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Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

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Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#141

Post by drstewart »

melenaboija wrote: post #107

I’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…

>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.

The first part of your sentence disagrees with the second

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#142

Post by inanutshellus »

neilv wrote: post #128
garfield_light wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 marketin…

"Meaning is irrelevant." ~neilv

;-)

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#143

Post by tptacek »

TeaBrain wrote: post #119
tptacek wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That street is basically identical to most of the city of Chicago. The only difference is fewer 2-flats. https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9301849,-87.7195955,3a,75y,3...

>That street is basically identical to most of the city of Chicago. The only difference is fewer 2-flats. The front yard space and number of driveways in the Oak Park link also stuck out to me.

This is the Chicago block I grew up on. It's less dense than Oak Park. It's easy find blocks like it elsewhere in Chicago. Jeff Park in Chicago and Oak Park are basically clones of each other.

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7099143,-87.6801127,3a,75y,1...

This is really what most of Chicago looks like (modulo economic conditions in the different neighborhoods --- they're not all this upscale). It's a city of neighborhoods. Most of the streetscapes that jump to mind about Chicago, if you don't live here, are places people basically don't live.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#144

Post by mclau156 »

afavour wrote: post #2

> my husband Tyler and I wanted that sense of community that feels like it’s only possible in the suburbs, but we believed we could achieve this while living in San Francisco. This genuinely threw me because in my experience the suburbs are the antithesis of this, just lots of people occupying neighboring space and rarely talking to each other. Still, a heartwarming story all the same. And yes, this is _exactly_ what…

Would still benefit from eventually moving the initial meetup group to a green space, especially if there can be a community garden to work on (yes I realize we are re-inventing the wheel of a village)

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#145

Post by tptacek »

kirtakat wrote: post #135
hugs wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm amused to see so many of my neighbors on here - we could do a Hacker News Stoop at one of the coffee shops (Whirlwind is my regular, but it's not like any of the ones in OP are hard to get to!)

'dhosek is also an Oak Parker.

My thing since I moved houses a couple years ago is just hanging out on the porch, and I'm probably just going to start telling people when I'm going to be out there and inviting everyone to just come over.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#146

Post by drstewart »

ojagodzinski wrote: post #90

In countries where people are free (almost everywhere except the USA) you can simply open a coffee shop in a "residential district". You have these ridiculous zoning laws so at most you can drive to a Starbucks.

Funny, in countries where people are free (everywhere except your city in Poland) you can use an electric leaf blower to clear your stoop of leaves so neighbors can sit with their coffee.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#147

Post by ctkhn »

ketzo wrote: post #99
bilbo0s wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this commenter is being facetious. How do you read that post and have the first thing in your head be, "Hmm? How can I monetize this?"

If you think “garage coffeeshop” is a fast track to wealth, boy do I have news!

Am I not going to make it in the next YC class with that pitch? Guess it's time to start from square 1

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#148

Post by tptacek »

emseetech wrote: post #117
tptacek wrote: post #77

Earlier 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...

Oak Park as "the suburbs" is of a bygone era. If all suburbs were like Oak Park, nobody would complain about the suburbs.

I agree, and outside of Fly.io the thing I work hardest on is advocating for more density here; we're slowly transforming into Winnetka (if you're not a Chicago person, Winnetka is the John Hughes suburb you have in your head when people say things like "suburbs are nothing like the city"). Thankfully, we have a board consensus that has us pointed in the general direction of eliminating single-family zoning, allowing as-of-right 3- and 4-flats everywhere in the Village.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#149

Post by glitchc »

dm03514 wrote: post #66
happytoexplain wrote: post #4

Earlier 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…

In my experiences of living in suburbs for 30 years, I’ve seen the default is to ignore neighbors. I don’t really get this. Our communities have so much in common and so much overlap, we shop at the same stores, go to the same parks, get stuck in the same traffic, our kids are at the same schools,our neighbors care for us medically, teach our kids, maintain our dwellings, work on our cars, and contribute to our local…

Part of it is politics. Totally correct about everything in common, and yet in the multicultural fabric we call society, politics could be vastly different:

Neighbour 1 cares about Trump, neighbour 2 about Ukraine, neighbour 3 is focused on Palestine, neighbour 5 about public transit, while I might not care about any of those. All of them are going to seek like-minded people who are unlikely to be their next door neighbours. It wasn't like this in the past, where economic mobility was relatively limited.

Multiculturalism coupled with economic mobility means often neighbours and you don't really have much in common. As an example my next door neighbour: He's a major, I'm in the sciences. We travel in different circles. I have a dog, he doesn't like pets. We both have kids but they are of different ages, don't go to the same schools and basically don't know each other. We met a few times then realized that we have very little in common and stopped interacting. There's nothing binding us beyond a shared geography.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#150

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

tptacek wrote: post #77
jimbokun wrote: post #73

Earlier 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...

Oak Park is not what anyone thinks of as a suburb.

It's like pretending downtown Evanston is a suburb of Chicago.

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