Can friends make you love where you live?

Melody WarnickMarch 30, 2016Moving, Place love, Placemaking, Uncategorized

Ben Duchac/Unsplash

In 2005, my sister Heather was basically living inside her own real-life version of Friends. She and my brother-in-law were renting a two-bedroom apartment in a complex in Tustin, California, where no fewer than eight of their best friends and relatives had also taken up residence. A band of super-social newlyweds, they were hanging out all the time. Squeezing into each other’s living rooms for Settlers of Catan marathons. Coordinating Sunday dinner potlucks. Arranging playdates as the babies came along.

The one downside: They were renters. And because Southern California real estate prices were crazy, everyone knew they could never afford to buy a home there. One of the BFF couples decided to drive to Arizona and make a down payment on an affordable new house in the desert. That set off a mass exodus. Soon the entire group had picked up and resettled in the outer-ring suburbs of Phoenix, this time in their own single-family houses. Eleven years later, my sister still lives on the same block as two of her very best friends and their families. Their children have grown up together. Heather is living the dream. (Her dream, at least.)

Except for one thing: Arizona is not really Heather’s jam. I’ve seen her go pale with yearning at the sight of Pacific Northwest greenery. She’d love a little less heat and a little more color in her landscape. Like most of us, she sometimes fantasizes about moving—but she always stops herself. Because she loves her Arizona people. And her people make it impossible to leave her place.

After I posted last week about place attachment, Heather messaged me: “Not sure if it is my city I love, or the people in my city that makes it home to me. I think I could quite easily pick up and move to even another state if I wasn’t so committed to certain people. So, does that make me place attached or just people attached?”

The difference between being attached to a place and being attached to the people in it is hard to untangle, because in many ways, places ARE their residents. A town or city is largely created by the people who live there—by their personalities, by their interests, by their choices.

Plus, place attachment and social cohesion—the phrase researchers use to describe the kinds of strong social relationships we have with people around us—feed each other. One study of data from the New York City Block Booster Project examined whether 2,000 residents of Brooklyn and Queens had a sense of community. They asked questions like: Do you recognize the people who live on your block? Do your neighbors watch out for each other? Do you and your neighbors want the same things from your place?

The strongest predictor of sense of community turned out to be place attachment. In other words, when participants agreed with statements like “I think my block is a good place for me to live,” “I feel at home on this block, and “I expect to live on this block for a long time”—signifiers of attachment—they generally also knew, liked, and watched out for the people who lived there with them.

It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Does place attachment make us like our neighbors? Or does liking our neighbors make us feel more attached to our place? Functionally speaking, a sense of social cohesion with the people who live in your city is as happiness-inducing as loving the city itself. For all intents and purposes, they feel the same way.

When we have a strong social network in our town—when we throw communal potlucks, chat with our neighbors, join the adult rugby team—we tend to feel happier and more engaged where we live in all the ways that lead to place attachment. On the other hand, when we feel lonely in our city or annoyed by the people we interact with every day, it’s incredibly difficult to fall in love with our place.

I’m nowhere near as social as my sister. (Honestly, her situation sounds like a bit of an introvert’s nightmare.) That’s okay, because there are plenty of other ways to become place attached, many of which I cover in my book This Is Where You Belong.

You don’t have to do game nights and potlucks. Inevitably, though, developing decent relationships with friends and neighbors has to be part of the place attachment equation.

For Heather, loving her Arizona people probably functions the same as loving her city in Arizona. She can’t imagine living anywhere else right now. That’s a win for putting down roots.

Source: D. Adam Long and Douglas D. Perkins, “Community Social and Place Predictors of Sense of Community: A Multilevel and Longitudinal Analysis,” Journal of Community Psychology 35, no. 5 (2007): 563-81.

Originally published at my Psychology Today blog.

How much do you love your city?

Melody WarnickFebruary 23, 2016Place love

Tell your friends in Iowa that you’re moving to Austin, Texas, and they squee with a weird combo of joy and jealousy. They maybe get misty-eyed, or tell you how lucky you are. “Austin is a great city,” they say solemnly. “You’ll love it.” Hear this enough times and eventually you become a believer. Moving to Austin makes us the luckiest family on earth. Obviously.

Never had a place been so well-hyped in advance of a new resident’s arrival as Austin was when my family moved there in 2010. And I’m just going to come out and say it: Everyone was right. Austin IS a great city. I mean, the tacos, people. Alamo Drafthouse. Reading a book on the back patio in February. What’s not to love?

And yet for all these fantastic qualities, it never quite felt like home to us. Two years later we were moving again, looking for a town that would–although if Austin didn’t do it, I was pretty sure my husband and I were broken inside. What were we expecting to experience, anyway? Pure adoration? I couldn’t quite figure it out, until I learned about place attachment.

What is place attachment? It’s a love for your city, a belief that this, right here, is your place. It’s a sense of local belonging. It’s an emotional bond based on mutual history, responsibility, and affection.

