Cul-de-sac communes: Surviving in the suburbs

By Katherine

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in my neighborhood recently: more neighborliness. 

Everyone’s always been friendly, but use of our neighborhood listserv seems to have multiplied exponentially in recent months. People are e-mailing more often for help in finding cheap, reputable electricians and nearby dog sitters; used play equipment for visiting grandchildren and new homes for old plants and stray cats.

I have two theories to explain this. One is the crazy weather we’ve had in Charlottesville this year. There’s nothing like record-breaking, debilitating snow falls and bizarre summer thunderstorm-induced microbursts to bring people together, whether it’s to borrow a shovel or bend an ear about shared tribulations.

Two, the economy sucks and people seem more apt to seek shared resources, barter for services and buy perfectly-good used rather than new items these days. I don’t have actual statistics to back this up, but my hunch is that the local Craigslist has seen an uptick in usage as well, and services like Swaptree, which Lisa recently highlighted, are getting lots of new participants.

This makes me happy for a number of reasons. Like family members who lived through the Great Depression and still fold slightly soiled aluminum foil to use over and over, I hope this recession changes thoughtless resource use and breeds more community-building permanently.  

Most selfishly, though, I’m digging the new neighborliness because until now, I’ve felt green guilt about where I live: a cul-de-sac in a suburban subdivision.

We never thought we’d end up in a builder-issued, rip-off of a colonial floor plan (ours is called The Madison) with fake shutters, HOA dues for the neighborhood pool and nary a coffee shop within safe walking distance, but the financial and other complexities of our current life being what they are, we made compromises on our more modern aesthetic leanings and energy-efficient hopes in favor of a house that needed no work and was safe and friendly for the kid and the kid-to-come.

It’s not all hardship; other than fudging my address to architect and designer friends who might be offended by the derivative, cookie-cutter home designs and the affront to urban connectivity, we enjoy living here. 

We’ve saved ourselves a lot of wasted cash and the planet a lot of wasted energy simply by walking down the street to our friendly subdivision co-habitants to borrow a chain saw or weed whacker rather than investing in these irregularly-used tools ourselves.

And when it’s a balmy Sunday evening, and I’ve dragged my lawn chair to the cul-de-sac to join the neighbors for a cold one while we watch our kiddos and dogs chase each other around the adjacent yards, I think: This is what living in a community is all about!  

Sure, if I had my druthers, I’d live a little farther out in the county and a little further from the grid on farmland in one of those prefab, eco-friendly, modular homes that one of my architect or designer friends could help configure with geothermal heat and hipster cachet. I’d have ample acreage for a chicken coop and there’d be a pond or a creek and a barn full of cute farm animals to delight my children enough that we could ditch the TV for good.

This might happen one day. For now, though, I live in a suburb three miles from downtown and enjoy every stroll to the neighborhood pool, especially when my daughter forgets her swim noodle and we only need schlep back home on foot to retrieve it.

Plus, with all this newly inspired borrowing of lawn tools and cups of sugar I’m witnessing, I’m thinking there might be something to Cul-de-Sac Communes—a social design project I first heard about on All Things Considered on NPR a year ago.

The project, which has been sweeping through Southern California, was spearheaded by Stephanie Smith, a Harvard-educated architect and entrepreneur. Smith’s work is focused on inspiring existing, mainstream communities (beyond the more counter-culture intentional communities such as Twin Oaks) to share resources. Smith in turn was inspired by British economist E.F. Schumacher’s book: Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

What do you think? Are you witnessing more sharing of resources among folks in your neighborhood?  Can cul-de-sacs be green?