How _____ friendly is Sacramento? (Davis, Folsom: apartment complexes, how much, houses)

[corduroyboy]

Originally Posted by pba

Funny you should mention that as I'm sure a lot of people will feel the same way. Isn't it funny how most (true?) people come home, open the garage door from their car, drive it, close the door and their neighbors won't see them until they are going to work the next morning. Sound familiar???

For me that's very true for the routine I have and I honestly don't know most of my neighbors by name. I'm friendly with everyone and have fixed a few common fences with neighbors but even then I struggle to remember their names unfortunately. I generally recognize everyone and wave at them when passing but that's about it.

I remember as a kid my mom would always have all the neighbors names & phone numbers written on the refrigerator just in case she had to call for whatever the reason. I also remember neighbors coming over more often for coffee or lemonade and my parents would chat with them for quite some time. Now that's just how I remember is as a kid but I wonder what my parent's recollection of that time would have been.

Is is safe to say that 'long ago' (1970's) that it was a 'friendlier' time?? If I would have been an adult back then I wonder what I'd think....and I wonder how I'll feel 30 years from now too.

Such a great post!! And true to the highest degree possible. Just today I was out washing my work truck in the street and the neighbor that has lived in the house across from me for 2 years comes outside, throws his bike in the back of his truck and off he goes. I turn around to smile at him to maybe get a hello, but nothing. I've tried saying hello a dozen times, but you just get to the point where it isn't worth it to make friends with an invalid. He's a guy my age and you'd think we'd have a little something to talk about. Never once a hello, or even a nod.

I think "back then" was a friendlier time. We too had the phone list with all the neighbors. Where I'm from in upstate NY, there are no fences. You had a property line and no one gave a darn about it. Everyone waved, everyone smiled and beeped the horn to say hello. Not here. It kind of becomes a grim reality of what we live in out here. My wife and I have never been more serious about getting out of California and going to a friendlier place in Colorado.

[dennismpat]

Originally Posted by PinkElephant

Maybe so, but with a couple few and far between exceptions, I found most people in the Sacramento, especially store clerks to be extra friendly and often willing to go the extra mile in what seems to be just a normal part of their working day.

That has more or less disappeared from LA, courtesy seems to translate to weakness or something.

I'd say Sacramento is a more friendly place than SoCal, with most humble apologies to the nice individuals anywhere!

Having lived in both SoCal and Sacramento, my personal experience is that Sacramento is a bit friendlier. Perhaps it's because Sacramento is smaller and not as busy as L.A.? Someone else mentioned how self-absorbed people in California (in general) can be, and I think that's so true, sadly enough.

[Ludachris]

Originally Posted by corduroyboy

Such a great post!! And true to the highest degree possible. Just today I was out washing my work truck in the street and the neighbor that has lived in the house across from me for 2 years comes outside, throws his bike in the back of his truck and off he goes. I turn around to smile at him to maybe get a hello, but nothing. I've tried saying hello a dozen times, but you just get to the point where it isn't worth it to make friends with an invalid. He's a guy my age and you'd think we'd have a little something to talk about. Never once a hello, or even a nod.

I think "back then" was a friendlier time. We too had the phone list with all the neighbors. Where I'm from in upstate NY, there are no fences. You had a property line and no one gave a darn about it. Everyone waved, everyone smiled and beeped the horn to say hello. Not here. It kind of becomes a grim reality of what we live in out here. My wife and I have never been more serious about getting out of California and going to a friendlier place in Colorado.

And here I was hoping that the Sac area was different than the Bay Area in this regard. Here in the southern suburbs of Denver we talk with our neighbors and know most of them by name. The ones we don't talk to much still wave and say hi. I'm sure there are friendlier places out there, but it's 100% more friendly than any place I've lived in CA. And it's quite refreshing knowing the people who live next to you, even if it's just a little.

Hopefully we'll find a neighborhood out there where neighbors take the time to get to know each other. That was one of the things that we really were hoping we wouldn't lose if we chose to move away from Denver.

[zen_klown]

I am curious where the people live who don't have much success mixing with the neighbors? I have heard people complain about Natomas but I am curious where these other folks live. Are most people owner occupants in these neighborhoods or renters?

My hunch is that neighborliness is a function of income and homogeneity. I assume the more people look and act like each other the easier it is to get along and I also assume that its a function of income with the more owner occupied homes in a neighborhood the more people feel a need to get along with each other because they assume they will be living with these folks for the next 10 or 20 years or so.

