Community Matters
Op-Ed, October 2000

On the North Oakland street where I live, there are shocking-pink stucco houses where 90-year-old African American widows live alone, and brown-shingle houses where groups of graying hippies live together. There are gay couples and married couples, toddlers who run the street naked and children who walk solemnly to church in stiff Sunday suits. There are neatly mowed lawns and tousled wildflower gardens, Buicks and bicycles, Buddhists and Baptists, atheists and Jews.

Our block is a microcosm of urban America in every way, including the problems we face: burglaries and muggings, sidewalks upended by rogue tree roots, parking space monopolized by BART commuters, the unpredictable, sometimes dangerous residents of the nearby halfway house, the closing of the only supermarket within walking distance, the proposed construction of a traffic-spawning health center one block away. The specifics of the problems have changed over time, but for the past fifty years, the people who live here have used the same method of solving them: the Fairlawn Street Neighborhood Association.

In the eleven years I’ve lived on Fairlawn Street, our block club has succeeded in many endeavors. We’ve shut down the crack house on the corner, won residential parking permits, forced landlords to obey the blight ordinance, forced the city to install a stop sign to keep our children safe. When my car was broken into, a block club member retrieved my wallet from a trash pile three blocks away. When my fiancée and I were out of town and intruders were casing our yard, block club members chased them off, used our hidden key to make sure the house was okay, called us to tell us that it was.

But for me–and for my neighbors–the greatest triumph of the Fairlawn Street Neighborhood Association lies in nothing so tangible as neighborhood beautification or even crime reduction. Sure, I like to know that my neighbors will keep an eye on my house when I'm on vacation. Yes, I’d rather park in front of my house than haul my groceries from a block away. But what really makes a difference in my life–what makes not only my house, but my neighborhood, a shelter from the storm; what extends my concept of ‘home’ beyond the confines of my front yard–are my relationships with my neighbors, many of whom I’d never otherwise have a chance to meet. The best outcome of our sporadically, chaotically convened community organization is our close-knit, wildly diverse, fiercely protective and loving community. At a time when peach-fuzz-faced millionaires are turning poor urban neighborhoods into elite, overpriced enclaves–evicting long-time residents just like my elderly neighbors in the process–in this one neighborhood, at least, we who live here stay here, and stay together.

Community is a word that’s falling from a lot of peoples’ lips these days. Not only the media and the politicians, but my friends, too, are talking about the need to ‘build community’–using e-mail, phone calls, chat rooms and plane tickets to piece together patchwork quilts of friends, lovers, relatives flung to faraway places by the modern conditions of work, wanderlust, rootlessness. My experience on Fairlawn Street makes me wonder: couldn’t it be simpler than that? Couldn’t we just decide to know and love the people with whom we live?

I think about the block party we had on Fairlawn Street last summer: all the neighbors’ Webers and picnic tables wheeled and dragged to the center of the street, the tofu dogs, turkeyburgers, and pork ribs sizzling together on the grill, the six-foot-tall teenagers shooting hoops with the 90-pound, 91-year old civil rights activist we call "The Mayor of Fairlawn Street," the chorus of conversations and laughter that rang out in many languages and dialects.

I think, too, about the controversies we’ve dealt with in our Neighborhood Association meetings. When a young white woman proposed planting trees, and an elderly African American woman objected, worried about the leaves falling on her lawn, the young woman promised to rake the older woman’s lawn regularly, achieving the kind of happy compromise a diplomat would envy. When a newly arrived lesbian couple was being harassed by their neighbor, the elders of our block visited that neighbor and told her, "We don’t tolerate intolerance on Fairlawn Street." At the next neighborhood meeting, one of the elders, a 70-year-old artist, presented each gay household on the block with a stained glass rainbow flag she’d made "for you to hang in your front windows with pride."

A couple of years ago, rattled by the stresses of city life, my fiancée and I considered moving to the country. We spent weekends inspecting houses, walking acreage, hanging out at the local café. It was quiet in that small town, and slow–just what we’d said we were looking for. But as we sat sipping our coffee, striking up conversations with friendly strangers, we realized that there was something more vital to our happiness than substituting crickets for sirens. Something it would take us years to build anew; something, we realized, we already had. Community.

For the past half-century on Fairlawn Street, a group of ever-changing, ever-disparate people have shared a commitment that brings peace, if not quiet, to our city lives. Committing ourselves to caring and sharing; committing ourselves to staying put, has yielded a gratifying alternative to home fortresses, white flight, gentrification, even loneliness. On Fairlawn Street we are determined to do whatever it takes–make compromises, appreciate differences, take out each other’s recycling and forgive each other’s frailties–to improve the quality of our collective and individual lives. This commitment makes us a community. Living in it makes life here not only safe, but sweet.