Ixnay on the Ay-play

(Source: Unsplash/CDC.)

“Live, work, play” neighborhoods are aspirational these days, or so I thought. Silly me—at least, regarding the “play” part.

In August, the Vancouver Sun reported that a group of Douglas Park neighbors succeeded in convincing the city to reject a zoning variance application which would have allowed the expansion of a business near their homes. They felt this expansion threatened the tranquility and quality of life of their neighborhood.

The business in question was a proposed day care serving eight children, which would operate out of a private home. (The home already hosts an eight-kid day care; this would be an additional eight on the upper story.)

It became one of those “NIMBYs gone wild!” viral stories that are a dime a dozen. See also: Davis, California, where a former mayor and his wife sued the city in October 2022 over the location of a “Sky Track” playground zipline in a city park, which they describe as making an unacceptably disruptive noise. A noise study commissioned by the city measured the zipline at slightly over 55 decibels, or comparable to the noise level of a “quiet office to a normal conversation on the phone,” according to The Aggie.

The former mayor, Joe Krovoza, claims that Davis violated state law by not conducting an environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) before relocating the equipment.

Both stories made the rounds on social media because, I suspect, they are unsympathetic to most observers. Clearly in both the Vancouver and Davis cases, many found the Scrooge-ly attitudes of the petitioners toward kids to be deserving of contempt.

But these stories are also pretty ordinary. It is the rule, not the exception, that development near existing homes is highly contentious these days, and plans are often contested for months or years. Decisions around the use of public spaces like parks are subject to much the same.

These aren’t very illuminating as stories of individual attitudes. “Group of humans elevate own self-interest over interests of other humans” isn’t news, and hasn’t been news for about 3 million years. But the ordinariness nowadays of stories like this, in which residents of a place use legal and regulatory processes to aggressively litigate seemingly small-potatoes issues, does say something about today’s cities.

What Is a Residential Neighborhood, Anyway?

It’s noteworthy that the presence of a day care for children is seen by Vancouver neighbors as a threat to the “residential” character of their neighborhood. For nearly all of human history, most child care happened in private homes. Children were a feature of the community, and it would have been bizarre to suggest that their routine play was an activity that belonged somewhere other than in a “residential” area.

Vancouver, however, like most modern cities, considers a day care to be a commercial use. One of the opposed neighbors, threatening legal action if the city were to approve it, warned of a gateway decision that could allow for any number of home-based businesses, including “a funeral home, motorcycle repair shop, corner store, gym, dry-cleaner etc.”

For that matter, for nearly all of human history, home-based businesses were also the norm, not the exception. Before the age of private automobiles, travel of any significant distance was a costly imposition on your time to be minimized if possible. Living above a storefront was thus a common arrangement, and so it was very likely that within earshot of your window at home were the sounds of commerce: customers coming and going, deliveries being made, food being prepared, laundry being washed, broken items being repaired, and all manner of wares being hawked.

The explicit sales pitch for early (i.e., late 19th-century) suburbs was an escape from the sensory conditions of living in the era’s chaotic, dense, rapidly industrializing cities: the sounds, sights, and (perhaps most of all) smells of life taking place around you. Today, the brochure doesn’t look so different. Granted, modern sanitation, along with the separation of polluting industry from residential areas, has essentially eliminated the “smell” issue as a concern. But it’s still the case that suburbanites often cite peace and quiet as a reason for preferring single-use residential neighborhoods. And those attitudes have bled beyond the suburbs into urban neighborhoods that, in the past, would have played host to corner stores and a much wider range of activities.

Privacy Versus Community

A comment left on an essay I wrote years ago has stuck in my brain ever since. It was attributed, second hand, to the brilliant New Urbanist developer Vince Graham. The quote was, “When you sell privacy and exclusivity, every new home is a degradation of that asset. When you sell community, each new home enhances the asset.” The same, I suspect, applies even more so to uses other than homes.

We’ve undergone a major cultural shift in the age of the Suburban Experiment toward “privacy and exclusivity” as a dominant expectation of what one’s home should offer, even in cities. Even in downtowns. (Where I used to live in Sarasota, noise complaints from downtown condo residents directed at the ground-floor bars and restaurants operating on weekend evenings were a perennial subject of discussion.)

