Seattle,neighborhoods and families

I miss neighborhoods.

I know about many of the reasons for this and they vary in my opinion of them, or the complexity of my opinion of them at least.

On the positive side of that is the fact that the Internet provides people with many more opportunities to find and commune with similar people and it's no longer essential to people to live in proximity to people like them in order to stay in contact.  Or at least feel like they're staying in contact.

In a city like Seattle, the cost of living has driven a lot of that. My ex-girlfriend and I lived in the heart of Seattle's once vibrant Capitol Hill neighborhood as genuinely poor people. Now, Rae, Conan and I weren't even able to consider living in the much diminished version now with significantly better and more reliable income.

But then I don't really recognize much of it when I visit anyway. I guess too many of the parts that I connected with were driven in some significant degree by people who were as poor as I was.

And here I openly wonder if it's the lack of neighborhoods and more the lack of a neighborhood that matches us.

In part, the character of the neighborhoods have gone, specialty stores have more trouble keeping up being able to pay the rent for brick and mortar locations, and ones that are able to succeed in online sales to a wider group, I suspect, find themselves wondering why to bother. So, there's a lot of people living in areas largely by habit with little of the benefits of any kind of neighborhood character. We moved to the north end of the Maple Leaf neighborhood, just on the border of the Roosevelt neighborhood, just north of the U District, thinking that the mix of hip young people to the south and families to the north would result in other people like us being around.

The problem is that the middle class liberal Nextdoor types one finds in Maple Leaf is the kind that Rae, associating their self with the white trash elements of their white trash background, feels intimidated as well as condescended to by. I grew up an undiagnosed Autistic in Seattle private schools, so I have much more experience with them, which only leads me to having a much stronger allergy to being in their presence.

And the younger, hipper crowd is mostly unencumbered by children, which makes their lifestyle different enough from ours to make it difficult to associate as a regular function of our lives, even when we've intended to.

It seems like most of the people in our income level and lifestyle moved to the suburbs, which we tried and hated at least as much as we expected to. Well, Conan was of an age to associate herself with her surroundings and maintains some warm feelings for Shoreline that Rae and I are unable to share. This seems like a kind of surrender. You can't dream of a better future while living in the suburbs, except the one where you move out of the suburbs.

But proximity is really such a strong part of most social groups. I think of my high school friends and a statistically enormous percentage, including Wade Bradford, waited at the same bus stop as me. Even in adulthood, the period where I had a strong enough group that I was able to attempt making my movie, Lakeside or whatever, was in some significant part because so many of us, including Ryan Allred, lived near one another and could gather and conspire over it.

I was saying to Rae that I wished there was a website for hip, nerdy, creative and/or outsider families to associate online, but also to find ways to be nearer in real life. Somewhere that you could find answers to the best places to live or meet in your city or which ones would best fit you in other cities you might consider moving to. Kind of a non-Nextdoor, but also a craigslist, Meetup and even a little goddamn Facebook.

We even tossed around the idea of starting it ourselves, but I think it would be tough to find the small starter version that would serve the necessary function while it grows. It would probably need to be started mostly formed, which is probably beyond us.

I don't really have a conclusion at this point. It's just what's been on my mind, of late.