Krunchy kitsch

The mythical and horrific "Stepford", or the "Village of the Damned", or "The Colony" (http://tinyurl.com/2we635) could happen, depending on the number of control freaks in the neighbourhood "Association".

In our area (northeast US), one can buy a condo and then be fined $25 per instance if one's cat or dog escapes out the front door without a leash and a muzzle.

I think villages no newer than 800 years old are fine.

Naturalmom, your perception is indeed quite like my own. It seems to me that the governance of such a utopian creation as the neo-village (good word coinage, Naturalmom!) under discussion would have several serious problems from the outset, given human nature in our times.

The "distributism" of G. K. Chesterton, where everyone lived and worked together in a close society that was wholly cooperative rather than competitive, was a fine dream, wasn't it?

But this idealised little bit of heaven on earth--the "neo-village" that, if we had the money, we could buy into, I think would be doomed from the outset, merely from an economic standpoint as property values fluctuate and "trends" dictate tastes.

On top of that, the 800-year-old villages had firm standards of morality, religion and cooperation that "manufactured communities" of today simply don't have. The "Levittowns" that were built in NY and PA look pretty shabby nowadays, but they were "absolutely adorable" when they were new, weren't they? Ditto the high-rise housing projects that looked so fine when first built, that degenerated into drug-ridden ghettoes.

Good luck to anyone who is able to stay in the "neo-village" for as long as our family has managed to stay in a tiny house we bought new in 1942, on a street that is quiet because nobody speaks to anybody else. Our street is pretty--we take care of our property--but we wouldn't dare go next door to borrow a cup of sugar. I could drop dead in this house and nobody'd know I was dead till the buzzards began circling in the sky overhead. When we first moved into our new house (I was 4 years old), it took my mother five solid years to get to know the next-door neighbours! My mother was a friendly person, but people were "just too busy" to say even a kind Hello.

Now that I'm old, I am sorry to have to admit that I've grown fond of the privacy, which is now further protected by locked doors, tight windows and a burglar alarm. But if I want to plant a bush in the garden, I don't have to get the approval of "The Committee"! And the folks next door won't criticise my bush to my face. I couldn't pull that off in Quaintsyville.

Mary

Um. Carmel "works" if you don't mind that it has a terminal case of thinking well of itself, and a REALLY terminal case of the "cutes." (This is where Thomas Kinkade really IS from!)

Carmel, rather than being a functional community in a crunchy-con sense, is nothing more than a tourist haven. Carmel grows no food, manufactures no widgets, and its main street is mostly hyper-expensive chain stores interspersed with "art" galleries, all aimed at outsiders. Oh, and residences there are astronomically expensive, further ensuring that no lower-class or working-class person will ever live there.

This isn't all that far removed from "Celebration," the Florida town devised by the Disney company several years ago.

And the concept itself hearkens back to an even earlier Disney project, Main Street U.S.A., visited by tens of millions at Disney World and Disneyland.

As entertainment, it's swell. But as a way of life? It's a candy-coated nostalgia for something that never was.