<p>FF–may well have been her. they are paid–not that they don’t believe in the cause, but you can’t volunteer 40 hours a week and pay the rent, too!</p>
<p>She loves talking to people who don’t agree with her; she sincerely likes to hear other people’s opinions. And she’s extremely personable and funny (yeah, I know, I’m her Mom). Anyhoo, there’s a few young women on her crew, and more than one enviro group out there, but she could well be the one you met. I’ll ask her if they’re doing off shore drilling these days.</p>
<p>I did the knocking on doors thing a long time ago for a couple of days.
That was all I could stand.
I didn’t like the neighborhoods we targeted ( far from gated communities thats for sure).
I didn’t like hitting people at dinnertime ( because that is when they are home)
I didn’t like the people that actied holier than thou, but were expecting contributions for lobbying to pay their salary.
I donate to causes and I volunteer, but I just hated soliciting.
Junk mail is bad enough</p>
<p>Like I said, I live in pretty good suburb of LA and found that gated developments in this area to be a bit of an overkill.</p>
<p>Once the youngest is through college, retirement will be around the corner. This has been a great place to raise kids, but it will be time to move on. I would like to move further out into the country but my wife is fascinated with the idea of living in the city for a while. So it will be a toss-up between a place where gates are absolutely not necessary and a place where gates by themselves are not enough.</p>
<p>Funny…most of the advantages people have cited for gated communities (heightened security at night, easy interaction with neighbors, a handy guy available to help handle unforeseen problems)…I get all those in my doorman high-rise in downtown Chicago.</p>
<p>It surprises me that people fear crime more than they fear car accidents. Car accidents kill exponentially more kids than burglars do. And yet people choose suburbs where they have to have the kids in the car constantly because they feel safer. To each their own.</p>
<p>It’s primarily because city dwellers pay for your energy use, your highways, your consumption of open land, and we shoulder a vastly disproportionate share of the needs of poor people in the cities. My choice has no negative economic consequences for you, so naturally it doesn’t matter to you. Unfortunately, the same is not true of all choices.</p>
<p>Barrons, my primary residence is a 3/2 home in another city - the bills are paid in full, including phone, lights, everything, but I haven’t been there since Christmas. It sits empty; my best friend lives five minutes away, and she goes to check on it several times a week - goes inside, upstairs, makes sure all windows are intact, etc. Nothing ever happens to it - my immediate neighbors have lived in their homes 18 and 21 years respectively and they are very attentive to everything, and there is a VERY strict homeowners association.</p>
<p>It is not gated however - I don’t think I would like that very much; I think I would feel trapped and confined.</p>
<p>So Hanna, your Chicago has no roads, no public transit, no publicly funded schools etc that get considerable funding from state and federal government?? Does not sound like the Chicago I know very well. And I doubt your highrise has any unmonitored back entrances, etc. that the security cameras don’t see or are always locked. Gate/security cameras/doorman–all the same thing. Univited strangers are not wondering the halls/streets.</p>
<p>Not everyone wants the city life. So long as this is a free country some will like it and some will move to the suburbs as soon as they can afford it. We don’t need to economically justify our decisions one way or the other so long as everyone is free to make the choice.</p>
<p>barrons, your road out to your little world for a few people compared to a road in a city for up to a million…gosh…let me think and do the math</p>
<p>And if we wanted to, we could afford the suburbs easily, thank you very much, but for many they prefer the city. My kids can pretty much handle anything.</p>
<p>They have friends, in HS, whose parents won’t let them go downtown on a Saturday afternoon. With tens of thousands of tourists. It was pure paranoia. And it was as if I was a bad mother for letting my Ds go shopping and taking the train, all alone.</p>
<p>I jsut don’t like solicitors,- my home is my castle sort of thing I guess. I don’t think going door to door is the way to educate people, unless those are doing the knocking really understand the issue.
I realize that most are just young kids, still in college, but the ones I have met, don’t have a sense of the history of the area, or the problems and it of course is a lot more complex than giving them money so they can try and get a legislator to vote for their bill.
I have limited amount of money that I give to causes, although I do give my time & I have gone to the capitol myself several times to do my own lobbying.
