Homeowner Suburbs of Every Age
Settled homeowners at every stage of life, from busy working families to retired couples and older women on their own, who mostly handle things themselves.
Who lives here
Read on the street, not on a spreadsheet.
Detached houses with a driveway and a yard make up most of the street, and most of the people in them own.
Many of the working adults here are managers, office and administrative workers, sales workers, teachers, or accountants and financial workers. Some are nurses, doctors and therapists.
For an evening somebody else planned, one that starts and ends when it was supposed to.
A neighbor you might meet
Invented, so no one is a case studyForty-two, a few years into the house, with two children in middle school. She and her husband both work full time, and the calendar on their refrigerator is full most weeks.
Where it is cracking
Signs, not proof of anythingYou cannot know the reason from the sidewalk.
A sample from the guide
Three pieces of the full textThe rest comes with the guide.
What you'll hear at the door
Can't complain. It's been a good year, really.
Can't complain
Usually true. If something harder comes out later, listen, and don't go digging for it.
What tends to backfire
Planning help nobody asked for
When you notice an older woman living alone or a retired couple slowing down, you may start planning how to help. They've run their houses longer than you have, and nobody wants to be somebody's good deed. Get to know them first, and let them be the ones who help you for a while.
A name, one question, a supper date weeks away, and then the same few doors again next month.
the guide
What to do this week, what to say, and why the news is good on this particular street.
The full guide carries the four first actions, three real conversation scenarios with the notes underneath each line, a story worth telling here, and the Gospel written into what this street is actually carrying. It is free, and it opens in the browser.
Where to next
Retired owners, working families, single parents and young renters on older suburban streets, many of them getting by with little to spare.
Renters in shared buildings, owners in older houses and families of every kind who have lived near each other for years and mostly never learned each other's names.
People who own their homes, often outright, where most errands take a drive and nobody stops by the house without planning to.