Going back to the way we once were
Going Back to the way we once were
10/23/2007
Going back to the way we once were Published: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 - 2:00 am Once, we knew how to do this. Griffin Park is a reminder. Used to, we built towns where 10-year-old kids could ride their bikes to the soda shop after school for ice-cream cones. Where every morning at nine sharp, the pharmacist or storekeeper or the man who repaired watches and clocks unlocked his door and turned over the sign in his window so it read, "Open." He lived over the business. The banker and the schoolteacher crossed paths on the sidewalk and spoke to each other by name as they passed. Spoke to the animal doc and the woman outside the flower shop too. We built houses so people could sit on their porches in the cool of an evening and converse with neighbors out for an after-supper stroll. Children who grew up in places like that could tell you who lived in practically every house around. Blocks were short and streets interconnected, like a web or a grid. You could come and go in a neighborhood a bunch of ways. You could walk to a dry cleaners or shopping or a park. In the old days, it was just how you built. These days, they call that Traditional Neighborhood Design, or TND for short. It's new again now because we forgot it for a while. We had G.I.s coming home after World War II, cheap gas, ambitious government spending on highways, VA loans for new houses, and a new kind of American dream with a deck and a big yard, the bigger the better. We started building subdivisions of only houses, no cafes or shops -- the mall was an island over yonder -- and all the houses in a development were about the same size and price. People got introduced to the concept of the commute. The average commute to work in Greenville County is now 20.3 minutes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2006 Community Survey. That's 40.6 minutes total per day, or 3.38 hours each week, or 169 hours each year. Or seven full days away from work but used up driving in traffic. Add to that: from houses-only subdivisions you have to get in a car and drive through traffic to go just about anywhere -- to school, to run errands. A typical American makes four trips per day in a vehicle, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics says. If the hours of your life were a thousand-dollar bill, that's like tearing off pieces and shredding them. We are now beginning to see a few developments in the Upstate, such as Griffin Park, that return to the classic old ways of building community. Tree-lined streets with houses that sit close to them so you can stand on your porch and talk to your neighbor on the sidewalk. Some of the houses big, some not. Playgrounds and parks. And nearby shops and businesses, maybe a grocery store, a cafe. Most things a five-minute walk from here to there. Sound familiar, like a place you used to know but had forgotten?
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