I’m currently sitting in my apartment, where it is warm, humid and half-way packed up. It’s been exactly a year (plus a few days) since I moved in, and the weather is remarkably the same. I guess living in the midwest has turned me into some sort of weather obsessive, but after this winter, all I want to do is comment on how warm and pleasant it suddenly is.

Ben and I spent memorial weekend gardening, picnicking on Belle Isle, BBQ’ing with his neighbors, and driving around. Despite my own personal distaste for driving, Detroit really is a city best seen by car. Luckily, Ben is happy to drive us (and battle I-75 traffic!) around Detroit and her suburbs, while I stare out the windows and we discuss the various emotional and sociological messages the passing architecture tells us. This weekend, we went on lots of walks and drives, trying to divine the importance of place, neighborhood, and community from the houses around us. The craftsmen bungalows and GI houses of Ferndale were in marked contrast to the brick and stone mansions of University District; the brick duplexes of Jefferson Chalmers (in various states of decay and order) whispered stories worlds apart from their 1920′s story-book cottages a block over in Grosse Pointe. I’ve been known to get emotional on these neighborhood tours, from skipping down Ferndale’s long blocks, to crying at gas stations on the East Side.

I would guess that many people have had some emotional reaction to architecture, but mostly in grand, dramatic spaces. My mother, during a trip to Europe, dragged me to every cathedral she could find (which is IMPRESSIVE), and in each space she gasped and awed over the flying buttresses, arches, and vaulted ceilings. When she and I drove up and down Woodward a year ago, she gasped and awed in the same way when we passed abandoned churches and synagogue. Cathedrals, churches, memorials, civic centers, etc., are all designed to be dramatic, gasp-worthy memorable. The walls, ceilings, ornamentation, all shout to be remembered and noted, and visitors hear that.

But there is something inherently different about the stance of domestic architecture. Some of the Tudors and Italianente mansions of University District, Sherwood Forest, Indian Village, are decidedly grand, memorable and different than the bungalows, duplexes, row homes and GI homes of Ferndale, the West Village, East English Village, Jefferson-Chalmers, and many other neighborhoods in and around Detroit. Those smaller homes, usually on narrow streets, lined with old, overgrown trees, are the ones cause me to cry. Each house– no matter the stage of care or upkeep– is so heavy with dreams, ideas, hopes, and possibilities. They have many messages; in Ferndale, the modest, four-square and cape cods, tightly squeezed together seem to smile and say, “we don’t have much, but we have each other!” The American Dream of working hard and having a decent life seems obtainable there, and like it always was and will be. Other neighborhoods in Detroit feel like they once felt this way. But whatever quality of life was once obtainable, isn’t any more. Depleted and deferred dreams line the sidewalks along with classic, turn of the century wood-frame homes and studier, brick duplexes, their porches shaded but empty.

How could that not drive me to tears? Its hard to be confronted with the inherent unfairness of it all. The same wood-frame home treated with love and care can be be a home to friendly backyard barbecues, bushes heavy with lilacs lining the sidewalk. That house could be in Jefferson Chalmers or in Ferndale (and there are plenty of manicured houses and gardens scattering Detroit neighborhoods). But without good company– an entire street of such hope– that home becomes a lone example, rather than the norm. Ben and I discovered some pretty forlorn and loveless streets in Ferndale too, so hopeful streets and homes isn’t so much a matter of place as it is community.

This recent New York Times piece on The Immigrant Advantage argues that community, belonging, and choice, create an environment for immigrant success in America that is inaccessible to native-born citizens. The elements of choice and community blend together to create a sort of hopeful mulch to create a belief that success is possible. Naturally, there is lots of hard work that must come after that belief to reach success, but first, it must seem possible.

Those hopeful possibilities envelope the cape cods, colonials, and california bungalows of Ferndale, creating an environment of success. It is so deeply, palatably unfair that that hopeful breeze does not blow equally over every street, every neighborhood, every town. That inequality is etched so deeply into the homes and streets in Detroit, that of course it brings me to tears, even after a lovely afternoon sunning myself on Belle Isle, in perfect company. How could it not?