Sweet Sprawl

In eighth grade I helped roll my piano down our driveway, across the street, and into the house I used to look at from my bedroom window. My family decided to move across the street when I was 14, so I lived in the same neighborhood (simply different houses) for the last 10 years of my life. It is a standard suburban neighborhood that would perfectly describe suburban sprawl. However, many of the negative connotations described in Blueprint America do not apply. Each house had a distinct personality of it's own. Also, we were within walking distance to business developments, and one man who lived in my neighborhood ran to and from work at Kennestone Hospital everyday, although he was the only one. Overall, despite our convenient proximity to shops and businesses (and our distance from any single mode of public transportation), every family had a car, if not several. Another small discrepancy between my neighborhood and the stereotypical model of sprawl is that my community wasn't sandwiched between other similar neighborhoods; it was surrounded by Kennesaw Mountain National Park which provided nearby memorials, walking trails, thousands of deer and coyotes, and a gorgeous back yard in which to grow up. The neighborhood is full of mostly middle to upper class families with children of all ages. I made great friends growing up, and our next door neighbors are over all the time for dinner with my parents. Although my neighborhood would be so insensitively described as sprawl, I will never think of it as a character starved, cookie cutter community built solely for the expansion of Atlanta; it is home to me.