Today I strolled through the Fairway neighborhood, located next to Idle Hour Country Club and along Richmond.  This is a neighborhood of homes built in the 1920’s and 30’s that tend to be on the larger side.  I passed some modest homes (for example, on Henry Clay) but many of the homes in this area are grand, tall houses often with front doors located well above street level.  This had some impact, as the scale felt different, more imposing than in newer middle-class neighborhoods.  This neighborhood is laid out in a connected street grid, and the block length for the portion I walked is reasonable (around 750 feet; blocks to the northeast are longer), with the end result that the neighborhood felt comfortable and walkable despite the imposing homes.  As you might expect in an old neighborhood, this area has some very tall trees; the wide tree lawns allow larger tree trunks than the 3 foot margins currently common.

It was difficult not to walk in this neighborhood and not be conscious of the fact that these were homes to people who are doing well financially; perhaps not rich but certainly upper middle class.  It comes out in the homes but also in the density of not just visual experience by auditory and olfactory experience.  Variety not just in homes but in how yards are landscaped (thinking toward my question from my Day 8 walk, some yards have completely eliminated grass in favor of other ground cover that presumably doesn’t require nearly as much care).  There were more smells, too, from a variety of plants to mundane home smells, and perhaps the canopy of trees kept smells in.

As it may have with sounds as well, since, the outdoors provided more variety of sounds, from a backyard fountain to the sounds of birds and kids playing that were clearer here than in past neighborhoods.

I think my dissatisfaction with planning largely arose from the fact that I felt it failed some of its social justice aims by making nice neighborhoods safe for gentrification while ignoring neighborhoods with significant design failures.  Simple economics drives less wealthy families out of good (in the planning sense) neighborhoods into neighborhoods that provide less interest, fewer opportunities for serendipitous discovery.  So what it is, exactly, about these nice, wealthy neighborhoods that make them so nice and to what extent could these things be copied, affordably (and ideally by residents ourselves) into the neighborhoods we can afford?