What My Rear Window Says About Life Moving Forward
A New Place Called Home, as Old Notions of “Place” Change Fast
Where I live in San Francisco, housing is pretty dense. And it’s an old fashion kind of dense—mid- and low-rise apartments and condos with front and back stairways. Rear windows looking out on other rear windows.
My place has a door off the kitchen that opens onto the back stairs and a small landing. During the day it’s quite sunny back there, when Karl the Fog is taking a break. From that vantage, it’s possible to glimpse the lives of dozens of strangers and acquaintances and even neighborhood friends, day and night.
Though I try not to be too nosy (and therefore creepy), one thing from casual observation is clear: there is a changing sense of place unfolding. And that change is coming fast.
Throughout much of the 20th century and into the first two decades of the 21st, home was just that… a place to live, often empty and unused for seven, eight, nine hours per day while people went to other places to do other things. While Airbnb has done an admirable job helping folks to take some of that unused space and monetize it, the vast majority of home spaces remain what they were designed for: a warm place to rest and rejuvenate, to be nourished, and to love and be loved.
Which feels like enough for a place! It is called “home” after all.
Other spaces are similarly (though perhaps not as lovingly) under-utilized assets. For instance, community college spaces are packed except for when they are not, like weekends or the entire summer or between terms. Places of worship can be very busy on a single day each week and much less so the other six. Movie theaters are packed Friday through Sunday, but not so much any other time. Most space designed for office workers are well-utilized from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, and all but abandoned otherwise.
Before COVID—19, the notions and definitions of place were beginning to change as more and more businesses began experimenting with remote work options. But now?
“Home” as a place is beginning to replace work as a place; the movie theater or sports stadium or concert hall as a place; school as a place; the doctor’s office as a place; the gym as a place; the bar or restaurant as a place. People have been rethinking what it means to be “at home,” which, thanks to a novel coronavirus, is accelerating at a dizzying pace.
They’re not only reexamining what feels possible at home. They’re looking at the costs of doing things the way we did them before.
My social media accounts vibrate with revelations about how much money is saved by not commuting, or not buying three Philz coffees a day, or not eating out, or not grabbing lovingly hand-crafted $15 cocktails with a perfectly-sculpted single square of ice several nights a week with friends. Parents and their kids are learning a lot about how to deliver and receive education more efficiently, cost-effectively, and with better results (especially those first two years of college).
But they’re also discovering what it means to be really present for family, for loved ones, even for a roommate. So much time with kids can be tough, but also a treasure. They’re preparing meals together. When they do order out, they’re conscious of supporting locally-owned businesses in their neighborhoods and towns. They’re deeply examining their local neighborhoods during long, leisurely walks or runs, and discovering beauty along the way. They notice that trees actually bloom in springtime.
The absence of all this in their lives before COVID is also a cost they’re reconsidering.
On top of everything else, many people are feeling a little more vulnerable now that they know what empty grocery store shelves look like. They want to make their families and the places they live more resilient to disruption.
Homeowners and landlords will be looking at how to add solar panels and Tesla batteries to their buildings; more bandwidth, more apps, and more hardware; and to redesign spaces that were often underutilized or inefficiently used in times gone by. They’re already coming up with new ways to make sure that everything ordered online can be safely and securely delivered to their front doors.
How we use front stoops, backyards, garages, rooftops, basements, and even closets is changing quickly, too, and will likely endure even when social distancing is a thing of the past. Just look at how well Peloton is doing with its home workout solutions, but also Mirror.co, which it bills itself as a home fitness system hiding in plain site.
Some of this is going back to things lost. There was a time when people really lived in their neighborhoods. They knew (and mostly liked) their neighbors. Their kids played together on the street. The neighborhood park was something everyone visited and didn’t simply drive past on the way to one place or another. City folk used to spend whole weekends on their stoops and driveways, and lots of magic happened on the building’s roof. Happily, many of those old things—really good things—are being rediscovered.
Still: a lot of this is a complete reimagining of what has been done for the better part of 150 years.
What this means for how we work, worship, interact, socialize, learn, stay healthy, exercise, and both entertain and are entertained will likely change, and those changes will stick.
A big question will be what we do with all those places that aren’t places any more?
A hulking suburban mall surrounded by acres of asphalt parking spaces isn’t easily repurposed. Movie theaters, places of worship, college campuses, high-rise office buildings… what happens to all those places when so much of what they’ve been designed for moves into a new place called home?
When manufacturing in the U.S. began its slow, painful death in the mid-twentieth century, abandoned factories stayed that way, some still to this day. Is that an acceptable outcome in the 21st Century?
Times of great change always demand enterprising new ideas that rise to meet the unique challenges of the moment. Even as some industries will die (and let’s face it: more than a few were dying before COVID), new ones will emerge. Ways to repurpose old and underutilized infrastructure will be imagined and then conjured into being through ingenuity, pluck, and hard work.
Even as how we use our place called home changes dramatically, so will the ways in which to be back in the world—to be in all new places. That’s something to look forward to.
