This Just In... Garages Lead To Urban Decay

As I explained in the previous posting, there are two different types of houses: those that have garages that are flush with the house and counted as part of the façade, and those that place the garage, if there is one, somewhere else on the lot. This little design feature actually has some large consequences for sense of community and neighborhood safety. When the garage is flush with the house and facing the street, it is often the case (though not always) that the house lacks a front porch. Front porches are important for the cohesiveness of neighborhoods, and thus cities, because they allow neighbors to see each other. When neighbors can see each other, they converse together about local politics, local idiots, and meaningless things. Neighborhoods, and again cities, are built on these simple yet intimate relationships. These things don’t often occur when porches are absent. Even when porches and front garages exist in tandem, the porches are often recessed to the point where the street is hardly visible, which completely defeats the purpose of front porches. Front porches are meant to be public, not private. Private porches are meant to be located on the sides or backs of houses.

We like our private porches, whether in front or back. What does this say about us? I could go into a sociological explanation of American individualism and how it leads us think that we need more privacy than we really do. But I think it is more about our fear than our freedom. It is the same fear that drove many of us away from the cities into the suburbs in the first place. Everything is so… well, public in the city. For some reason, a good portion of us react strongly against the word “public.” Is it because it carries with it negative connotations of inner-city life? Or socialism? Whatever it is, many of us have let our fears overtake us in such a way that a true front porch would be completely unacceptable. We moved to the suburbs to escape from seeing people all the time, so why would we want a porch that encourages us to possibly interact with others? What if the neighbors don’t like me? What if they are annoying? What if they’re satan worshippers? What if the neighborhood kids are getting into mischief and I have to speak up? Won’t that be embarrassing? There are just too many possible things that can go wrong with putting myself into the situation where I might have to talk to my neighbors, so I like my privacy, thank you very much!

I would argue that these fears, begun at some point after the Pilgrims arrived in the 1600s, have directly led to the physical and social decay of our cities. We often wonder how our inner city poverty rates got so high, or how our schools became such a joke, or how guns and drugs became so prevalent, or how so many lots (27%, to be exact) have become abandoned in Detroit. Are we missing something? We fear these places, because the people are different from us, buildings are not kept up, and any hope that they might have had as children of “movin’ on up” were dashed by the time they reached their dead-end high school. We now have every right to fear these places because their problems are self-perpetuating and are only getting worse, and because their own residents fear them. So, even in these depressed cities, houses with front porches (and most have them) have very little positive effect because people are, ironically, just as afraid to use them as the suburbanites are, but for very different reasons.

It’s funny how a discussion about garage design can lead to a lesson about front porches, our tendency to choose privacy over publicity, and inner-city problems. It sounds like a large mass of tangents, but that’s our problem: We are so trained to look at things linearly that we get confused when non-linear or organic connections are made. Fortunately, we as a society are beginning to think “organically” again, front porches are making a comeback, garage design and its implications are being discussed, the “privatize everything” movement is losing steam, cities are slowly being revitalized, and Generation Xers are the most civically-involved, community-focused, and mission (not profit)-driven group of Americans since the great generation before the Boomers. There’s hope after all!