Neighbour Shaming!


Today, I’m speaking out about neighbour shaming.  For too many years, thousands (if not millions) of people have quietly lived with the pain and humiliation of living on a street with a neighbour shamer.  It’s time to break the silence.

The main problem is our world has not yet woke to the social devastation caused by neighbour shaming.  Neighbour shaming behaviour is still acceptable and, in fact, even actively encouraged by many public organizations and the media.  So it’s no wonder many neighbour shamers don’t even realize that what they’re doing is inappropriate, and most victims are unaware that they’re being victimized.  They still believe that there’s actually something wrong with them.

So what is neighbour shaming?  And how do we end this unacceptable behaviour?

It’s quite easy to spot a neighbour shamer.  They’re the people whose houses have neatly manicured lawns, perfectly edged sidewalks, trimmed hedges, window boxes and nicely painted fences.  They’re the folks who spend their evenings and weekends planting, weeding, raking, pruning, sweeping and generally working their asses off to create a beautiful home and garden.  The problem is these alt-horticulturists have created a toxic urban environment by setting an unrealistic and unattainable standard for the rest of us.  Through their selfish, thoughtless actions, they make everyone else in the neighbourhood look like a bunch of lazy hillbillies.  But, we’re they’re not hillbillies.  They’re just ordinary people who are struggling – struggling with weeds, aphids and rose blight.  And they could be facing their own challenges — perhaps they grew up in an apartment or an orphanage, perhaps they were abused by florists, or maybe they suffer from gnomophobia (a fear of garden gnomes.)  At first glance at an unattractive garden, it’s easy to be judgemental, but not everyone understands soil composition, mulch, or the dos and don’ts of fertilizing.  Plus, many victims have serious time, space and financial disadvantages.  It’s time we were honest and recognized that “having a green thumb” is, in reality, “green privilege.”

The Home and Garden Industry is a multi-billion dollar business whose profits depend on neighbour shaming, but you can fight back.  Here are just a few things you can do to raise awareness in your community.

1 — Go to the neighbour shamer on your street and tell them how their perfectly symmetrical flower beds make you feel.  Explain to them that the sound of their hedge clippers is causing you emotional harm.  Open a dialogue.  You might be surprised.  Many neighbour shamers feel the same social pressures you do; sometimes, even more.

2 — Organize a neighbourhood garden party to show that you don’t need an immaculate lawn to enjoy life, and people can still party and have fun, surrounded by brambles, weeds and dog shit.

3 — Contact home and garden magazines or websites and tell them just how offensive their “before and after” pictures really are, and then suggest they would be more inclusive if they provided equal coverage of derelict houses and waste ground.  Write or email television networks and demand they broadcast trigger warnings to caution viewers that gardening programs can cause stress or harm self-esteem.

4 — You can also start a support group to let people know they’re not alone or even turn your own garden into an empty, concrete “safe space.”

And finally, but most importantly:

5 – Always remember it’s not your fault your garden kinda sucks, and even though that workaholic, perfect-sized, handy-husbanded, helpful-childrened, cupcake-making, bikini-wearing bitch down the street can grow gorgeous rhododendrons in her sleep — you’re still a good person.

Self-Help and the Modern World

Have you ever noticed that people who buy Self-Help books never buy just one?  They always have three or four of them kicking around.  Usually they’re all on the same subject, but sometimes — and this is really scary — they’re all over the map.  There are people (we all know them) who could use a little help, self or otherwise.  There are also people who genuinely want to improve themselves; their outlook, their personality, their world, in general.  There’s nothing wrong with that!  In fact, most of us could do with a tuneup every once in a while.  However, this is the basis of the Self-Help industry.  They know, that we know, that there’s something wrong with us.  All they have to do is sell us the cure.  And that’s the reason people buy so many Self-Help books: they are a cure — that doesn’t work.

