leaves, claw foot tubs and octagonal black and white floor tiles. The kitchens were often retrofitted into the pesky middle room and were furnished with 1920's stoves, undersized fridges, and no counter space. If you were lucky, you had access to a backyard and could grow some tomatoes or sleep on an upstairs porch. Everywhere windows were in awful condition. If two unattached people shared the apartment, they would each have a bedroom and there wouldn't be a living room. Couples could have living room and we even had a dining room in one of our apartments because the tiny kitchen was converted from an old sleeping porch.

We could get everything we needed in just a few blocks. Like many CV residents, I would go down to Eddie's for groceries just around dinner time, run into some friends and decide to spontaneously make and share the meal together. I enjoyed the proximity to the Museum with its boat load of Matisse paintings and the walks we would take in nearby Roland Park and Guilford.

I thought when I finally outgrew having a one bedroom apartment I would move into house on Guilford or Abel Avenues. So cute!

The Pesky Middle Room

Some rowhomes are long enough that there are three rooms on the second floor. The front bedroom is often largest with the biggest windows. The back bedroom might have smaller windows and perhaps a porch off the back. But the middle bedroom is trouble. Because the stairs and hallway take up some of the width of the house, the middle room is small. Light is just a single window off an air/light shaft or unattached side.

Our middle room is about 9 feet by 9 feet. A room this size allows for the placement of a queen size bed, with 24 inches of room on three sides. It has a 12 deep closet with a hook - hangers would be placed parallel to the wall, not perpendicular. It has one window, which faces north.

Many houses I have visited have altered this configuration, because the room is just too tight for people who have a lot of stuff, like dressers or bookshelves or clothes. The house next door has the middle room combined with the front room which gives one large L shaped room. They were able to add large closets along a wall, thus getting a sleeping area in the front and a dressing area towards the middle.

In another house, a prior renovation turned the little room into a giant walk in closet with a window for the front room. Perhaps this was closet overkill: a recent renovation cut the closet in half and ceded the other half to enlarging the adjacent bathroom. Now the bathroom has two windows and a lot of floor space, a current trend.

I have seen a few examples of combining the middle room with the hallway. It solves the problem of the narrow hall, allows light to reach further in and makes the room seem larger too. Of course, the room can't be used as a bedroom since it has no walls, so it is furnished as a family room, office, TV room, sewing room or what-have-you. My grandmom and my mother-in-law both set up sewing areas on the large second floor landings of their houses, and although neither of them were in rowhomes, maybe it is a pattern that makes sense.

For those homes that haven't reconfigured the second floor, the room is used as a nursery, office or art studio. With clever use of a loft bed/desk/dresser combination, my kindergarden aged nephew manages to fit into their middle room.

My current dream plan for my second floor would divide the room into 3 pieces. One piece for the front room, for a good sized reach in closet, one piece to enlarge the bathroom, and one piece to widen the hallway enough to fit a laundry area up there.

My house/ My Neighborhood

Row houses create the perfect density for city streets.  Not a little city unto itself like a condo tower and not a little piece of farmland like a 1/4 acre detached house.

Where I live, we have a couple hundred houses in a two block radius, with a few hundred people living inside.  It gives us the perfect critical mass to have a lively neighborhood with lots of activities and yet we all have our own direct access to the outside with no elevators.

The houses themselves are attached or semi-detached homes, built from 1850 up to about 1910, in several styles.  Some are two story and some are three.  Some are pretty small but the largest are 2500 square feet.  Mine is a three story house with about 1750 square feet.

Inside the houses live single people, couples (both young and retired) and lots of cats and dogs.  There aren't that many kids in our neighborhood.  I don't know if that is because people think the city isn't a wholesome place to raise a kid, or they just can't fit a modern family into these narrow, closetless houses.

The shape of the row house makes it very adaptable over time.  People have moved walls around, finished basements, closed in porches, added bathrooms and combined rooms.  Mostly they have left the footprint alone, because there is no more room on the lot to expand.  Mostly they have left the window openings alone, which is good because these narrow houses would be so dark without big Victorian window openings.  I have visited houses with the modern approach of opening the whole thing up into a single space, and I have seen houses which have reproduction Victorian wallpaper.

My house comes equipped with some of the typical positive features of old homes in general: 5-panel doors, original wood windows, moldings, plaster walls, wooden floors (both hard wood and pine) and some slate tiles on the roof.  I also have the typical problems: narrow hallways, no closets, oddly added bathrooms, an old kitchen, not enough insulation, lead paint, flaking plaster and a plumbing problem in every room.

When I think about living here in this house, I think about how to fit all 5 of us in here without going crazy and I also want a manual about how to decide when the plaster needs to be replaced.  Is it safe for the kids to go outside?  Should I have the doors stripped?  When prepping a wall for painting, seriously, should I really bother spackling when the whole wall is as pock marked as a dart board?