Being a Good Guest in Someone Else’s Neighborhood
Picture a woman named Beatriz who runs a small cafe on the street where she grew up. Six years ago, newcomers from abroad began renting the apartments upstairs, and she was glad. They were curious, they tipped well, and they asked about her grandmother’s recipes.
She printed a menu in English. She learned the words for oat milk. When a few of them asked whether the cafe could stay open later in the evening, she tried it for a month.
Then the street began to change. The rent on her building doubled. Three of her oldest customers, neighbors for forty years, moved to the edge of the city. A group of newcomers asked the council to end the street’s annual festival at ten o’clock. The festival is seventy years old, and it runs until the music stops.
Beatriz does not hate any of them. When one newcomer asks why she looks tired, she says something she had not planned to say. I am tired of explaining my own street.
Then Hana arrives. Hana rents a flat above the bakery, and in her first week she asks the baker a question: what should I know about this street? The baker takes ten minutes to answer, and Hana writes it down.
Hana learns two hundred words in her first four months and makes mistakes in most of them. She goes to the festival and stays until the music stops. In November she brings a dish from her own country to the neighborhood party and says, this is how we eat it, and I would love to learn how you do. She asks Beatriz for her grandmother’s recipe, and Beatriz, to her own surprise, writes it out by hand.
A second newcomer, Gregory, lives two doors down. He is a kind man and a lonely one. He shops where the labels are in English, he eats with other newcomers, and he asks his neighbors to speak English and to lower the music after ten. He is not a villain. The easy road, for anyone, is to rebuild home: the same food, the same friends, the same rules. It is comfortable, and the neighbors pay part of the cost.
Hana and Gregory carry the same kind of passport and have about the same money. The difference is a question. One asks what should I know here. The other expects the street to know what he needs.
Gentrification is a large and complicated subject, and one person cannot fix it. Rents rise when many people with more money arrive, whatever each one intends. What one person can shape is how they behave on their own street.
For myself, I do not want to move to a place unless I am ready to become a little more like the people who live there, and I do not expect them to become more like me. That is a rule for me. Other people may weigh it differently, and I am still learning it.
Has anyone ever asked you to change something you love about your home? However that felt, it may be close to how a neighborhood feels when newcomers do not ask first.
Being flexible still leaves room for who you are. Hana keeps her holidays and shares them. She adds a dish to the table and leaves the rest where it was.
Everyone finds a tribe in a new place. For some it takes a week, and for others two years. It might be a choir, a table-tennis club, a church, a volunteer group, a language class or the people at the bakery. Some take longer to find than others. A tribe may include other newcomers, which is good, as long as it is not the only one.
You could begin in your first week by asking, what should I know about this street? You could learn fifty words before you land and a hundred more in the first year. You could go to the local celebration and stay until it ends. You could bring something from your own culture to share, and not to replace.
What did a neighbor teach you about being a guest? Tell us in the comments. Someone reading may be about to ask their street the first question.
Tell us in the comments