Apartment-and-House Blocks
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.
Who lives here
Read on the street, not on a spreadsheet.
The homes here are a mix.
People here work as office and administrative workers, managers, sales workers, and accountants and financial workers.
Somebody on their own block who knows their name. Plenty of people here have lived beside the same neighbors for years and would be a little embarrassed to admit they never asked.
A neighbor you might meet
Invented, so no one is a case studyThirty-five, four years into an apartment he likes more than he expected to. He lives alone, does the books for a few companies, and nobody within sight of his door knows his name.
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
They're renters. They'll move on in a year or two.
They won't be here long
Ask how long somebody has lived here before you decide anything about them.
What tends to backfire
Treating the renters as temporary
If you talk to a renter as if he's about to leave, you've told him he isn't worth knowing. Most households here have stayed for years. Ask how long he's lived here, and let the answer correct you.
You can end years of nodding with a name said out loud and a second visit to the same door.
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.
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.
People who own their homes, often outright, where most errands take a drive and nobody stops by the house without planning to.