Civic Lessons

I started my blog to broadcast how to self-install a PV solar system, and it morphed into little more than delusional rants about energy and our living environments. The two are wholly linked, however. I live squarely in suburbia and despise it...and it took over a decade to develop a set of coherent thoughts on exactly why I despise it. I knew the day I moved to Elk Grove I'd be just another motorized, blinkered consumer...and I did it anyway.

Truthfully...I didn't have much choice.

I spent most of today in the Sacramento county court building. I received a jury summons, and in the span of less than 5 minutes this afternoon I went from being a remote prospective juror to landing the juror #5 spot. I am actually totally thrilled that I was selected, having never done this before. I have a distinct memory of my dad describing to me, many years ago, the first time he had to do this and how he relished the experience. I will be doing my civic duty starting next week.


At lunch, I walked about two miles to the Blue Diamond almond factory store. Lunch was a homemade cabbage salad before hoofing it to the store and a half a can of almonds on my walk back. On my lunch break, breaking from my civic duty, I walked through the civic fabric of two distinct neighborhoods that were made for walking.


There were several dozen Japanese Zelcova, Dutch Elm, London Plane, and Tulip trees formally planted four generations ago along the roadside that provided both a physical barrier between me and traffic and a canopy to 'contain' the neighborhood. These were fantastic trees and without them the neighborhoods would have felt entirely barren. I passed corner stores that weren't slumified, several streetfronts with two or three story buildings (lofts, condos, what have you), and street-level businesses mixed in here and there. For someone willing to walk, as I did today, virtually all of my daily living needs could be addressed within a half hour's distance, as well as access to two light rail tracks. There were other people outside walking as well. A neighborhood with a steady volume of people engaging in human interactions, however minimal they might seem, is vibrant and safe.

I said I didn't have much choice but to live in suburbia. This is because the neighborhoods I walked through today are only available to the wealthy. The homes are outrageously expensive precisely because they are in neighborhoods scaled to Homo Sapiens, not General Motors. That they are located in the city core is really incidental; people find value in such arrangements everywhere, but which haven't been built since World War II. Elk Grove could have done the same thing -- build a vibrant city core that's connected to Sacramento but distinct and separate, a complete community. But they didn't.


Instead, Elk Grove chose the route towards inevitable suburbanized slumification. Think of all the earlier generations of failed suburban Sacramento experiments: Del Paso Heights, Valley Hi, Rosemont, Colonial Heights, Orangevale, Rancho Cordova; this is what Elk Grove will become, just another place people won't care about.

They won't care about it because Elk Grove is a place not worth caring about. Homes are somewhat kept up for now, but after a few more years, without corner stores, without formally planted trees, without the feel of it being a human enterprise, it will drift into non-owner occupation. Rentals. Dead cars in driveways. Dead cars in garages. Dead cars in backyards. Absolutely no interaction between humans in one private dwelling with humans in adjacent private dwellings. Unpruned trees. Speeding thru commuters. Recalcitrant teenagers. Latchkeyed adolescents.