Marie Singleton

Savannah is more of a community unto itself. While there are “suburban sprawl” neighborhoods, namely the newer ones like Southbridge, the neighborhood I grew up in was not. My neighborhood was a ten minute drive from the middle of downtown. I lived on one of the islands closest to the beach. My neighborhood was one of the oldest to be built on Wilmington Island, a place called Wilmington Park. My house, in particular, was built in the early 1940s – one of the first on the Island. Within a 10 minute bike ride from my house, I could access a community pool, a playground, basketball courts, tennis courts, three grocery stores, a local barbershop, a nail salon, and the elementary school. There wasn’t much else needed growing up. My friends were close enough that I could walk to their houses, or at the very least, ride my bike. Growing up, there were a lot of older people, but a boom of kids my age. My next door neighbor and I went from kindergarten through eighth grade together. We were constantly playing together. Eight of us kids. We roamed the neighborhood – and felt safe doing so.

This was my house:

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With growing up came the ability to venture further than the limiting walls of the neighborhood. Aside from Wilmington Park, I spent the majority of my time in downtown Savannah and Tybee Island. To begin with, Tybee Island is our beach. The locals run the island. The only major chain restaurant to set up camp – and actually thrive – was Arby’s. Other than that, local restaurants were the main attraction. You could walk down Butler Avenue and call almost everyone by name. Almost everyone in the Savannah/Tybee Island area is connected to another family you know, someway, somehow.

Downtown Savannah held the most importance to me. I went to a small, private, Catholic school in the middle of downtown, so we walked everywhere. Five, six, seven blocks was a short trip for us. The streets are lined with twenty-one public squares – green space open for all to use. These squares serve another purpose, though. They reduce the speed limit. In all my years in Savannah, I knew of two major accidents downtown. One in which the brakes locked up on a car and forced it into a square and another with a drunk driver. However, neither person was injured because the squares slowed the cars down. In downtown Savannah, townhomes are built right on the street and built around these squares which serve as almost a community yard. I worked downtown and walked everywhere. There were no chain restaurants. There were no big name department stores. Trolleys and horse-drawn are a very common site and a popular way for tourists to get around. You just don’t find these kinds of attributes in large cities and suburban sprawl. 

Sometimes, I wish Savannah was more sprawl like. It may have been safer than walking around downtown Savannah. There would have been more to do as a child. But what we did do when I was little, was to explore different neighborhoods and all the different styles of housing - from ranch to old plantation to Spanish to structuralist. It was cool to experience different kinds of architecture and not just one, uniform style of building.

Halifax North

The name's Shaun Roberts and I live in Evans Georgia. The Halifax neighborhood is extremely similar to Martin's Chapel Grove with the exception of a lost name identity crisis of course. The way the areas are set up is extremely familiar but they do vary on many key areas. The area also doesn't actually fit perfectly into the same prerequisites of any of the cities in Blueprint America. The Evans area is more like Portland than any other because of the restrictions placed upon the area with the growth of sprawl. But also like Denver where there are outlaying towns and neighborhoods outside the bypass of the city (Such as mine!). The area has extremely limited space because it is getting pushed from the east by Augusta, blocked from the north by the Savannah River and blocked from the south by Ft. Gordon. So the area is slowly building up and to the west.The Blueprint America documentary's main point was to try to prove that urban sprawl was bad, wasteful, doesn't allow for a community, and destroys the land. I believe that my community shows otherwise. I for one believe that urban sprawl is not necessarily bad per say but does need to be controlled. Evans exemplifies that need. My community for instance was created with the landscape in mind. All the houses have several trees and are created with the idea that if the houses dissipated the original layout of the land would still exist. The overall hillyness of the land has stayed in tact and they have constructed around the many ponds and the older or bigger groups of trees.

Many of the houses appear quite different than others as shown in the pictures(surprising i know...). Many hold the same elements such as the porch or the type of architectural style but rarely do you see a house that looks extremely similar to another. Many times they switch up the colors, reverse the layout, add another room, chance where the porch or driveway is located, and then make it out of a different material and by that time its a completely different house.

Going back to the way Martin's Chapel Grove is constructed, the two neighborhoods are extremely different because houses are farther apart and keep many trees around them compared to the land in Chapel Grove where every house looks the same and its flat with a thin line of trees protecting it from the main road.
I personally have had a good experience in my neighborhood. The lack of public sporting areas forces the kids in the neighborhood to either be in the street playing or at one of the local schools playing. Everyone is always sitting on their porches or riding by in their golf carts and seem to always be polite, stop and talk or even help out with you moving furniture. Even though statistically wise we are a very diverse group with ages anywhere from just out of college to in the upper 60's, everyone seems to get along quite well.

The Evans area has many bike paths, sidewalks, community areas and parks, and is exremely cautious where buildings are constructed to maximize space. and any major grocery store or convenience store or even local shopping area is at least within a bikes ride away, many even closer. Traffic is hardly a problem except the main Washington Road that comes from Augusta and links the two areas. Many of the other roads are less busy and so its not a problem to go around town on a walk or bike ride and enjoy the area with out worrying about the traffic flow.

Martin's Chapel Grove

My name is Thomas Rowe and I grew up in Lawrenceville, Georgia in a suburban sprawl based neighborhood, Martin's Chapel Grove (who exactly Martin is, is anybody's guess), with a similar layout to the photo on page 5 of Suburban Nation, with roads surrounding around a central block of houses with more houses running on both sides of the street with a couple of exits to leave the neighborhood.

My family moved into this neighborhood when it was just created about eight years or so ago, when the shape of the hilled landscape was clearly visible, but when more and more houses were built, those houses became our only view from the front of our house with the thin wall of trees behind us seperating our neighborhood from busy roads. Since the sloped landscape and small size of the neighborhood could not provide a recreational center with a pool or a tennis court, most of the children had to travel to the homes of others to play basketball in the street or have the occasional bike race down some of the hills.

The ranch-styled houses in that neighborhood were the definition of "cookie cutter" houses, every house looked like the one next to it which looked like the one next to it, with the exception of an extended porch every other house or an additional floor every twenty houses or so. The picture below (courtesy of Google Maps Street View) shows the house I used to live in to the far right and its copies within view.










Although my neighborhood was fairly diverse in terms of age and ethnicity most families shared a common income level but keep to themselves mostly. Of course the children were more outgoing and willing to walk house to house to interact with others, but the adults keep rather private lives except for the occasional chat with the neighbors while mowing the lawn, which lead to a sense of no deep community relationship that traditional neighborhoods foster.

This neighborhood was solely used for residential space and made the residents drive a good ten minutes away to a shopping center with a pizza place, dry cleaning, gas station, chinese restaurant, and a grocery store. The sidewalks ended as the neighborhood did so walking was never an option for leaving the neighborhood, and the busy roads and awkward intersections made biking anywhere near impossible. The diagram on page 23 of Suburban Nation illustrates the jist of this situation where a "collector" road attracts all the traffic making driving a necessity and the only feasible method of transportation to the distant shopping centers.

My neighborhood supports the idea of suburban sprawl as "bad" growth in terms of building lasting relationships and a strong sense of community, because if more neighborhoods like mine sprout up faster than traditional neighborhoods can develop, then more and more citizens would grow up without a closeness to their neighbors and miss out on a chance to form lasting community ties with one another which are lost in the seperation associated with sprawl. My neighborhood was livable but on an individual family stand point because only inside our house did we feel a sense of closeness but there were hardly any ties between the families in the neighborhood. One way to improve sprawl neighborhoods like mine to make them more livable would be to centralize neighborhood involvement through social events for all age groups to strengthen bonds to one another.