I love this concept. I live by a popular head trail, and when I do work in the garage (on my bikes or other projects), I usually keep the door open. That simple thing led to meeting many people from around the neighborhood.
Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
121–130 of 517 posts
Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
#122I love these stories. My adult home city feels off compared to where I grew up in terms of neighborly-ness. So while I'm not a coffee drinker, I have been doing the pancake breakfast thing monthly in my front lawn/driveway for a decade, also an annual crawfish boil that is a big draw for the surrounding neighborhood (probably 300 people show up, free beer never hurts attendance)
FWIW, I live in a mid-century suburb that's now part of the urban core but also still very low density and single family housing oriented. The challenge is that there is a huge disparity of the census in a neighborhood like this. You have 90 year old people who raised their kids long ago and you have newly married folks who bought their first home. You even have some people who are just renting houses and don't really care about getting to know their neighbors. Unlike in the the newer exurb/suburbs where most people are raising family and all going through similar life phases, or in the denser part of the city where most people are single or DINKs. It's also varies alot by when you moved here, because it started out as a very affordable middle class neighborhood and is now extremely affluent with people building new construction multimillion dollar McMansions, etc. Anywho, it's been a good way to get people into a super casual setting and let them get to know each other. It certainly feels more like 'home' to me now.
Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
#123I’m from a small town in Spain, about 800 people small, and this is what everyone would do every night during the summer, each group hanging out in different spots with different gangs, lol. It was just a way to chat with your neighbors. Sadly, this has mostly disappeared, but I think it’s a good example of how the sense of community in Spain differs from that in the U.S. And this feeling isn’t limited to small towns…
I remember seeing a documentary or a video clip of this being followed. I don't recall whether or not it was in Spain, but it was definitely a Spanish-speaking village. That clip came to my mind when I read this post.
Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
>just lots of people occupying neighboring space and rarely talking to each other. This is a bitter stereotype that is leveled against both city-dwellers and suburb-dwellers, and, like many stereotypes, has some truth to it in both cases, but amounts to uncalled-for negativity. Some people don't want to interact with their neighbors, regardless of whether they live in a city or a suburb. Others are sociable with thei…
The thing is that whether you click with your neighbours or not is pure luck and it's no one's fault. That's why you read many opposing anecdotes in this thread. When there are more local third places, there is a higher chance you will find a nice community to hang out with.
Pro tip. Being a good neighbor helps you click with your neighbors, and that can be the difference between life and death in an emergency, or your house burning down or not if a neighbor catches something and calls you because you’re chill, friendly and helpful.
It is worth extreme efforts to cultivate good relationships with your neighbors.
Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Suburbs often have physical constraints with the way houses are laid out making this "stoop coffee" approach more difficult, if anything. Houses laid out in a way that you're more likely to drink your coffee on your back patio surrounded by a fence or hedges to avoid being seen. And even if you are sitting in front of your house, neighbors are more likely to be driving by instead of walking so not very likely to stop…
I live in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago (Oak Park) and stoop coffee would be much easier to do here than in San Francisco (where I lived many years ago). This is what my suburb looks like: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9014246,-87.791197,3a,75y,17...
hey neighbor :) we should totally do this in oak park. oak parkers already kinda do "stoop coffee", but usually only twice a year during a pre-planned block party. i could see this expanded to something a little more frequent, like maybe sunday mornings from memorial day to labor day.
Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
>just lots of people occupying neighboring space and rarely talking to each other. This is a bitter stereotype that is leveled against both city-dwellers and suburb-dwellers, and, like many stereotypes, has some truth to it in both cases, but amounts to uncalled-for negativity. Some people don't want to interact with their neighbors, regardless of whether they live in a city or a suburb. Others are sociable with thei…
Suburbs often have physical constraints with the way houses are laid out making this "stoop coffee" approach more difficult, if anything. Houses laid out in a way that you're more likely to drink your coffee on your back patio surrounded by a fence or hedges to avoid being seen. And even if you are sitting in front of your house, neighbors are more likely to be driving by instead of walking so not very likely to stop…
This is the entire thesis of Jane Jacobs’ work: urban living works because of friction-by-design.
Inadvertent interactions between people you see every day build a sense of community over time — the “sidewalk ballet”.
I always wondered what she would have thought about her ideas in the context of COVID.
Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had block parties like this in Brooklyn while I was growing up. People would make or buy food and we'd just occupy half of the block with loud music, running around for the kids and drinking for the adults. Cars could still pass by, but they were careful and people would move out of the way. It was fun!
Pretty sure in Brooklyn, and other NYC boroughs, that is more of a cultural thing rather than a "try to create a sense of neighborliness" thing. As a cultural thing, that type of community behavior has likely been going on for most of the past century in NYC. But the person in the article tries to create that in a place where there is no cultural proclivity to that kind of behavior. That's actually a far more difficu…
Definitely not knocking stoop coffee. Super cool that they built that from scratch.
Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
When they started mentioning WhatsApp, I did have the briefest thought that this could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor. There's certainly opportunity. NextDoor comments here are of mixed quality. And the NextDoor feed seems to have the ad saturation cranked up unpleasantly high. > Thus, the WhatsApp group was born. At first this was just a place to announce when we’d be out having stoop coffee, but we soon re…
> This could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor. This is kinda funny from my perspective. In most of the world WhatsApp reigns supreme to such a degree, that advertising for it would have the same pointlessness of a Coca Cola ad. In LATAM every neighborhood, department building, workplace and school has a multitude of Whatsapp groups. The good and functioning ones are: work related, have people that organically…
BTW, good comments, and sorry for the meta aside, but please be careful when quoting. I said:
> When they started mentioning WhatsApp, I did have the briefest thought that this could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor.
But the quote of a fragment of that, without ellipses, and somehow capitalized, looks like a verbatim quote of an entire sentence, which changes the meaning substantially:
> This could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor.
The difference in meaning is irrelevant to your comments, but, in general, others who come along will see and respond to quotes, so quotes take on a life of their own, while remaining attributed to a person (who didn't necessarily say that).
Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago (Oak Park) and stoop coffee would be much easier to do here than in San Francisco (where I lived many years ago). This is what my suburb looks like: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9014246,-87.791197,3a,75y,17...
There's no official definition of what the "the suburbs" means, but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks. The area you linked looks to me more like an older "streetcar suburb", which I think most people would just call "the city".
Agree. Lots of US cities have neighborhoods like this outside of the downtown business districts. Even in NYC, famous for concrete-jungle apartment dwelling, you find this in Staten Island and in parts of Queens.
Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
#130This used to be completely normal. It was caled being neighborly.
I grew up in a small village in the arse end of nowhere, in the 80s/90s. Even there and then it was a rarity for people to engage with their neighbours, beyond saying hello. Being the precocious child that I was, I invited myself to their homes for snacks. But I was alone in that. In some (many?) places, people just want to be left alone.
You don't choose your neighbours, much like you don't choose your family. Sometimes you luck out, and sometimes you're fucked.