How do you tell a neighborhood is safe?

That's pretty easy - just observe how many women are strolling the sidewalks.

Women tend to have higher public safety needs (especially at night) than men do, and instinctively know which neighborhoods are the safest. The more obvious requisites include excellent lighting, the less obvious is a high enough density, as described yesterday.

If you stand on the streets of the North End in Boston at rush hour (for people, not cars), a significant majority of the 'commuters' walking home from the adjacent downtown are women. 'Unfortunately' for the women, the ogling waiters of Boston's Little Italy form quite the gauntlet along its restaurant-lined streets.

Does density cause crime?

Well sure, if you have a density of criminals. However, if you have a density of entrepreneurs, entertainers and artists, you'll cause some serious economic prosperity.

New York City and San Francisco are two of the densest cities in America, yet not only are they two of the most prosperous, but also boast one of the lowest murder, rape and aggravated assault rates per capita. William Murray of Maryland's State Attorney's office and former Suitland, MD chief of police, emphasized to me last week that density and walkability were essential to public safety via the 'eyes on the street' phenomenon of community self-policing. In other words, where there's lots of people, there's lots of 'witnesses'.

Think about the cost savings to the municipality. Just today I was one of forty people on all-day jury duty suffering through a snail's pace jury selection process for a laundromat robbery that took place in a rundown, neglected neighborhood. Just the jury selection alone for one crime equals a couple of police officers' paychecks!... and if the neighborhood was designed with the eyes on the street concept, you wouldn't even need that police officer. Who'd try and rob a laundromat on the street corner below?

Investing in a healthy town

Here are the health-oriented town features that investors are implementing in the CoolTown model.

1. Genuine walkability. I mean 'genuine' in that people will actually want to walk to destinations, rather than it being a theoretical possibility. I see the word often abused as such. Few people enjoy walking across parking lots, especially at night.
2. Enough fast food joints! If you read the book Fast Food Nation you may never eat at one again. You'll see a lot more local businesses that promote the local economy, culture and people.
3. A 30,000 sf community center for ongoing recreational activities, plus parks and scenic jogging trails. Also, we should all know that as kids, any street without cars made the ideal playground.
4. Multiple dance venues for all kinds of music! I can't think of a better, safer, more social and entertaining way to get exercise at night. It's the CoolTown version of the tired bar scene.

What are CoolTown-oriented shoes?

What's a typical week in a health-oriented town?There really is such a thing, in my opinion. Once I got 'urban dress/walking shoes', I found myself getting twice as much exercise.

Go to Nike and look up "prestos". My shoe expert of a friend recommended I get these when I asked him if there was such a thing as shoes I could go to a meeting with, and run in. Well, for my sake, these shoes are just that! Not only do I wear these to business meetings, but I ran a ten mile race in them too! They're extremely comfortable, light and flexible, yet have a simple black exterior that allows me to get away with them in more formal settings. Or you can do what women in the city do - carry another pair of shoes.

If more of our footwear was designed for comfort rather than show, I guarantee you we'd be walking a lot more. I'll make sure that when we build the first new CoolTown, at least one of the stores sells footwear like this.

What's a typical week in a health-oriented town?

How do you know you're in a healthy town? Just walk around and look. For some reason, the people at suburban Walmarts just don't seem nearly as fit as those strolling through city downtowns.

Here's my list of choices in a typical week: Less than one block away: Pick-up basketball games, throwing a frisbee, running up and down stairs, jogging to the grocery or drugstore. Just a few blocks away: Walking to the subway, yoga, salsa dancing, jogging to my gym and more pick-up basketball (or swimming). One easy subway ride away: Swing, zydeco, hand dancing, ultimate frisbee, pick-up football, kickball games.

Not only are these activities physically healthy, but they're all very convenient to get to (and without driving). Most importantly, they're fun!

Investing in Community

This week The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is sponsoring The Shape We're In, focusing on why nearly two-thirds of Americans are out of shape.

