Taylor the Teacher

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I’ve been doing hours and hours of web surfing looking at where my husband and I should move next year. I spent a good bit of Saturday evening into the wee hours of the morning doing this. It was fun. Some of the most interesting things I read were about new urbanism, planning human scale neighborhoods, public transportation systems, and gentrification.

My reconnaissance about Austin, one of our prime candidates for a city to move to, has been mixed in terms of actual data. The City-Data forums are very helpful, and I intend to get more involved and start doing my part to answer people’s questions about places I do know about. It just seems like the right thing to do to help others even when I’m not looking for answers myself.

It’s also exciting to see that there are some real citizen journalists blogging in Austin who are willing to do the hard work of journalism that mainstream media is too lazy (or corrupt?) to do. If I weren’t beholden for my livelihood to the district I live in now, I’d love to start really digging and reporting on this school district. They better hope I either move to another state or can’t find a good non-education job in this town. If I ever live here and don’t draw my paycheck from them, I’m all over the FOI paperwork the very next day.

After those hours of web surfing, however, I don’t feel informed about Austin. I feel overwhelmed by the information. But the search itself has still been very valuable because it has caused me to think through what I really want.

It’s hard to find the information I really want about any location because, I realized, I’m not looking for a city. I’m looking for a neighborhood. The particular city that neighborhood is located in doesn’t really matter.

This whole thing has led me to think about the places I’ve been the happiest. My favorite neighborhood that I ever lived in was the Chimes St./Carlotta St. neighborhood in Baton Rouge.

The thing that neighborhood had that so many lack was community. Our consumer culture seems to sniff out true community and devour like a meerkat sniffing out a scorpion on the Kalahari. The meerkats can die, not only of hunger, but of thirst, if they don’t find little critters to eat. (On a side note, if you’ve never watched Meerkat Manor, you really should.)

Many of the old-time Austinites on the forums and blogs I read are upset about the loss of the community they used to have. I can sympathize. The Chimes Street neighborhood in BTR was never as famous or “hip” as Austin, but it had that same kind of quirky, honest, live-and-let-live attitude that Austin is known for.

Then the Sunglass Hut moved in. Then, a clothing store, I think it was The Gap, moved to the corner of Highland and Chimes. Little perfectly-folded T-shirts displaced one of the cornerstones of that neighborhood, Highland Coffees. HC only moved one door down, but it was important to us. Nobody in that neighborhood wanted, or could even afford, sunglasses from the Sunglass Hut, and having Highland Coffees on the corner of that street was important in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time. I just knew it sucked that it had to move.

Having a place where people could sit and play chess or talk about the Church of the Subgenius or study or read or whatever is necessary to building a sense of connectedness. Even if you didn’t always stop at Highland Coffees, it was there. Inviting you to join the community. To sit, to talk, to be a part. You can’t do that at The Gap. Get in, spend your money, and get out.

Changing the way we used that particular space changed the neighborhood. Somebody knew that would happen. Since that neighborhood is smack up against LSU, those properties were just too valuable to waste on a bunch of students, hippies, and artists. In someone’s mind, anyway. But something real was lost.