I walk a lot and as I walk I observe how people of different social classes live around here.
For the first 5 years in this town, I resided in what I can schematically call a working-class neighborhood (WN). This was an area of rental apartments where bus drivers, university support staff, janitors, and people who lost their houses in the Recession lived.
For the past year, I’ve been living in a typical middle-class neighborhood (MN), with big detached houses, pretty lawns, etc.
Right in front of my subdivision, there’s our upper-class neighborhood (UC), with houses that cost between $600,000 and $900,000 (which is a lot for our region).
All 3 neighborhoods are extremely safe and clean. Their differences lie elsewhere.
The rich UC area is the one with the greatest number of children playing outside unsupervised. Starting from about the age of 6, kids in this neighborhood stay in the street with their friends a lot. There are also many groups of teenagers who hang out with their friends outside.
In the poorer WN, it’s extremely rare to see kids play outside without adults hovering over them. Even the children who are 12-14 years of age are marched the 100 feet to and from the school bus. (Once again, it’s the safest, quietest area on the planet, so this is not about safety.) In my MN, children walk to the school bus and back alone or with other kids. Parents only take them if they are really small.
Teenagers never spend any time outside in the WN and the MN. It’s only in the rich neighborhood that I see them spend time in the street, racing their bikes, listening to music, playing basketball, and saunter around trying to look all grown up.
The poorer neighborhood is the most racially segregated. In my WN, black kids always played at a distance from white kids. I never saw them together on any occasion.
The rich neighborhood is the most racially integrated in terms of kids’ groups. (Who the adults spend time with is impossible to find out from the street). Every children’s group in the UC is a veritable United Colors of Benetton commercial with kids of different races and ethnicities. This is an area where quite a few immigrants live.
In all these areas, kids have to play in the driveway or in the street because the concept of a communal playground in a residential area is absent. Playgrounds exist only in the areas one has to access by car, as if children wanted to have bored parents hover over them as they play.
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