On a civic association email list, a subscriber recently asked us why we moved to our house. The question went as follows:
A question to Heather and River Brandon—you live on a tougher street that has a lot of absentee rental housing on it. What made you decide to move there?
This week, River responded with the following.
talk about a tougher street. there was just a large altercation with over 20 people milling around, some carrying sticks, canes, someone even had a hammer. then two young men started fist fighting. i called 911 and the police showed up quickly. everyone ran off, and no one was seriously hurt as far as i could tell, and i don’t think the police were able to get anything useful by the time people had dispersed. but yikes, it looked like a potentially explosive situation for a while.
anyway, to answer your question, i guess i would say it was a confluence of factors, like most things in life. for one, it’s our first house, and we’re a single-income family. we also have three small kids (ages 5, 6, and 8 ). so finding a house large enough for all of us that was also in our price range was somewhat challenging. we did find a nice house on kenwood terrace that we made an offer on—i really liked it—but someone offered more than the asking price (it did seem like a bargain). anyway, by the time we had looked for a while, this was the only decent option that was still on the market—it was the second house we looked at, i think, and was still available after a few months. it had just been renovated, so that had some advantages, after being mistreated for quite a while, from what we could tell. it’s a great house, with lots of character, and a good amount of space for us, and the price was right.
beyond the house factors, the other main thing was that we wanted to be in forest park, and this part of the neighborhood particularly, since our daughter was already attending kensington ave school (we were living in 16 acres and chose kensington as a magnet school) and we wanted to live within walking distance. we’ve been very happy with the school, and now our middle son is in first grade there, with our youngest starting in the fall.
we also really like the diversity (ethnic/racial/cultural) of forest park in general. our street is very diverse, with quite a sampling of backgrounds, considering the latino families, a few vietnamese households, and lots of african american families. our street does have a lot of multi-family houses that are owned by absentee landlords, i’m sure, and that’s certainly a downside. there are only a handful of single-family houses on our block, we are one of them. but there are a lot of good people here. a lot of families who care about their kids and work hard. the language barrier is a challenge with some of our neighbors, but we’ve had good relations with most of them in spite of difficulty communicating. on our end of the block, i can honestly say most of the problems i’ve seen are related to two or three houses at the most, and primarily one. it’s pretty interesting, actually.
i don’t know if we’ll live in this house for a few more years or a lot longer, but we hope we can contribute to helping the neighborhood be more stable and safe in our small ways. like i said, i think a vast majority of the people here are really good folks who do their best, and it’s a small number that seem to create problems, or let them fester. we’re still pretty new, so we hope to get to know people better, since i think that’s the most effective protection against any sort of problems.
i read of a study not too long ago that pointed out that crime isn’t necessarily worse in inner-city, low-income neighborhoods, than it is in suburbs–at least, it’s not worse because they are inner-city or low-income. i guess that’s just not a good metric. the correlation is stronger between how long people live in a neighborhood and how well they know each other. relationships, a stable community, that’s the best way to make our neighborhoods safe, and it doesn’t matter so much who the people are in terms of socioeconomic status. coming from sixteen acres we know how isolated you can feel even in a neighborhood that seems safe and comfortable. we had little contact with our neighbors, and after living there for a few years didn’t feel much more integrated than when we moved in.
that said, we didn’t have 20 or 30 people milling around getting ready for a fight very often either. so it goes.