There is a stretch of the northeast side where the sidewalks used to tell a story.
Kids on bikes, a man who waved from his porch every morning at 7:40, a woman who left tomatoes on a folding table with a hand-lettered sign that said "free." Then the fences went up.
Six-foot privacy panels, double-locked gates, cameras angled at the street.
It just happened, the way most things happen now — quietly, defensively, one household at a time making a reasonable decision that adds up to something unreasonable.
Ask people why and you get the same three answers.
A neighbor who "wasn't from around here" walking too slowly past a driveway.
Stack them together and you have a neighborhood that has decided, collectively but without ever saying so out loud, that the street is the enemy.
The fences don't just keep strangers out.
They keep the mail carrier from cutting through.
They keep the kid who used to return stray basketballs from knocking.
They turn a block into a row of private compounds, each one technically safe, all of them lonelier.
But it is instructive, because the change came fast enough to watch.
Ten years ago you could stand on a corner and know six people by name.
Now you can stand there for twenty minutes and not see a single person at all.
When every yard is fortified, the default assumption becomes that the person on the sidewalk is a threat until proven otherwise.
That's a way of living, and it corrodes everything it touches.
They stop watching each other's houses when someone's on vacation.
The irony is that the very thing people say they want — safety, community, a place where their kids can play — is the thing the fences make harder to get.
You can't lock in the feeling of being known.
Block parties with actual budgets. "Front yard" ordinances that discourage blank walls facing the street.
Small, unglamorous efforts to make the public part of the neighborhood feel public again.
But on the northeast side, the fences keep going up, and the sidewalks keep getting quieter, and somewhere a person is installing a camera to watch a street where there's no longer anyone left to wave at.
The question is whether we ever unlock them.
Opinion: A fence is a reasonable response to a real fear, and I won't pretend otherwise.
But when an entire neighborhood opts out of the street, it shouldn't surprise us that the street stops feeling like ours.
Final Thoughts
Safety bought at the price of knowing your neighbors is a bad trade, and we keep making it.