Self improvement is not a recent innovation.  There is probably something called A Slave’s Guide to Better Cowering written in hieroglyphics on a papyrus scroll, buried in the Nile Delta somewhere.  However, Self-Help is less than a hundred years old.  Its rapid development into a multimillion dollar industry runs exactly parallel with the development of our contemporary society.

There are two reasons Self-Help has become such a lucrative business.  First, we are losing our sense of family, and secondly we have lost our sense of community.

As we head off into the 21st century, our homes are no longer multigenerational.  Our parents and grandparents do not return to the family in old age.  Increasingly, they are warehoused, first in retirement communities, and then in care facilities.  Likewise, as most families consist of one or more working adults, childcare is outsourced, first to Daycare then the public school system.  Although these may be excellent institutions, they simply do not have a personal, vested interest in either education or development (beyond immediate behavioural problems.)  In other words, it’s a lot easier to fly right if you have grandma looking over your shoulder — or Dad — because they have an emotional attachment to you and pretty much everything you do.  You are the centre of their world, and they genuinely want to help you find your way around.  Likewise, as you grow older, your emotional connection to your parents and grandparents is strengthened by, if nothing else, proximity.  Nobody in a multigenerational family is left on their own to fend for themselves.  It isn’t in anybody’s emotional best interest.   Just as an aside, I know there are excellent care facilities everywhere with expertly trained staff, and I cast no aspersions on them.  However, at the end of the day, nobody wants you to succeed at life as much as grandma and grandpa do — and that lasts forever.  As we continue to replace the functioning parts of our multigenerational families with multi-task, care-for-hire personal assistants, we are turning ourselves into individual entities, relying on the kindness of strangers for our well-being.

It works the same for neighbourhoods.  In the old days, for better or for worse, the multigenerational family actually cared what the neighbours thought.  This was simply because they knew who the neighbours were.  They didn’t merely share the back fence; they shared community values and responsibilities.  Neighbours were involved with the comings and goings of the neighbourhood, which included Bob’s diet or Janet’s quit smoking plan.  People were available to help, and they did.  In essence, neighbours were all in it together.  However, as that community disappears, we are not only becoming physically isolated in the world; we are now increasingly psychologically alone.

The mantras of the Self-Help crowd are “Show personal responsibility” and “Take ownership of your problems.”  This is just a sugar-coated way of saying, “Good luck!  You’re on your own!”  Since we no longer believe we can rely on the traditional community to support us, we go looking elsewhere for help.  Invariably, this means throwing money at the problem; either through professional assistance or Self-Help.  And there we are again, back at that one-size-fits-all guide to personal growth, wealth and happiness: the Self-Help book.

Somehow, I find it impossible to believe that somebody sitting in their converted laundry room cranking out 800 words a day, has any connection to my quest to quit procrastinating.  They may have a good plan.  It may have worked wonders for them.   However, unless they know my heavy schedule of avoidance behaviour, I’m afraid they’re going to come up short.  By the same token (and I’m sure this worked for you, too) no three-chapter discussion of “How to Dress for Success” ever trumped my mother telling me to wash my hair and put on a tie.

Sometimes, the best self-help comes with some sharp-tongued maternal assistance.

“Funky”: Kiss of Death and Yuppies in the ‘Hood

There are few words in the English language that carry the destructive power of “funky.”  Way back in the day, “funky” (or “funk” as it was called then) was a musical term.  It was urban black.  It was loose.  It was uncontrolled and it was cool.  It meant something, although most people couldn’t describe it; they just knew it when they heard it.  So much for the history lesson.  Today, funky is the kiss of death.

In every city in North America, there are brilliant little neighbourhoods.  They exist on the fringes of the bigger, more famous areas.  They’re middle ground territory, neither rich nor poor and mostly overlooked in the urban sprawl.  They have houses and apartments, restaurants and shops.  Sometimes they have schools or a theatre or maybe a gas station, but definitely a couple of corner stores and at least one old-fashioned cafe.  These are great little places and people live there — all kinds of people — grandmas and students, bosses, workers, the guy who owns the bakery, Jamal, Eddie and Suzanne.  They’re not some 50s wonderland, filled with Andy of Mayberry characters, but enough local people know each other, or recognize the guy across the street, to make them real neighbourhoods.  They’re what urban planners dream about.

