What do you dislike about having neighbors?
Last Friday after work, a friend and I were talking over beer about her plans to return to Fairbanks. (She currently lives in Haines.) When she lived in Fairbanks before, she lived completely off the grid in the remotest of places: she says that she often had to ride an ATV just to get from her cabin to her car on account of the mud, and her nearest neighbor was a mile away. Though her current apartment (house? cabin? some sort of rental) in Haines is surrounded by trees, she doesn’t like the location because she can hear her neighbor’s dogs.
This is something I can understand. Persistently noisy dogs — especially big ones, in large numbers — grate on my nerves, and it would drive me batty to have to listen to them at all hours. However, there must be some — probably plenty in the Borough — for whom the sound of a noisy dog team is music at whatever hour.
And these same people might be bothered by the occasional midnight whistle of the train, which can be heard from my house. Or by a pack of rowdy adolescents. Or by the passage of homeless people on their street. To me, those are all happy signs of human activity, of the energy and color of our community.
To me. But not to everyone.
The mind-set of “wanting to live on twenty acres” is foreign to me, and just understanding it is difficult enough. Yet it seems to be the mind-set of a good number of people in the Borough, and I’d like some help in understanding it.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the conventional wisdom in an episode of Sesame Street and what it had to say about zoning, population density, and the character of neighborhoods. Yet it doesn’t mean much if people just don’t want neighbors. And that is how many people seem.
My question, kind readers, is: what are some things you dislike about having neighbors? What are the drawbacks of living in a neighborhood?
Are roommates included in this? Either way, you likely don’t want an answer from a xenophobe. I’ll just move on.
The saying that “familiarity breeds contempt” should probably be modified to say “excessive familiarity breeds contempt.” That touches on your question about neighbors. In the case of your friend who likes to live in the remote forest, it could be turned into “proximity breeds contempt.” Some people just don’t like to be around other people — or they need some total quiet time as part of their day. As for the others, who are probably most of us, what constitutes “excessive familiarity” is relative. My wife and I have always known our neighbors, chatted with them, exchanged gifts of fish or special cooked meals with them, and asked them to watch our house and take in the mail when we were away — which we also do for them. And we enjoy that relationship, but we have never had them over for dinner or been invited to dinner. Our close local friends are in the same city but more distant. The others are nodding acquaintances who are pleasant to see and chat with, but that is all. Some people have lived in an apartment building in New York City for 20 years, do not know the people in the apartment next door, and are shocked at the idea the they or one of their friends should even go ask the neighbor for some ketchup. I created a minor uproar by proposing that, but I got the ketchup and was received in a very friendly way.
For further thought: I have been going to the same gym for five months now, seeing many of the same people every day. People there seem to prefer to be solitary and isolated, unless they are with friends they already know.
Having grown up on top of Ester Dome and enjoyed the relative isolation there, I can tell you that it’s not about not liking neighbors so much as liking the elbow room and the privacy. My dad could take a pee off the porch, my mom and I could sunbathe in the nude, my sister and I could run around and play and not worry about traffic or dogs or things like that. And we had neighbors; we just had to run through the woods for a quarter or half-mile to go visit them. The quiet of growing up in the woods was nice, although it wasn’t silent. There’s different noises (red squirrels and ravens are definitely not voiceless) and different rhythms, and it’s defiinitely not city life.
Now I live in Ester, on an acre of land. My neighbors all have at least one acre, some of them many acres. Yet the houses are situated within easy walking distance. I find snowmachine noise annoying, but many of my neighbors use them in the winter to get around; we have nearby mines, which make a big racket in the summer. My neighbors are much closer than in the place I grew up, and I don’t have as much privacy or quiet as I like, but the neighbors do provide a bit of security: they’ll notice when somebody strange is in the neighborhood, or if something isn’t right. We look out for each other, borrow eggs or butter or bring over cookies, that sort of thing, even if we don’t socialize regularly. I like the feeling of the place I’m living, in large part because we have a community anchored in the physical area. Ester is very walkable, and very community spirited. Ester Dome summit is also walkable, but has more of the neighborhood feeling than a larger community feeling, and I think that’s because it’s much easier, physically, to remain isolated if one chooses.
Paul,
I think that lot sizes, by themselves, really don’t tell us much about community or neighbours one way or another. I share your sentiments expressed in previous posts that density matters. However, there isn’t a single density that is universally optimal, nor is low density a declaration of disliking neighbours. The difficulty is that, while strong urban and rural communities have some commonalities, there are also considerable differences. (Warning: sweeping generalizations ahead) In strong rural communities neighbours frequently rely on one another to a much higher degree than what is typical in urban neighbourhoods. Urban community building takes place atop of a foundation of services paid for through local taxes (the payment and support of such taxes itself a neighbourly act), while in rural communities acts of neighbourliness may be the very work of providing ‘the basics’- keeping a road open in winter, staffing the volunteer fire dept, etc. Of course the rural/urban mix that is peculiar to Fairbanks confounds all generalizations. There are thriving neighbourhoods and communities outside the city of Fairbanks. On the other hand, life on the edge of Fairbanks is entirely different from rural life hours from ‘town’. Anyway, so as not to stray too far from the intent of your question my point is there are a lot of people on larger pieces of land outside of town that really enjoy and even depend on their neighbours.
