It takes a walkable village

The first week I was a home with my newborn daughter in my standard sprawl neighborhood located in Fort Collins, Colorado, I felt like I was stranded on the moon. In the morning, I would see cars leave and then I would see no activity on the streets in that neighborhood the rest of the day, with the exception of an occasional clichéd tumbleweed blowing through. There are few occupations more lonely than suburban sprawl stay at home parent. Americans currently spend so much time getting to, from, and at work that we tend to get a significant amount of our daily socialization there, something I really didn’t realize until I was no longer working. As a stay at home parent in sprawl suburbia, I usually didn’t speak to another adult the entire day until my husband came home from work. If you want the fast train to crazy town, this is a good way to get there.

I couldn’t take the baby anywhere without many minutes of car set orientation and buckling, and then had at least a 10 minute drive to get anywhere of interest, like the bookstore or coffeehouse. On arrival, minutes of baby unloading and baby stuff inventorying would commence. I already wasn’t getting much sleep and was covered in baby barf so my patience for anything was near zero and this dance to get anywhere was exhausting. I had no friends or family nearby and I knew none of my neighbors. I was miserable. Not all of that was my neighborhood’s fault of course—it after all, wasn’t responsible for keeping me awake at night—but the sterility and loneliness that resulted from my neighborhood’s design sure made enduring those awful parenting times significantly more trying. Moving to a New Urbanist neighborhood when my daughter was 2 saved my sanity.

People—finally!

Whoever said hell is other people was not a stay at home parent living in the suburbs. I needed adult human interaction in bad way and I needed it close and convenient so I could run back to home base in case of a diaper blow-out. The first thing I noticed when we moved to Bradburn Village, a new urbanist neighborhood in Westminster, Colorado, was there were people out walking around all the time—even in the middle of the day. Even just seeing other people made me feel less lonely.

I found that I met people easily when my daughter and I were out walking around the neighborhood or playing in one of the parks. In my first month in Bradburn, I met more people than I had known the entire four years living in my old neighborhood. Over time, I made many good friends as did my daughter. If we were bored at home, we could walk outside and almost always run into someone and have a nice chat, and my daughter could play with other kids without having to arrange a formal date, time, and place to do so. Now that my daughter is older, she can just open our front door and walk down the street to play with her friends—their homes are very close and the walk is safe. Bradburn was designed to encourage walking in many different ways and it works—it draws people out of their homes and into the social realm and creates a nearly effortless sense of community.

Eyes on the street

Because people are so frequently outside in Bradburn, they meet and get to know their neighbors and their neighbor’s kids. It also means that there are many people watching any neighborhood activity and they know what is normal, what isn’t, and whose kid just threw a dirt clod through another neighbor’s window and ran away. This phenomenon is called “eyes on the street” and it comes in especially handy for parents.

One day one of my neighbors was driving back into the neighborhood when she noticed another neighbor’s son (age 5) riding his bike quite far away from his house headed to a nearby shopping area. She thought this was odd but assumed one of his parents was on a bike behind him until she got home and heard that neighbor’s son was missing. They had been having a party with a lot of people and their son had decided he wanted something from Walgreens right now and had slipped out unnoticed. The neighbor who had seen him ran over and told his parents who hot-tailed it to the shopping area and discovered their son’s training wheeled bike in Walgreen’s bike rack and their son inside.

The only potential downside of eyes on the street is predicted to hit when the largest number of kids in Bradburn get to their teenage years. Neighbors often joke they will get away with nothing and will have to go to the beige large lot neighborhood next door to do any partying.

Interesting places to walk to

There are multiple services, restaurants, shops, and parks in 5-10 minutes walking distance from my home because of Bradburn’s design. It’s such a delight when you have kids to walk through a beautiful neighborhood to a local ice cream store on a warm summer evening, seeing friends along the entire way. Once the kids are older, parents don’t need to drive them everywhere—they can safely walk to stores themselves to buy candy or whatever takes their fancy. This promotes independence and exercise  in kids and sanity in parents.

New urbanist neighborhoods with their pedestrian oriented design and promotion of effortless socializing are a boon for parents.  Critics that charge new urbanist neighborhoods won’t attract families because they don’t have acreage sized yards are quite mistaken, as my neighbors and I can attest.

Petra Spiess has been resident of the new urbanist neighborhood of Bradburn Village for 7 years and can’t imagine raising her kid anywhere else.