In Praise of Staying Put - - GOOD

I like my neighborhood. I like the fish taco place on the corner. I like that my mechanics play Bach. I like that I can get a croque monsieur or Korean BBQ in a short walk, and I especially like that I can buy— or borrow— almost any kind of book my heart desires whenever my heart desires it. I live in a walkable, bikeable, liveable place: the kind of place Jane Jacobs might like, if it wasn’t in Los Angeles.

But it is not the place where I learned to ride a bike or where I ate tomatoes from my grandmother's garden. Like many of my peers, it is among a handful of places I have called home in my twenties. And that may be most damaging part of our city fetish: the pervasive “footlessness” that it inspires. And while places like Braddock need the artists and students to move in, they also need those people to stay, to pay the taxes that fund schools and crosswalks and libraries—the things that build sustainable, local economies.

“This thing we are calling mobility keeps people from learning their lessons,” noted Wendell Berry in 1999. “Their idea is that you can completely mess up somewhere and then go somewhere else, or you can completely succeed somewhere and go somewhere else. In either case you don't know what the effects are. Sometimes people cause worse effects by their success than they do by their failure. Gary Snyder said the right thing: Stop somewhere, just stop.”

via good.is

Posted via web from Firesaw