By Peter Payette
In February, when winter blew an inch of snow an hour for two days through single-digit air, I came home late and found my driveway shoveled. My family was away, and I had been figuring how little of the drive I needed to clear in order to get in and out again the next morning at 6:00. More snow came the next day, and when I returned home I found my neighbor Claude at work.
"I'm a good neighbor," he said with a laugh, "What are neighbors for?"
By many measurements, Claude is the best neighbor we have even though he can't read and needs assistance from our community mental health agency. We see him more often than anyone else in our neighborhood. We play Uno and horse shoes with him. I can't recall playing a game even once with any other neighbor. He's more personable with our children than the other adults nearby, people my kids tend to identify by the children they tow. He calls my oldest daughter Blondy and the youngest Shorty. (Initially, he called my oldest Skinny, but my wife takes exception to observations about other people's weight.)
Claude is served well by our community. He has a one-bedroom apartment and a job. He often takes long walks, no matter the season, and occasionally rides his bike. He has a friend who can bike down from an apartment on Veterans Drive. The bus gets Claude to and from work and to visits with his mother; someone takes him grocery shopping once a week. But it's hard to believe the arrangement that keeps him in a downtown neighborhood has a future. The house next to his was recently listed at $169,000. When the current owner of Claude's duplex cashes in on the investment, it seems unlikely that subsidized rental income will be in the next owner's plans. Despite the efforts of organizations like the Foundation for Mental Health-a group working with Tim Burden's Red Management to see if housing for people with special needs can be incorporated into the Depot project by the library-what seems likely for our neighbor Claude is an apartment beyond South Airport Road where walking will be unpleasant if not dangerous.
It's too bad that market forces are unkind to people like Claude. But it's more regrettable that our public dialogue has no terms for community development other than job creation and loft construction. News reports of these blessings are like signs of revival to New England clergy three centuries ago. It's difficult to imagine the DDA or city planners thinking about much else. In the end, Claude is irrelevant to whether Google locates here, and we'll all suffer, we're told, if it doesn't. (Of course, harm may come to Claude as an indirect result if it does.) The Cool City is really not his home. It's for hip-thirty-something freelancers armed with iPods and Frisbees who understand what it takes to telecommute or get a federal grant.
Owning an iPod and enjoying disc games myself, I view Claude's future housing arrangements as important to my family. We don't need more people on our block talking about the great Baba Ganoush they made with the eggplant from their organic CSA. I have plenty of contacts for that kind of information already. What we need is a neighbor to temper our affinity for prosperity and to remind us that many, indeed most of us, won't live in the Cool City.
Peter Payette is News Director for Interlochen Public Radio.
