What it was like before
I recently reconnected with a very old friend of my childhood on facebook and it made me remember what it was like for me during those years. This was while we were in North Carolina and I was between 5 and 10 years old - we lived on a cul-de-sac in a suburban neighborhood. There were two other families that lived on the same street and both had kids our age (2 each, so there were 6 of us. I was the eldest by a year and the youngest was a year behind my little brother) - there was pretty much always someone to just go outside and play with, be it riding Big Wheels or playing in the creek making dams and catching crayfish. One of the families had a small in-ground pool, so we could go swimming in the summer. These were really good years for us.
There's certainly nothing like that around us right now - I'm wondering if that sort of neighborhood still exists around here. If not here, where? Is it a matter of location or time - has 30 years changed the world so much that communities like this are so rare or am I just in a place where this sort of environment isn't the norm? The house we lived in there was huge (5BR, 2.5B) and my parents paid $116k for it back then. Zillow has it for around $400k today. It's hard to make comparisons to points of reference so far back in time, the world's changed too much - but the only good references I have for raising a family are my own. Anyone have any good resources for families and researching communities out there?
There's certainly nothing like that around us right now - I'm wondering if that sort of neighborhood still exists around here. If not here, where? Is it a matter of location or time - has 30 years changed the world so much that communities like this are so rare or am I just in a place where this sort of environment isn't the norm? The house we lived in there was huge (5BR, 2.5B) and my parents paid $116k for it back then. Zillow has it for around $400k today. It's hard to make comparisons to points of reference so far back in time, the world's changed too much - but the only good references I have for raising a family are my own. Anyone have any good resources for families and researching communities out there?