These neighbourhoods go unnoticed for years.   They go about their business and never bother anybody.  Then, one day, somebody wanders by (sometimes it’s a real estate agent, sometimes it’s a journalist, sometimes it’s just somebody with a big mouth) and calls them “funky.”  As in: “3 bdrm, TLC, close to transport, all amenities, funky old-world charm” or “My companion and I dined on authentic Portuguese squid, with plenty of funky atmosphere, for half the price of an expensive downtown restaurant.”  These people think “funky” is a term of endearment.  It‘s not; it’s a death sentence.  It’s a neighbourhood killer because, in actual fact, “funky” is a polite word for gentrification.  It represents the time period between when the first upwardly mobile couple moves in and the last original inhabitant is driven out. 

There are any number of ways for this to happen, but they all basically follow the same pattern.  Brooke and Meghan* buy a house in an area that’s less than ideal, maybe even a little rundown, because they can’t afford the big prices in the tonier parts of town.  They make up for their shabby address by putting on the brag about how great their neighbourhood is.  How urban cool it is.  How it just reeks of diversity.  How Bratislav cuts his own cheese and Nahoud bakes his own biscotti.  In short, how “funky” it is.  Eventually the word gets around: that it’s not such a comedown to live east of Main Street or south of Central, and other people start buying inexpensive addresses.

Any wave in the real estate market, however small, is battle stations red alert for property developers.  They’ve long since figured out that there’s a boatload more money to be made selling thirty brand-new condos, sitting on top of four retail outlets, than there is reselling four single-family homes.  They buy the lots, tear down the houses, vertically sub-divide and parcel it all out as urban living.

In turn, concentrated population increases attract the big boy franchisers — like throwing blood into the shark bait waters off the coast of Australia.  If there be condos; there be McDonald’s, 7-11 and Starbucks.  There might not be a WalMart (urban professionals don’t like them) but at this point, it doesn’t matter.  Wai Chow’s Golden Chopstick or Bayview Meats can’t compete with Earl’s, East Side Mario’s or Flying Wedge.  These people are willing to sign long leases for big money, and local shopkeepers just don’t have that kind of coin.  They’re forced to close and the cycle continues.

Back in “the hood,” Brooke and Meghan, those two crazy kids who started the whole process, aren’t helping matters much.  They aren’t actually living in the neighbourhood.  They might physically be there, but so what?  They don’t work there.  Their kids don’t go to school there.  They don’t ride the bus or shop on their way home.  In fact, they never consistently patronize the local merchants, at all.  They drive in and out of the neighbourhood every day for months, perhaps years, basically waiting for their generic world to catch up to them.  Their furniture is Ikea, their home renovations are Home Depot, their toilet paper is Costco and their gadgets are Future Shop.  When the bakery and the drugstore close, they play “ain’t it awful,” but it never occurs to them that they are the ones who don’t buy doughnuts or have their prescriptions filled.  And as every new Brooke and Meghan move into the neighbourhood, the problem accelerates.  Local merchants can’t pay their ever-expanding rents or taxes on an ever-decreasing customer base, and the developers pick them off, one by one.  At this point, Brooke and Meghan discover the new Starbucks or whatever and start actually hanging around, meanwhile, telling everybody they and their neighbourhood (it’s become their neighbourhood now) are uber-cool.  More people move in; more people move out.  Years pass, life goes on and the city digests the remnants of what was once a nice, vibrant place to live.  More corporations; less local ownership. Civic officials shake their heads and wonder what the hell went wrong.  They consult city planners and urban geographers to see how to artificially create socially and economically mixed neighbourhoods.  They fail.

 Just a bit of advice: if anybody calls your neighbourhood “funky,” run!  It’s a trap.

*Brooke and Meghan’s names have been changed to protect the guilty.