On Fixing Teeth And Finding One’s Place
My wife and I finished packing our bags and put our beautiful apartment in Quito, Ecuador up for rent in September of 2016. We…
My wife and I finished packing our bags and put our beautiful apartment in Quito, Ecuador up for rent in September of 2016. We bubble-wrapped a few items to remind us that we could build a home wherever we wanted, finished our dog’s health papers and travel arrangements and camped at my mother’s until boarding our flights in November.
By New Year’s Day 2017 we were settled with our son and our dog in a little one bedroom in South Beach, 50 yards from Lincoln Road, 5 blocks from the beach and terrified about our savings running out before we found jobs in our new country. It also marked the beginning of my wife’s journey to get her Dentist license in the US.
Between September and November of that year we looked tirelessly for the perfect city to start our adventure. We had not settled for Miami but it was our plan B. Family and friends were there so it would be easy and we knew a few realtors who could help us out finding a decent apartment.
We filtered out the runners-up: Portland OR and Savannah GA. Don’t ask me why we picked Portland. Maybe because I’d seen how cool it is. Savannah was a natural one for me, since I had lived there for five years and knew the lay of the land. The decision was hard and it finally came to plan B.
One day, in a proper table with a proper drink, I’ll tell you about deciding to place an offer for your new house, which you have never seen, via Facetime and all the questions that pop into your head that you are afraid to ask.
Then came the daily browsing of hundreds of apartments on the listings our realtor sent us. Budget was very tight so we had to keep settling for less area. We had a one-year-old who thankfully did not need his own room yet. We were about to stop downsizing and start moving farther when we finally found what we wanted. This was our first encounter with housing prices in Miami and it wasn’t pretty.
Eventually we both got jobs and found the best day care center ever before our savings ran out. The beach was 5 blocks away, the supermarket a short 10-minute walk; the movie theater, great cocktails and a fantastic French bakery were 5 minutes away. And Shake Shack was around the corner.
We had a great two-year run in Miami Beach. But as our great plan progressed, my wife passed both her Board examinations to go to Dental School. That meant we needed to move again. Choosing where to go would be a more focused endeavor this time, since we knew where the school was and had to limit our search to a 25- to 30- minute commute.
I hate commutes but they are as prevalent as pizza in northern New Jersey.
Always the Planner, I made a huge spreadsheet with all the attributes of the city we wanted. We looked from the innermost city to the sprawliest of suburbs and came up with a valuation system that focused on a few parameters, none of which included cultural and community institutions or school quality. Too early for all that.
I used every available website to mine data about the different options. Diversity, safety, tree canopy, percentage of renters, density of cafes and restaurants were only a few of the factors. We looked for a bakery within walking distance, a coffee shop and a supermarket. When we got down to 10 places I made walkthroughs on Google street view of each to find the walkable areas and see the texture of the ground floors. I can say I did a pretty thorough job.
We chose Montclair NJ, which has been our home for one year and COVID and will continue to be at least for the next few months until my wife graduates from Dental School. Our main street is just fantastic and it’s very walkable, with lots of pockets of neighborhood commercial activity, a neverending tree canopy and a great mix of housing options. The coffee shop is less than 100 feet away on the same block and the French bakery is one block away.
We love it here. But now graduation is upon us and we get a rare chance: choosing our new home from thousands of cities nationwide, including Montclair- but sadly excluding any in Georgia and New York, for licensing reasons. Deeper ties will necessarily come as my wife starts to see patients regularly and our boy goes to school. Likely, wherever we go will be our home for several years.
Which brings me to the subject of Home. Some people have had it always. Their ties to the city where they live or at least to the region are generational and stem from a rich history of grandparents and their ancestors building ties to the land and the local people, starting businesses and building old houses that are still in the family.
My wife is Cuban. I would have trouble finding people more proud of their city than Havanians. Maybe because so many have had to leave forcefully, with their homes and the places where they had built their lives torn from them, taken away and their families dispersed. But maybe because it is a place worthy of love because it has been loved for 500 years. And that fierce pride despite hardship is what we would love to find.
This is what makes the opportunity we have now all the more exciting. Adopting a new culture- or hoping to be adopted by it- means accepting it and loving it as our own and making the place our own. Loving it till it hurts, as we say here in Proud Places. But, what does that mean?