The series kicks off with Experts plotting America's new diet: Less sprawl, less fat, less frenzy. From the article: "Right now, 75 percent of all trips less than a mile are taken by car. About 25 percent of people are physically active. Another 50 percent do a little activity. And 25 percent do virtually nothing."

Here's my take on it. If you've got nothing to do and nowhere to go, then of course you'll do nothing and go nowhere. It's all about having choices, and unfortunately the industrial, mass production economy doesn't provide much. However, the good news is we're transitioning to an information-based, mass customization era of multiple choices, and that means more of us will get to live in cool towns where we have ten options each night to entertain ourselves within walking distance, rather than two (watch TV or surf the internet).

Investing in Community

For regular blog viewers, you may notice that I end the weekly theme on Fridays with a blog on how investors plan on implementing these visions in a real town, a CoolTown. Here's how the group plans on helping enable a sense of community:

1. Focus on a target audience - in this case it's the cultural creatives. Learn as much as possible about the things they like to do, experience and prioritize. Learn about their sub-groups as well, like the free agents. This is the common interest that initially draws people together.
2. Build numerous third places for them to meet spontaneously, frequently, for longer periods of time. My favorite outdoor version is the piazza. The most well-known indoor version is Starbucks, though I much rather prefer independent owners who care more about the local community.
3. Host lots of events in these third places, the piazza and the parks, especially if it involves the unifying vibes of music and art.
4. Establish ongoing community programs for the residents and workers that inspire them to collaborate, barter, network and find common recreational or work-related interests.
5. I could list about fifty more lines, but that's beyond the typical web viewer's attention span.

Community: A group of people living in the same locality; a group of people having common interests
Clique: A small exclusive group of friends or associates.

When we think of 'friends', we often think of them as cliques - people we regularly hang out with. However, being exclusive by definition, cliques also include country clubs and gangs. Either way, they typically aren't very diverse.

I believe a CoolTown will be more about community than cliques. Rather than asking the people in your clique what they'd like to do on Friday night week after week, more people will be choosing among myriad entertainment choices first, then meeting up spontaneously with people they know there. Why? In our evolution towards diversity, tolerance and choice and away from exclusivity, it's a natural progression. It encourages individuals to do what they're most passionate about, find out what's really out there and still have the best of friends, maybe even better ones. It's up to us to provide enough of those choices in the towns we build.

Actually, the verdict isn't in yet, but the way I'm hoping to help catalyze a stronger sense of community at my workplace is using the same approach as where I live (see yesterday's blog). Just today I used the listserv to pick dates for our first happy hour, and half the entrepreneur tenants (eleven) are a go. June 3rd's our first happy hour, so I'll let you know then how it went. Update: How it went!

As far as a common place that everyone can naturally gather, that's a strength of where I work at the shared suite of workspaces at the Affinity Lab. Simply put, the entire workplace is like a big living room, complete with a central lounging area of couches, big comfy chair and coffee table full of magazines.

There are seventy or so people who live in my building (image below), but for the first three or four years I hardly knew a soul. Today I know more than half of them by first name, and that all happened within a matter of months.

Here's my recipe to get to know your neighbors:

1. As painful as it is for some of us, you're going to have to go out of your way to get to know at least three or four of them. This forms the 'neighborhood core'.
2a. Plan an event like a happy hour in the most common area that everyone walks through. In our case, it was the lobby. Make sure the neighborhood core is there from the start. People attract people.
b. At the event, play music on a portable (I use my iBook) with decent speakers, something upbeat and energizing, like Marvin Gaye's Got To Give It Up.
c. Get an event sponsor for free beer and wine. Save the leftovers for the next quarterly event.
3. Get everyone to sign up on a building listserv. You can create a free one here. Use this to ask people to bring stuff to the next event, sell or give away things, or ask for help.
4. Reap the benefits! Let's see, since I've gotten to know my neighbors I've gotten a lot of free furniture and fix-it advice, along with numerous happy hours, social dinners, parties, snowball fights, movie nights, off-the-wall events and yes, a sense of community.