You probably haven’t heard of it. Neither had I until a few years ago, when, after yet another semi-disastrous move to a new city, I started doing some research and eventually discovered that place attachment matters in a huge way to our physical and emotional well-being. What I learned so drastically changed how I thought about where I was living that I wrote a book about it, called This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live (which comes out June 21, 2016, from Viking; you can preorder it now right here).

So how do you know whether you’re truly attached to the place you live now? Start by answering these three basic questions:

Does where you live say a lot about who you are as a person?
If you could move anywhere right now, would you stay in your town?
Does your city feel like home?

Read the rest of this post over at my new Psychology Today blog.

Some people look for a beautiful place.

Melody WarnickJanuary 20, 2016Place love, Placemaking

The Power of Small in Charleston

Melody WarnickJanuary 6, 2016Civic engagement, Cool projects, Place love, Placemaking

The highway overpass that funnels vacationers like me toward the high-end shops and million-dollar mansions of downtown Charleston, South Carolina, soars a hundred feet above a very different kind of neighborhood, a part of the city known as the Upper Peninsula. The homes here are small, interspersed among warehouses and union halls, and lived in primarily by low-income, African-American Charlestonians. With three thousand residents spread across 800 acres, the streets have a worn, slightly abandoned feel.

This is a part of Charleston that’s expected to change dramatically in the next five or ten years. As people and businesses are crowded or priced out of other parts of Charleston, the Upper Peninsula will, it’s hoped, get the spillover. Already new restaurants are being built and businesses are moving in. It’s the city’s wild frontier, and as Rachel Parris, director of development and community relations for the placemaking nonprofit Enough Pie (because they believe “there’s enough pie to go around” for everyone in Charleston), explains, “Right now we’re looking to mold that growth and shape it in a way that’s really inclusive. That’s where creative placemaking and community engagement come in.”

To show me, Rachel drives me to the Romney Urban Garden. Once a vacant lot where Romney Street dead-ends a few blocks past the Highway 26 overpass, the space is now a well-groomed park, marked by a gate and an archway welded from garden tools. Grow boxes overflow with last season’s most persistent greens. A few beachy blue and green picnic tables offer a place to sit. Rachel points out a mosaic hopscotch board that was funded by an Enough Pie microgrant and assembled by people who live around here.

Outside the garden gate, the rest of the street is a high-low jumble of churches and houses, some that seem to be standing by virtue of only a few coats of peeling paint. The white clapboard house next door has weathered into a forlorn gray, with a slumped front porch that suggest it’s not long for this world. It makes me wonder: Is an urban garden just a Band-Aid solution?

Obviously, Charleston isn’t the only city to try this. Community gardens have sprouted in vacant lots all over the country, from Pittsburgh to Detroit to Phoenix, as a way to repurpose empty land and beautify blight. Nice, but in places scarred by poverty, neglect, and racism, does something this small really help?

Here’s the thing: urban gardens aren’t just lovely to look at. They’re meant to be gathering places for neighbors, and when people get together and start talking, when they start having fun, and when they see something awful turn into something lovely, it makes them excited about where they live.

When the Romney Urban Garden opened, Enough Pie sponsored a pizza party. “Holding a meeting, you might get five to ten people in your community,” Rachel tells me. “At the pizza party we had 300 people here, so it’s a great opportunity [for neighbors] to talk about how to grandfather in your taxes so your taxes don’t raise, or hey, you need help with this, this person’s here, they can help you.”

Sometimes cities fall into disrepair because people don’t feel connected and invested enough to keep them up. But as the beloved urbanist Jane Jacobs explained, old houses have a way of being snapped up and rehabilitated once “life [breaks] out” in a neighborhood. “People in search of what is both unique and alive would ferret them out.”

Because they make streets like Romney come alive, something as seemingly minor as a community garden or a mosaic hopscotch board could turn around a block. Already you can see signs of that here, with construction workers buzzing around a historic freedman’s cottage that’s being restored next to the garden. “It helps bring people together and reinvests them in the community they’re already in,“ Rachel says. When people get together, they share information, form alliances, and build trust. They start to feel like they have a voice, and for communities that are changing, that matters. A lot.

Cross-posted from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill School of Government’s Community Engagement Learning Exchange blog. They have more photos! Go see!

This may be the first time a video for an app made me tear up.

Melody WarnickDecember 9, 2015Cool projects, Place love

Vamonde – 'Every Story Has a Place' from Philip Giancola on Vimeo.

Vamonde is a new iOS app inspired by the age-old question, “What happened here?” This is a way to make the walls talk. Download guided tours through the history of a 100-year-old theater, or the architecture of a particular neighorhood, or the food of an entire city, mostly Chicago right now, where Vamonde is based. Users can create their own place tours too, with stories embedded.

I’m not the kind of person who cries at a Kleenex commercial, and yet there was something very sweet about this ad’s conception of place. Every place has a story. And, as the video points out, “every story has a place.” Every moment of our lives is embedded in a specific geography. Everything that’s ever happened to us or to anyone else has happened somewhere. Mind. Blown.

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