So I would expect, Oak Park to have no feeling of neighborliness, but East Sac would have a pretty high sense of neighborliness. I imagine Folsom is pretty neighborly, but I imagine that the parts of Rancho with the apartments cluster next to the light rail lines aren't.

[wburg]

Originally Posted by zen_klown

My hunch is that neighborliness is a function of income and homogeneity. I assume the more people look and act like each other the easier it is to get along and I also assume that its a function of income with the more owner occupied homes in a neighborhood the more people feel a need to get along with each other because they assume they will be living with these folks for the next 10 or 20 years or so.

So I would expect, Oak Park to have no feeling of neighborliness, but East Sac would have a pretty high sense of neighborliness. I imagine Folsom is pretty neighborly, but I imagine that the parts of Rancho with the apartments cluster next to the light rail lines aren't.

I'd say your hunch is dead wrong. My neighborhood isn't fantastically diverse, but it ranges a lot in occupation (professionals, business owners, college students, laborers, and the disabled) and age (from senior citizens to families with young kids and college age folks) and ownership (about half rental and half ownership on my block.) Neighbors tend to meet when they have a reason to meet--on the street, in nearby businesses, on public transit. The suburbs discourage neighborhood interaction when everything has to be done by car and there is never a reason to walk on the streets or encounter anyone not surrounded by several thousand pounds of automobile armor.

I have friends who live in Oak Park, and their experience is that the neighborhood is a very social place. From what I have seen visiting there (I'm typically through there a couple times a week) it certainly seems to be the case: kids play in the street, families are out in their yards, people walk. I lived in a neighborhood right in between East Sac and Oak Park (not as fancy as the former but fancier than the latter), and I knew all my immediate neighbors and a few farther down the block. Again, it was a neighborhood where it was easy to walk, lawns and driveways were small, and people just kinda ran into each other on the way to here or there.

[angelbug]

Originally Posted by wburg

Maybe it depends on the neighborhood. There tends to be quite a bit of neighborliness in the central city. I have at least met most of the people on my block, and there is a group of people in the neighborhood who get together once a month for a potluck. People aren't overly friendly on the street but if you nod and go "hi" tend to respond in kind.

Suburban living tends to atomize neighborhoods for just the reasons mentioned above. A lot of Sacramento is postwar suburb, so I wouldn't be too surprised that people there tend to not know their neighbors.

It definitely depends on the neighborhood. I live in Davis and all the neighbors on my street and the cross street nearby know each other. I hurt my back a couple weeks ago and my next door neighbor mowed my lawn for me this weekend. I didn't ask - he insisted. Later that day he borrowed my charcoal grill because our gas was out over the weekend and he had family coming for a cookout. When I go away there's a third-grade girl a couple doors down who always brings in my mail and newspapers for me. Lady across the street just gave me a "ShamWow" faux chamois last week because she saw me using old towels to dry my car off after I washed it. I host a Groundhog Day party each year and we have ice cream socials outdoors in the summer and Christmas parties here and there depending on who's up for putting one on.

I have friends who live in Orangevale and their street is much the same. They have a big 4th of July party on their cul-de-sac each year and it's apparent that everyone knows each other pretty well.

If someone is having trouble getting to know their neighbors, it wouldn't hurt to be proactive and start hosting some potlucks or other get-togethers and see what happens. If you wait for people to approach you, they might think you prefer to keep to yourself and not want to intrude.

[ubu]

The social science is pretty clear, diversity and social capital are inversely correlated.

The downside of diversity - The Boston Globe

I live in Natomas Park. I would say my neighborhood has very little sense of neighborliness. I have tried to be proactive, but it really hasn't worked. But the reasons it didn't work also illuminate a lot of these issues. On my block there is a hmong family, a mexican family, an asian family and the local family of black republicans. Part of the problem in organizing neighborhood activities like 4th of July parties or Christmas socials are language barriers. The Hmong family and the Mexican family don't speak English very well. English isn't there first language and only there kids seem really comfortable speaking English. With the black folks, I don't know if they are so distant because they the legacy of past discrimination against black folk in this country, because they feel isolated for being black republicans, or because they are wealthier than everyone else (both spouses drive BMW's and there house is the largest on the block) and are just snobs. But in any case, they really aren't up for doing stuff with the neighbors either. The asian family will occasionally wave back, but they have completely shut down any efforts to organize any type of neighborhood social activity. With the people living in the rentals in the neighborhood its tough to establish any type of relationship because the rentals turn over too quickly.

