I grew up in the 'burbs, a child of parents who grew up in the city. A lot of my life was spent in Brooklyn and as a kid, I really wanted to live in a city.
Now........pfffft. I like my house, my yard and the only gripe I have about it is my neighbors are too close.
When we bought our house a little over 20 years ago, we bought into a middle class blue collar older neighborhood in which many of our neighbors were twice our age. Well, the old folks either died or moved to retirement places; someone decided that our street was a goldmine and bought many of the homes left behind. He tore them down to the foundations and replaced them with multi-family units-apartments.
My neighborhood is on the border of a small city that is not known for its affluence. These units have been rented out to mostly transient immigrant families from that town; we have become an extension of the city, innundated with taxicabs, people cutting through from the local shopping center, even day workers congregating on the corners.
I don't want the urban life. I don't want the noise, the intrusions, the not knowing anyone walking by my house. My home value is going down; the housing market fall coupled with the change of the neighborhood can be blamed. The house next door to me has been up for sale since last summer and two houses up another went on the market a week ago-that probably won't move either. People who can't sell are forced to rent and renters don't generally make good neighbors.
On the other side of the coin, there's places like Bordentown, NJ. Thirty years ago, if you said you were from Bordentown, you were looked at like you had 3 eyes. "River Pineys" were from Bordentown. The houses in town were aluminum clad multi-apartment travesties. Most were over 200 years old, but cheaply "remodeled" with fake brick facades, yards not taken care off, driveways filled with cars long past any usefulness.
Then some gays moved in. Houses were in bad shape but cheap as hell. And, like that old shampoo commercial, they told some friends and so on and so on....today, after an amazing 20 year renaissance, Bordentown is an art mecca, a small town that thinks it's a big city, with high-end restaurants, antique shops and galleries. The multi-family travesties have been brought back to single family splendor.
Bordentown's rebirth was featured in the NY Times in their December 24, 2006 issue.
Bordentown