It’s not that people of the past, I suspect, didn’t enjoy peace and quiet. I can imagine a day care next door to me getting on my nerves to some extent, especially during pick-up time. I can imagine being annoyed by the smells wafting from a restaurant downstairs or next door. It’s nice to open the window and just hear birds.

What was different in the past was that you lived much of life within your neighborhood, so you acutely felt the trade-off between the advantages and disadvantages of living in a complete community. On the one hand, it meant that you’d be aware of your neighbors’ activities, and some of them might be disruptive or annoying to you. On the other hand, it meant that you were able to take advantage of everything that was in walking distance: the goods and services for sale by your neighbors were things you, too, could access. A critical mass of neighbors supported local institutions and amenities: a nice park, a library, transit service, community events. The kids at that day care were probably the kids of people you knew and liked.

You understood that there was a balance to be struck: a certain amount of chaos and disruption in your environment was tolerable because the benefits were obvious.

The most obvious thing that has disrupted this balance is one word: cars.

Car ownership, in a city designed for easy motoring, makes it possible to meet almost all of your needs—for work, shopping, services, and recreation—outside of your immediate neighborhood. Now the calculus changes: the downsides, such as noise, weigh more heavily compared to the minor benefit of having these services right down the street instead of in someone else’s backyard.

And, once we are all habituated to driving to someone else’s backyard to participate in commerce, another thing changes: commerce becomes a far more disruptive neighbor, because the customers are all arriving in their own large, noisy, smelly vehicles. The most eyebrow-raising objection to a small day care in Vancouver was that the noise of kids playing would be objectionable. But the more mundane and, indeed, reasonable objection was that the influx of parents in cars dropping off and picking up their kids would contribute to traffic and parking issues.

It’s a vicious cycle: nobody likes businesses near their home because of the traffic, so we put businesses near nobody’s home, thus guaranteeing far more traffic.

Most of us no longer look to our neighborhoods for community and its benefits. We will travel where we need to for that. But the costs to society when everyone does so are dramatic.

The generalized attitude that not only your house but your whole neighborhood ought to be a place of quiet, private refuge seems to have taken on a life of its own. Case in point: the issue in Davis that has so upset one former mayor does not involve cars or parking at all. And the South Cambie neighborhood of Vancouver, where the controversial day care is located, has a Walk Score of 82: “very walkable.” These are not suburbanites in gated cul-de-sacs; this is an urban neighborhood, in which, nonetheless, a significant number of residents seem to believe that a small imposition on their peace and quiet is something they are right to marshal the power of the state to prevent.

I don’t like to moralize. It’s cheap and lazy for me to assert that my preferred lifestyle is righteous and civic minded, while someone else’s is selfish and antisocial. I struggle not to go there in cases like this.

It’s not moralizing to observe that there are real, significant costs to constantly litigating the location and availability of services that are part of a functioning community. Vancouver is perhaps the most expensive city in the Western Hemisphere, and anything that makes child care even more difficult to provide and attain in a place like that should meet with reflexive skepticism. If, that is, you view your neighbors with children—even if you don’t have them yourself—as people with whom you share an environment and a common interest.

It’s hard enough to get by in British Columbia or California, and not least of all for parents. Can we not make it harder? Is that too much to ask?

I will also suggest that it is a misuse of the power of government to litigate issues whose effects are hyper local. The misuse is most galling to me in the Davis case, where one aggrieved household is demanding a state-level environmental review of something that negatively affects, at most, the residents of one block. We would be well served to rediscover the principle of subsidiarity: let issues be resolved at the most local level of decision-making competent to resolve them.

Here’s where I can’t help but moralize a little. The actions of the Vancouver and Davis neighbors here smack to me of some deep civic rot that has set in, nearly a century into the Suburban Experiment. I fear that the biggest obstacle to building stronger towns and neighborhoods, today, is a dominant culture that says that your neighborhood is no longer a project in community-building in which you are engaged alongside your neighbors.

No, your neighborhood is now a consumer product, and you are the customer. And if something threatens your enjoyment of the product you paid for, well, better demand to speak with the manager.

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