Mr. Gibbs: I certainly recognize that the amount of proximity needed to breed contempt is relative to the person. But I doubt that it’s just proximity in most cases: people think that the neighbors are too noisy, they drive cars by too much, their kids are unruly, or they collect to many junker cars. What I was poking around for was, What are these factors? What specifically, beyond “neighbors too close”?
Admittedly, there are those who simply want the feeling that they are alone in the wilderness, and any signs of neighbors would certainly spoil that. Particular behaviors of neighbors speak to me, but that desire doesn’t. I’m a city mouse.
Incidentally, the very civil, but not close, relationship you and your wife have with your neighbors (and which Deirdre also mentions) is something Jane Jacobs praises about cities in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (which I mean to finish someday). In a neighborhood you have a web of support and trust built up among casual acquaintances, but not the pressure to have close, friendly relationships with any more than you care for.
In mentioning the NYC apartment building, you touch on something I mentioned but did not resolve in one part of my “Sesame Street” series: the possibility that neighborhoods not only must have critical mass, but may also have something like “terminal mass” — such a crowding of people that residents want nothing more than to shut their teeming neighbors OUT. Naturally, people’s threshold’s differ.
Deirdre, I believe we’re working from different definitions of “neighbor” — or at least I’m struggling with several competing definitions, all of which seem partly right. (This may call for its own post.) One I like is, “Someone living near you whom you see, not infrequently, without intending to.” But that’s not the only sense in which I actually use the word.
Russell, naturally lot sizes by themselves don’t tell us much one way or another. Nothing does, by itself. I do suggest that certain lot sizes (1) are sought by people who wish to eschew neighbors and (2) make it harder and less likely for neighborly relations to develop.
Even without actual evidence in hand, I’m inclined to agree with you that rural and urban neighborliness are different creatures, and that the very needs of survival, in the absence of a paid civic workforce, may tend to bring people together in a way very different from urban neighborhoods.
I have to leave my computer right now, but I’d love to continue this later.
Mr. Adasiak (You can call me “Will” if you like and I’d be happy to abandon the formality and call you “Paul”): I think we may be close to agreement. For me the more specific factors you seek grow out of proximity. And they vary from person to person. Varying proximity and varying taste or temperament are the root causes. As for the specifics, perhaps you need to have a poll conducted (passive construction intentional; I suspect you don’t have the personal budget to conduct one.). For me, a little noise — like kids playing or even the neighbors fighting — gives a sense of life to a place; even an occasional chain saw. A lot of noise — cars without mufflers, or a kennel of barking dogs at 2 a.m. — is objectionable. Similarly, a little visual pollution, like an ill-maintained yard, is just an expression of character; but abandoned cars or refrigerators in the front yard is too much character. Neighbors who associate casually are fine, and friendships may grow out of that. Neighbors who are pushy or intrusive, or who have over-active dope parties in the middle of the night, are not. Quiet dope parties are all right. I agree with you that there is comfort in casual association — like seeing the retired college professor walking every morning on her way to the gym, and the occasional exchange of pleasantries with her. There is also on some occasions a sense of protection and mutual support. For me, I suppose, the closer the proximity the more I appreciate some distance — but after a certain point the greater the distance the more I appreciate some distance.
Yours, in a neighborly intellectual way, Will.
(P.S. I read some time ago in a book called “India: a Million Mutinies Now” by V.S. Naipaul of a woman with a doctorate who grew up and lived in very crowded, chaotic conditions. When she married she moved with her husband into a quiet apartment. She literally couldn’t stand the silence and the absence of people all around, and she had to move back to the conditions she liked and was accustomed to.)
Whoops. Make the end of that line before the closing read “after a certain point the greater the distance the more I appreciate some PROXIMITY.”
Great article Paul! Some wonderful points in it…
My family & I lived off of Minnie St. for 8 years and just moved ‘out’ of town (couple of miles) a year ago. At the time of house searching, the instincts were to go further out, like 20 miles. But ‘we’ compromised with what we have now. It was a trial of city vs. country life so to speak.
It has been an interesting study and we have realized that we HATE driving this much on a daily basis. Going on a car trip is one thing, but an hour+ a day in transit is completely another.
Results, this house is for sale & we have made an offer on another in Fairbanks! Funny, it is 3 blocks from our old house… Guess after our experiment we are not necessarily city dwellers, but strongly believe in the resurgence of downtowns and building stronger communities.
Being out in the ‘hills’ the noise of neighbors is no less than what we had in town. Dogs still bark at all times, snow machines still drive by at all times, people still party in the summer and stay in the yards late. Those are all good noises to us…