I grew up in the 1990s in Lula, a modest town of a thousand people in the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia. As a child, I frequently walked to my neighbor’s house to borrow a cup of sugar or milk. I would also walk (alone) to piano lessons, to the hardware store, to the grocery store, or to borrow books from the widowed schoolteacher next door. My mother and I planted flowers in our front yard, chatting with the neighbors who walked down our street. Come to think of it, everyone in Lula walked — a lot.
And in Lula, we had a community, a nearly extinct but frequently simulated place. To me, a community is somewhere a dozen unchaperoned kids can meet up at local baseball field and start an unplanned game, where neighbors talk to each other face-to-face. I believe this kind of trusting, tight-knit community is what Southern culture is all about, and at its core is the friendly and visible pedestrian.
Three years ago, after finishing graduate school in Boston, I moved back home to Georgia — specifically, to the suburbs in Gwinnett County, where I became completely reliant on a car for the first time. Traveling to work or the store, I saw my neighbors through my car windows as we drove past each other; we never spoke because we never needed to.
It took me 15 minutes to drive anywhere, even to the grocery store. The kids on my street didn’t play together much, despite the safety of a quiet cul-de-sac. In this subdivision and planned residential “community,” I felt isolated. I yearned for the ease of exploration that comes with walking wherever I want to go. So I did what anyone my age would do: I packed up and moved to Atlanta.
Generations of Georgians grew up in communities where they walked because it was simpler, or maybe just because they were poor — but also because they deliberately chose an unhurried pace of life. My Granddaddy grew up walking through Whitesburg in the 1930s; my parents did the same in Decatur in the 1960s. I grew up walking (often barefoot, I confess) around Lula decades later. Pedestrian-accessible, vibrant communities are part of my Southern heritage. And these days, the best place to find them is in the city.
According to Christopher B. Leinberger of the Brookings Institution, 60 percent of development in metro Atlanta between 2009 and 2013 occurred in walkable urban areas — areas like the Beltline, Cabbagetown, Adair Park and Decatur, where neighbors congregate on porches; where parents bike with their kids to school; where a person can leave her house and transport herself wherever she’d like on her own two feet. These are the places I want to live.
I’m not the only one. Many in my generation want communities in which we can walk, rather than drive, to get around. A frequently cited Nielsen Co. study found 62 percent of millennials would like to live in urban centers with a mix of restaurants, shopping and offices. We want pedestrian access to our jobs, friends and communities. We yearn for this access not because we desire modernization or innovation, but because we are nostalgic for a simpler past.
Sadly, if you go to Lula these days, you will find the hardware store, the antique shop and many other storefronts on Main Street shuttered or decrepit. It’s not so easy to walk places there now. I won’t speculate as to how or why this change occurred, but it has. In Atlanta, however, I can still find my tight-knit community. I can still walk down the street and visit my neighbors.
As an at-least fifth-generation Georgian, this is a freedom I value.
Jessica Estep, 27, teaches English at a local college.
