09/13/2023
This was a great read shared by Jo-Anne Peck. So very true…
We all fall into the habit of looking past things. We are all guilty of turning a blind eye at times to what we don’t want to deal with. I am sure each of us noticed blemishes we promised to amend when we moved into our homes only to find them unaddressed years later.
The blemishes don’t go away, we just learn to live with them. This is understandable, but not without a cost. If too many of these blemishes remain, if too much maintenance gets deferred, the house becomes harder to sell, the value harder to discern, the price comes down.
A town is a collection of structures, those structures create a habitat for people. When those structures are allowed to decline, the value of the town follows suit. A place becomes harder to love when the maintenance is deferred. As the built environment falls into disrepair, the emotional attachment our communities depend on becomes considerably harder to foster.
The older generations have a context and a history to relate to, they are familiar with a time when things were different, possibly better. They were around when those buildings were not yet tarnished, their town functioned differently when they were kids,
For most of us, our parents’ communities were exponentially nicer than ours. When they were young, people lived closer together, there were more places to go, more places to gather. For my parents, it was easy to walk to a park to play, it was easy to ride a bike to a friend’s or head downtown to shop. It was easy to make friends, to have some freedom, and to have some fun.
We have taken most of that away as we rearranged our cities for cars, but we expect the kids to behave as if this never happened.
We aren’t just turning a blind eye to a lack of maintenance though, we are putting a piece of electric tape over the check engine light. We are being willfully ignorant of how we trashed our cities and instead of asking ourselves ‘how we can repair the damage we caused’, we are blaming the next generation for not loving the unlovable.
When we don’t take care of something, we make it very hard for someone to care about. In deferring maintenance, we are dampening affection, we are squandering concern and decreasing engagement. The simple fact is this, if you want someone to fall in love with your town, all the wishing in the world won’t make a damn bit of difference. The secret to making someone fall for your town is making your town worth falling for.