One factor that I think the discussion has ignored up to now is how time effects the creation of social capital. On J street, you can find the Sacramento Turn Verin. It was an organization founded in 1854 for german immigrants in Sacramento. Sacramento is no longer a hotbed of german immigration, but the organization still lingers on. In your older neighborhoods you have historical traditions that help to organise people. I went to the 77th annual St Mary's parish festival a few weeks back. People who moved out of the neighborhood go back because its something they grew up doing like going to the state fair.

I think neighborhoods are complex ecologies. Its not just the physical structures that create a neighborhood, but its also these institutions that take a while to create. In Natomas you don't have church fairs because a lot of the church's are still meeting at the local elementry school gym trying to raise money to build a structure. Natomas hasn't been around long enough to create them.

I also think class is a factor. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a pretty intresting article about the ivy league admission algorithm. It does a pretty good job of predicting success in America, but one of the things it screens for is people who create a lot of social capital. Whether you joint a frat or read Saul Alinsky, in college there are just a lot of opportunities to learn how to organise people.

Getting In: The New Yorker

[wburg]

There used to be a lot of that sort of organization: the Portuguese had the ODES and ADES, the Italians had the Dante Club and the Piemonte Reale, the Mexicans had Diligencia and el Centro, the Chinese had tong associations, and so on. But, at least from the people I've talked to, everyone went to everyone else's parties. Admittedly, social capital was stronger within ethnic communities, because there were strong centripetal forces, in the forms of common language, religion, response to prejudice, etcetera.

A lot of the loss of social capital comes from the shift in the ways people spend their free time--sitting in front of the TV instead of going out to the movies, playing in the backyard instead of playing in the park. Meeting neighbors in today's neighborhoods *requires* organization and effort, in a way that used to be pretty much automatic due to the ways neighborhoods worked. The deficit of social connections is replaced with media and products--and an alienated consumer is one who buys more stuff to try and resolve that alienation! The closest modern equivalent are those with identifiable common interests--musical, recreational, or ideological.

We've had several generations to unlearn how to be good neighbors. Getting those habits back will probably be a deliberate effort, although it is one that could be facilitated by changes in the ways that we build and organize our neighborhoods.

[ubu]

The social capital issue is more than about just joining neighborhood groups. Diversity and social trust are inversely related and that has huge social policy implications.

David Goodhart: Discomfort of strangers (part one) | Politics | The Guardian

At the macro-level it helps to undercut the welfare state. In California it affects how we deal with issues like the underclass, its cheaper to send someone to the University of California than prison, but the budget for the prisons are continuing to expand, whereas the budget for higher education is shrinking in real terms. The longer you are at the university the more successful you are in the labor force, the longer you are in the prison system the less successful you are in the labor forece. Yet the more you distrust people the more appealing incarceration is as a social policy versus just expanding the unversity system and sending more poor folk to college.

At the local level, one of the things that drove suburbanization (white flight) was forced busing during the 70's, it got people to move out of the Sac City District where there were then busing decrees and into the burbs where those decrees weren't applicable.

The folks backing smart growth assume that we will have to expand mass transit to make it work, but that assumption is flawed. First we don't have the money to fund the existing mass transit system. More significantly, I think the reason we don't expand mass transit is racism. Why spend more money funding a mass transit system that benefits primarily poor minority folks? The less transit the easier it is to keep undesirables out of your neighborhood.

[wburg]

ubu: Urban planners have a choice to make. They can promote greater population densities and mass transit, or they can promote continued suburbs and freeway construction, or some combination thereof. Our population is continuing to grow, so one way or the other our cities have to grow to match--the question is how to best address that growth. Yes, mass transit costs money, but so do freeways--and mass transit delivers a lot more bang for the buck, in addition to solving other problems posed by the suburb/freeway alternative.

Some people assume that only the poor and nonwhite benefit from mass transit. Those people are flatly, obviously, demonstrably wrong. Go to any city with a mass transit system and you'll see people from throughout the social spectrum on mass transit. Heck, you don't even have to leave town--you can see that in Sacramento *now.* Sure, you may see a poor person or a nonwhite person, and I'm sorry if that makes you upset or nervous. You'll get over it.

The articles referenced that mention the problems of distrust in the face of growing diversity both mention that these are problems that can and should be overcome, not insurmountable obstacles. What exactly is the alternative? A return to the bad old days of redlining, racial exclusion covenants, and restricted neighborhoods? Ghettos for nonwhites and "whites only" businesses? Ethnic cleansing?

There is no going back to the bad old days. Yes, learning to deal with a diverse society is going to be difficult and not without some trouble. But what exactly is the alternative?