To try and get it back to topic ( sorry), I know some jurisdictions are trying to ban solicitors- so I know Im not th eonly one</p>
<p>Hanna -you make a good point. In my community and surrounding areas, I can think of one “outsider” crime resulting in a death in the last several years. But every year (including just a few weeks ago) a teenager dies in an auto accident. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s just another example of how we irrationally prioritize our fears and ascribe wildly inaccurate assessments to different risk factors.</p>
<p>As to who is subsidizing who: There’s no dispute that the more urban “blue” states have been subsidizing the macho, free enterprise red states for years, in terms of dollars sent to Washigton vs. dollars received back. Make of that what you may.</p>
<p>Dke, you get snakes in your house?! Eeek! I don’t think I could live in a place where snakes could easily just wander into my home, gated or otherwise. Do you live near the desert? Was the snake poisonous? :eek:</p>
<p>I don’t have any strong feelings about the “morality” of gated communities one way or the other. I do understand the need not to feel vulnerable in one’s own home/neighborhood, though. I find it interesting how greatly the security comfort zone varies from person to person, even within the somewhat narrow demographic of the CC community. </p>
<p>Personally, the older I get, the more I value peace and quiet. My dream home would be a log home set in the mountains, where I could hear little more than animal sounds at night, and where I could enjoy the the night sky, unpolluted by the lights of more populated areas. I could hole up there for days at a time, making quilts, painting pictures, and listening to satellite radio for information and entertainment. A couple of times a month I would venture into the city for shopping, dining and cultural enrichment, then return to my silent retreat, grateful for the solitude.</p>
<p>I have nothing against suburbs per se, although find the environmental waste of exurbs, planned with too large homes and too far commutes, to be problematic for me personally, from a pure consumption level.</p>
<p>I guess what I find most intriguing about this entire conversation is the way some people let fear rule their lives and the choices they make. We live in a culture of fear in this country now, so the desire to live in the gated community makes sense, for those people who buy into fear mongering. The question is, is the fear real or imagined?</p>
<p>There have been break-ins, thefts, abductors and serial murderers from long before gates. I suppose that if the gate provides a sense of security, whether it is real or imagined, that is the choice of the homeowner. I would just hate to feel that I had compromised so much of my life out of fear. That’s all.</p>
<p>Poetsheart, we don’t live near the desert. Our house is in the marshes near a large lake. (2 miles in from the Atlantic) Every once in awhile, yes, a snake gets into the house. (even with the guard at the gate, ha ha!) Usually they’re not poisonous but the last time we had one in the garden the gate guy came and it was a deadly one so he chopped it in half.er…We’re taking the kids up to Cambridge to visit family tomorrow, and hopefully they’ll enjoy the city experience as much as I did. I thought of something when I was reading all of these posts. The people who live in this particular gated community have lived all over the world. Most of them are international corporate relo types who’ve experienced an assortment of lifestyles before landing here. They’re not the least bit provincial or fearful. The housing options here offered are mostly gated. The nicest houses are in gated communities where we live so people buy in to them. Don’t knock something out of ignorance. As I said, I did the city life for 15 years so at least I know what I’m talking about.</p>
<p>Poetsheart’s comment about getting older and wanting a place in the mountains is interesting. </p>
<p>I recently attended a conference called “Aging in Place.” It was so interesting. </p>
<p>Turns out the easiest place to grow old is in an urban setting. </p>
<p>Old people often can’t (or shouldn’t ) drive anymore or should limit driving at high speeds etc. and are often prisoners in their far flung homes at relatively young ages. </p>
<p>The cities have better services and transportation for the elderly. </p>
<p>The elderly in cities often have closer, more involved neighbors to give them a hand. </p>
<p>There is frequently a better mix of housing so that they don’t have to leave their neighborhoods if they need to move to an apartment. </p>
<p>The farther out you buy a house in your 40s or 50s the earlier you are apt to end up in an assisted living setting or other care facility. </p>
<p>It was a very interesting conference and also delved into how the elderly can be accomodated by reasonable changes tot heir houses and yards. Just some stuff I hadn’t really thought about before. The new movement of wealthy retirees into vibrant urban areas may turn out to be a good thing for them for the long run too.</p>
<p>In all seriousness (!!) my 63 yr old sister has a best friend who lived in Ct. all of her married life and just went through a bad divorce. Fortunately, her ex left her pretty well fixed, and the first thing she did was get the heck out of the burbs and buy herself a ritzy co-op on Madison Ave. She’s having a ball. Taking classes, going out for lunch, the good life. She loves being back in the city. Loves its vitality. (of course the men in NY her age all want a 20-something so she’s having a hard time replacing H but you can’t have everything, right?)</p>
<p>First, I would have no desire to live in a gated or ungated community–one way or the other. For me, it would largely depend on the community, the environment, the house, the cost and, when I have them, the benefit to my children (rather than to my self image as a bohemian, cosmopolitan or nature girl, as above). </p>
<p>But, it seems clear that the critique of the gated community has descended into the actual tired and total cannonade launched against the bourgeois by those who routinely deem themselveswronglyto be above the trifling snobs. This is a tired and highly dated debate that should have been put to rest generations ago by Puccini, and the actual bohemian stylings of Rodolfo & Mimì. That is, the true lifestyles of Bohemia: go for it!</p>
<p>Society is such that we will never be without the high-flying and self-hating moralist looking into the mirror and, without fail, seeing their disfigured and petty neighbor.</p>
<p>The self-hating Bourgeois, you got to love 'em!</p>
<p>FountainSiren, your post was perfection. Thank you. We’ve never even told our northern (bohemian) friends that our house is in a gated community because we’d have to listen to exactly what you’re referring to. They’d be horrified if they knew we lived here. (“what? That’s not cool. We used to live in Brooklyn and now we live in a multicultural suburb blah, blah blah”)</p>
) drive anymore or should limit driving at high speeds etc. and are often prisoners in their far flung homes at relatively young ages. </p>