

My neighborhood is a little run down, actually. There’s a lot of houses that are falling apart and in disrepair. Some wooden houses seem to be rotting on their foundations. Many houses have mold stains on the outside and also have chipping, faded or discoloured paint. Often there are little kids playing in the streets.  Some are as young as one or two being watched by their four or five year old siblings as they play near the streets or in them. They never wear helmets when they ride their bicycles, either. They walk into the streets near the corners and turns where oncoming traffic cannot see them, and I’m always so scared when I turn a corner driving that one will be there and I’ll hit them on accident.  There are two parks in my neighborhood, but most of the time there are people doing illegal things in them. I’ve gone down to the nicer park a handful of times with my cousin and her children, but I was solicited by some unsavory people so I haven’t gone back since. It seems like the nicer houses in the neighborhood are the ones on the outskirts of it.  There are a few older couples living on the main drives that take great care of their gardens and seem to be nice.  Unfortunately many people on the inner streets don’t cut their lawns, and some don’t even have lawns; most of their yards consist of dirt and broken or discarded child toys.  Many people leave their screen doors open or their front doors open so that anyone walking or driving by sees right into their homes.  It isn’t very classy, in my opinion. There are sidewalks on the sides of some roads, but not all of the roads, which makes it hard for people to walk around the neighborhood safe from traffic.  Because my neighborhood is a through-street neighborhood that many people use to bypass traffic, it seems that everyone who drives by just dumps all their trash out of their cars into the roads. Bi-weekly neighborhood church volunteers come and clean up the trash, but it still doesn’t alleviate the problem much. People often have loud parties in my neighborhood, too.  It can be midnight on a week night and people are out in their yards, thumping their stereo systems and yelling at each other about this or that.  Stuff like that happens all the time.  I hate it. It makes me really upset to wake up to loud disturbances in the middle of the night. Sometimes burglaries happen in the neighborhood, too.  I would say we get a notice from the neighborhood watch about once every month or two to tell us of another burglary in the neighborhood.  We lock our doors and have only had our place broken into once in the twenty years I have lived in the neighborhood.  I don’t live in the same house I used to, though, and recently moved into a home in the nicer part of the neighborhood.