I’ve been conducting informal research that goes well beyond my spreadsheets. For that, I’ve used several services such as Niche, City-Data, Home Snacks and even the census, as well as others that rank schools and jobs. And even an economic scorecard that ranks access to capital and quality of infrastructure, among others.
Social research has been interesting as well. I’ve asked and got quite a few responses. Cities that have a strong musical tradition seem to be attractive for locals and visitors alike. So are those that have a rich local cuisine that has not been industrialized. Also high on the scale are those that have districts with old buildings large and small that people love, and an identifiable center, downtown or main street.
Finding home without any previous ties to land and community means you get to think of what is it that you value from a place to be called home. I know, deep philosophical shit and all but bear with me as I try to break down the different elements of home and their intricacy, partly because I’ll be asking for your help to find the perfect place and partly because I still need to convince myself of what it is I’m looking for.
A rich history is something I value. Or, perhaps, a rich story. Cities that have seen ups and downs, that built incredible wealth back in the day and then fell on their luck have found in their history, traditions and architecture a way to find pride and anchor their recovery. Some in the Rust Belt definitely fall in this category. Pittsburgh and Detroit come to mind, especially the former, for the incredible amount of locally grown cultural institutions and the amazing wealth of beautiful buildings that house them. But surely there are many more. Any more ideas?
Local culture is also important. Places that have cultivated their local cuisine and give enough importance and appreciation for each node of their local food network thrive and build community even during hard times. Cities that boast writers or musicians of old who bring the spotlight to their culture, chefs, farmers and artists pride themselves in keeping the built environment, the traditions and the vibe are very much alive and coveted places to live. Perhaps Charleston or New Orleans fall in this category? Or maybe Kansas City? Are such places all in the South?
Beauty is high up there in the ranking. This nation has built some of the most beautiful cities on earth and we are slowly rediscovering them and taking pride in that beauty. All the ones I mentioned before are beautiful beyond compare. And as it usually happens, a place becomes beautiful because it is loved, and a beautiful place can be easily loved back. Philadelphia tops this list, in my not so humble opinion. What are your top three most beautiful American cities?
An appreciation of the small is of critical importance. It counts greatly and without conditions. There must be a few cities lying around that acknowledge that a business with 500 employees is hardly “small” and is in a different category than a single person operation.
Small is a family hardware store, a tiny corner grocery store in a residential neighborhood, a barber shop in an adapted garage. Whatever city that has an appreciation for this and that has created legislation to allow flexibility in zoning and business practices would be high on the list. I can’t think of any specific case. Can you?
Not all is festivals, museum days and sriracha avocado toast for brunch. Eventually my spreadsheet will have a column or two devoted to economic conditions. We all gotta eat, right?
Ease of doing business is measured internationally by the World Bank. Each year they come up with a ranking in which countries are sized in distinct categories such as how many days it takes to open a new business or how long it takes to get a building permit. If we were to rank US cities with those standards, California would not fare so well but Florida probably would. Do you know of a similar ranking for local places?
Trade is ten times older than agriculture. Commerce has seen more cities grow around it during human history than any other city-spawning event. Cities that honor that history with strong local food supply systems, small scale, light, local manufacturing and entrepreneurial networks will generally be great places to live, work and raise a family. The public market as both a beloved building and a beloved institution where these values show up would help Los Angeles, Seattle and Cleveland rank well. Would you help me think of other cities, especially smaller towns, that might have great public markets and are great places to do business with low barriers of entry?
All the places that have these traits in common tend to have an old, compact and dense center or centers with walkable connections to amenities, good parks and a sense of community. There usually are many restaurants offering great food, not necessarily all fancy but all very homey. Several decades-old culinary staples are local institutions that inspire new ones to appear all the time.
Churches, community organizations, great farmers markets, clubs and charities are prevalent, as are cultural institutions like famous museums, libraries, botanical gardens and art galleries. I’m talking Rocky Balboa climbing the steps of the PMA famous. They tend to have solid job creation records, high entrepreneurship and a local economy that grows like Jane Jacobs would approve: by continuing to provide economic opportunities to all.
Whatever place we choose to build our home in will accommodate my family’s everyday life and routine, will be loved soon after moving in. The presence of the traits I have diligently tried to describe before will be added bonuses. All or some of these characteristics can be found in large cities and small towns alike, in any region. I am trying to find one that gives us the same sense of wonder and hope and excitement that we had when we first arrived in Miami in 2016, scared but confident that this is the best place in the world to dream.
I’m taking recommendations.