It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

This neighborhood is physically defined as a small hilltop outcropping that stands between a little valley called Hidden Meadows and the run down to the coast. As I may have mentioned before, there are about forty homes up on this hill on what I would characterize as six roads. There are hill crest homes around the edges and several inner homes that don’t seem to care so much about the view as the generally pleasant surroundings. While things slowed down in the new construction game last year, the inexorable trend to grow and expand the inventory of Southern California housing inventory goes on. I keep reading that people are leaving California for Texas, Arizona and Idaho, but that doesn’t seem to slow down the demand for new construction. There are five lots in various stages of new construction ranging from a bare lot awaiting county permissioning to a house that the young couple has just moved into and is all done except perhaps some of the more involved landscaping. In addition, given the aging of the neighborhood population (we are clearly skewed towards the retirement quadrant of the population), there is also some resale turnover. It so happens that the two resales are on either side of us, one by COVID death of the owner and the other by the widowing of the owner and subsequent move closer to the kids and grandkids.

One of the in-process lots is across the street in the inside section of the hill and it is the bare lot awaiting county permits. In addition, there are about fifteen or twenty empty lots which could be built on if someone were so inclined. The most obvious one for us is directly across the street and the owner is an aging woman in town who has said she has no interest in either selling or developing the lot, but is leaving all that for her children to determine when her time comes. There is one lot without road access that does sit between me and my ocean view, but the local rumor mill is that that lot neither “perks” for proper sewage placement, not has road access. I tend to not believe all that since people have a way of making things happen if they want a view property. While I prefer neither of those two lots develops any time soon, I don’t care enough to pay a premium to control the lots and even if they did build neither would do much to impair my pleasure of our hillside, which sits above it all.

What does matter somewhat to me is the composition of the neighborhood. To put it simply, I want nice neighbors with whom we can develop a good rapport. I want us to have nice local friends as we age out in this lovely spot. One of those friends was the widow who recently moved to Denver. The other is my pal Winston and his wife Kathleen down and across the street. Winston and I keep tabs on the goings on on the hill and share this and that with each other. Now that the two houses on either side of us have sold and one of the two lots across the street sold, I would like to report on the shifts underway in the hood. We are having the new neighbors to the South over for dinner tonight and have included the nice couple just beyond them and Winston and Kathleen. So, we will be eight for dinner on the patio for what might be called a pre-Labor Day get-together. The newbies are the Mooney’s and they are fifteen years younger than us and both still very much in harness while their kids go through college and high school. They are both biologists of one sort or another, which makes some sense given that San Diego is a biomedical locus and that sort of scientific career is what I might have expected.

Winston is a retired career military officer who did county administrative work after leaving the Army as a Colonel. Jeff and Shannon are more naturalists in that Jeff is the senior ranger at Lake Hodges, a nearby county park while Shannon trains German Sheppard dogs for something or other. I have now met one part of the neighbors moving in to the north side of us. He is an electrical engineer of Nepalese origin. His name is Ramesh and his wife is Lalita, but I am guessing at the spelling and don’t yet know what she does. Winston has sussed-out that their Nepalese parents are coming to live with them for an extended period of time. The folks across the street wanting to build on that lot have put a trailer up there (not visible to us, but quite visible to Kathleen from her pool, apparently). The best we can figure, he is an established Californian with a long heritage in the San Juan Capistrano area and she is a Peruvian with a decidedly Incan-looking brother and extended family. I know we have some Scottish folks (Henderson) on the hill, a French couple (Paroz) as well as a Palestinian family (Milbes). There is also a mixed Persian and Japanese couple (Faraj and Yasuko) and the rest of us are mutts. I find Winston’s story particularly humorous because he has a McCall kilt and thought he was a highland Scot only to learn that he was truly a lowland Irishman. I wonder if he’ll still wear his kilt once in a while?

I love the diversity that seems to characterize our neighborhood and only wish it were more so since the preponderance of folks, like us, are nothing more or less than Americans with the usual array of names of unspecified origins. This is, after all what America means to many of us. This is the land of endless and ever-changing immigration. At this moment in the news cycle, immigration is taking a back seat to other issues, most notably abortion and the abdication of constitutional hegemony over the issue as established in 1973 by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. The Texas legislature is trying to establish the ultimate state sovereignty by using a legal gimmick of allowing the citizenry to police and actually bounty hunt violators of its absolute (no exceptions for rape, incest or mother’s’ health) post-six-week abortion ban that would otherwise be forbidden by Federal legal precedent. This is certainly a critical feminist issue, but more so it is another in a long history of class warfare that falls most heavily on the less economically advantaged portion of America often including the latest immigrants as well as the descendants of oppression (like people of color). The truth is that to the Republican bullies, black and brown lives don’t matter, but strangely, black and brown fetuses do.

There is no chance that this is a case of collateral damage. This is part of the 30-year-long brilliant but devious effort by Republican strategists to control America through controlling SCOTUS. It starts with voting rights, goes to abortion and will certainly find its way to immigration, COVID immunization and mask mandates, and who knows what else. It may be a beautiful day in the neighborhood, but it’s getting to be an uglier and uglier day in America.