Neighborhood Watch

There's been a lot of change on my street since I moved in thirteen years ago. I live in one of those city neighborhoods that always seems to be teetering between borderline blight and exciting renewal. The bad economy hasn't helped the tip of that teeter-totter. On my daily walks, I see more litter, more empty storefronts, more overgrown properties. I don't have to walk too many blocks from my front door to feel discouraged about my little slice of the city.

My street is still okay, though. Most of my neighbors take care of their properties, and if they don't, they have some of the rest of us to reckon with. Homeownership brought out the watchdog in me. It seems to me that if you buy a house in a neighborhood like mine, you're also investing in the idea that you are part of the community: you have to mow your lawn, shovel your walk, keep things in a general state of repair, and keep an eye on the overall state of the street (pick up litter, and so on). That last thing on the list seems to have fallen into my lap. I'm the neighbor who reports potholes to the city, who calls about slow snow removal, or who calls somebody to pick up the occasional dead raccoon in the road.

My latest crusades have been to get the gas and electric company to come back to my street to replace the sidewalks and lawns they dug up when they replaced gas lines in the spring, and to help my neighbors get the city to remove an enormous white ash tree on the city grass strip in front of their house. The tree is wonderful in that it provides tons of shade and fall color, but there is a big, deep crack up the trunk, and the tree drops big branches on a regular basis. It's a hazard. When I came home from China, I found a gigantic branch had fallen across my driveway, took out my electric, and lopped off a part of the small crab apple in front of my place. The ash had to go. All of our efforts are starting to pay off.

On Monday, I awoke to the sound of heavy trucks coming down the street. By the time I woke up enough to look out the window, I saw the gas and electric guys prepping the sidewalks for new concrete. By Wednesday, the sidewalks were poured. I don't know when they'll be back to fix the lawns, but I'm prepared to email and call them if they forget about us.

The tree has been harder. The city wrote to us in late spring saying the ash was a danger and would be removed by the end of June. In mid-June, a tree-trimmer came and took off several large branches that hung out over the street, but the tree was not removed. It just looked pathetic and over-pruned. June came and went, July passed, we called again, and in August, a truck came to hack a few more big branches off the tree. Between the torn up lawns and sidewalks and the skeletal remains of the tree, things were looking pretty bad on my street. In late September, my neighbor really sprang into action and started calling and emailing the city arborist. I came home on Wednesday to find that even more tree had been hacked away, but the majority of the poor, amputated tree was still there. Finally, on Thursday, they took the tree down.

Our efforts are paying off, and the street is finally starting to look better. Neighborhood upkeep is hard work, but the alternative is way worse.


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