Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

supernuclear.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 517 posts

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#451

Post by ascagnel_ »

oldandboring wrote: post #129
azdle wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the same if you go west -- Hudson County, NJ, is mostly neighborhoods that were designed as streetcar suburbs if you measure by land area.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#452

Post by bongodongobob »

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…

My neighbors are fucking assholes. We don't shop at the same stores, or see each other at the park, we don't have kids, or work on cars. One neighbor doesn't like me because they don't like dogs and I have a dog. The other is just a mean, bitter, old lady. Not everyone is nice and friendly dude.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#453

Post by bongodongobob »

eleveriven wrote: post #357
dm03514 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's wild how much we depend on and live alongside each other without actually knowing one another

It really really isn't.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#454

Post by hombre_fatal »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #432
hombre_fatal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It exposes you to the mental illness of some people, like the kind of person who will make a thread asking if anybody knows this new runner they saw jog by their place because it's very suspicious and it's making them very angry that someone would jog down their street. Or bicker about street parking. Or people who post on social media in general, like to talk about politics or fake outrage over nothing or the weird…

> It can get in the way of a foundational part of the social fabric: being able to assume your neighbors are normal, nice people. if my neighbors are weirdos I'd like to know, and in what sort of ways

That monkey paw gambit might make sense at first.

But you aren't learning that they're pedophiles or violent or that they'll harm you or that you can't trust them to watch your kids or make moves on your wife or poison your dog or burgle your house or can't be a good friend or reliable neighbor.

You're learning things that really have no impact except to make you dislike them.

It might not seem like it since we love to forage for this kind of info on social media, but you only lose from that transaction.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#455

Post by lolinder »

dionidium wrote: post #447
lolinder wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks. Define people? When most people I know say suburb they mean this: You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there. Some suburbs are like what you descr…

You're right that people in practice use the word "suburb" to talk about all these different things, but that just reinforces that the word isn't very useful. Oak Park and Naperville are both "suburbs," but this reveals nothing to us. In fact, it mostly obfuscates.

A suburb is outside of the city in low density housing, typically not within walking distance of anything. That reveals plenty for a lot of purposes, and if you want to critique something more specific than that you should use a word that people will recognize as being more specific than that.

Clearly the author of TFA believed that this was the definition of suburb, because they were clearly thinking of a space where people could in fact just hang out in front of their houses and meet neighbors. So for the purpose of this conversation, this definition of suburb is the only one that makes sense.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#456

Post by lolinder »

dionidium wrote: post #450
RHSeeger wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody I know would call that street the city. In my mind, "the city" is, minimally, houses that are a few feet apart, small yard in back/front, pretty much nothing on the side. Frequently, it's 2-3 story buildings, with whole floors rented out as an apartment. That's my "least dense" vision of a city. Anything less than that (ie, full yards) falls into my vision of suburb.

Some US cities incorporated their lower-density "streetcar suburbs" over the years and other US cities didn't. This is why "Kansas City" proper has literal farmland [0] within its city limits, while "St. Louis" proper [1] on the other side of the state doesn't even include most of the skyscraper development that's occurred there within the last 40 years. This is entirely arbitrary and knowing whether a particular pla…

They're pretty clearly not using "the city" to refer to city but instead to a certain density threshold, so pointing out that city limits are arbitrary doesn't really help anything.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#457

Post by amendegree »

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...

Lol this is the most chicago looking chicago that has ever chicagoed. I clicked the link before really registering the comment, and was confused why I was looking at a random Chicago neighborhood. While I do like the way chicago neighborhoods are set up (especially the space between houses and general greenery) I think the compactness that SF has creates more opportunity for interaction.

That being said, we did have this sorta thing on my block during covid times (once ppl stopped caring abt the social distancing and mask nonsense) but then the main families that did this moved away to bigger houses (as their families grew) and now it’s basically dead as there wasn’t a lot of intention behind it like the OP clearly has.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#458

Post by freeAgent »

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…

I now live in a suburb and it’s plenty social. We baked cookies and took them to every house up and down the block when we moved in and we greet new neighbors with treats when there’s turnover. We also exchange holiday cards and cookies every year. We either know or recognize most people within a few blocks and we have become friends with a few families that also have kids the age of ours whom we met at the neighborhood park. Suburbs can be great!

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#459

Post by _madmax_ »

I think it's sort of sad that this simple act of trust in your community (having coffee and exposing yourself to others) has to be over-analysed and dissected into a blog. Broadening and Deepening events, just dividing the whole act as events it feels like i'm reading a post-mortem on adobe workfront. When the true meaning of that awesome initiative remains the human need for social interaction and the need to be part of something bigger (like a community!). I feel this is poseur-ish and project-managerial to a degree even detailed oriented people will find unauthentic.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#460

Post by Yhippa »

_madmax_ wrote: post #459

I think it's sort of sad that this simple act of trust in your community (having coffee and exposing yourself to others) has to be over-analysed and dissected into a blog. Broadening and Deepening events, just dividing the whole act as events it feels like i'm reading a post-mortem on adobe workfront. When the true meaning of that awesome initiative remains the human need for social interaction and the need to be par…

I was reading this and thought to myself that I would have stopped at hanging out on the stoop and getting to know my neighbors that walk by. I don't want to yuck their yum, but as an observation, it does seem highly performative and overly organized. Almost like they are trying to proof this out to sell to other communities and eventually make money off of: "buy our community building platform for $20 a month".
Post reply on HN