I found myself wondering that on a recent Saturday afternoon as I contemplated attending a block party in my San Gabriel Valley neighborhood. It would be the first such party on our street since we bought a home there in 2011. I had had nothing to do with preparations—I’d been traveling a lot—and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

We’d been happily living there for eight years, and hadn’t had any problems with neighbors, even though we didn’t know them particularly well. And I had learned, from visiting neighborhoods around our state, how quickly relations can sour between people in this era of anger and accusation. As the party approached, and I took a look at a long list of undone household chores, I began plotting the excuses I could use to convince my wife to let me skip it.

My reluctance is very Californian: Polls show that most of us love our neighborhoods, but we are less sure about our neighbors. While recent surveys suggest that our levels of civic engagement are rising, more extensive studies have shown us lagging behind the rest of the country in neighborliness. Californians are less likely than other Americans to work with our neighbors to improve the community, to exchange favors with our neighbors, or to belong to community groups.

Theories for this abound, from our state’s huge size and diversity (our lack of neighborliness is in line with results from Florida, Texas and New York) to our long commutes (which keep us away from our homes). Another possibility is that our local governments discourage engagement in various ways, because they regard close neighbors as potential NIMBYs—more likely to band together to oppose projects than folks who don’t know one another.

Another factor is California’s high poverty rate. Just 39 percent of low-income Californians reported in the Advancing Wellness Poll from the California Wellness Foundation that their neighbors take an active interest in their community. Among rich Californians, the percentage who saw their neighbors as active was 65 percent.

I’m a pretty good example of the many reasons we fail to engage with our neighbors. My job is time-consuming and can require work at all hours, so when I’m actually home, I’d rather sleep, cook, or watch Netflix than work on a community project. When I do engage locally—volunteering at school or coaching Little League—my real agenda is spending time with my three kids.

And I am desperate to avoid local politics, because I know, from traveling around California, that our most bitter fights pit neighbor against neighbor over housing, homelessness, traffic, and development. It’s much safer to write about such things than to participate in them. And if you get crosswise with your neighbors in California, it’s hard to escape them; between the high housing prices and Prop 13 protections for longtime owners, people here are less likely to sell their homes and move away.

For all these reasons, I kept my distance when a woman and two children from Canada recently moved into the place across the street. She seemed too eager to engage, too quickly. No sooner had she suffered a bike theft than she began contacting neighbors to document other property crimes on our block. I unsuccessfully tried to talk my wife out of going to a meeting at the Canadian’s house to discuss starting a neighborhood watch. Property crimes, I reasoned, are just the price of living in the middle of Los Angeles County.

But a neighborhood watch was formed without me, and its first project was a block party. Block parties are a World War I-era invention that became popular in the U.S. in the 1970s. They’ve never been as common in Southern California as they are in Chicago or New York, though. For one thing, we’re reluctant to stop traffic for something as small as neighborliness.

The Canadian came to the door to get our signatures in support of the block party—it’s required to get city permission to close down the street to traffic, and to set up lights, since our party would be in the evening. We agreed to bring brownies, even though our neighbor kept calling me Dave, which was vaguely annoying. Or was she flattering my musical ability—did she think I’m Dave Matthews?

On the appointed Saturday, I was still inside our house, contemplating whether to go out, when two of my boys noticed that the street was now a car-free playground, and raced outside on their scooters, with me in pursuit.

We confronted a considerable tableau. The neighbors on either side of our house—the two people who I knew well enough to have been inside their homes—were out grilling hamburgers, hot dogs and desserts. A third neighbor had set up a full bar.

And it seemed like everyone else in the neighborhood was already out on the street. There were kids playing ball and cornhole, and drawing with chalk on the sidewalk. An elderly woman, who I’d never seen before on the street, showed up in her wheelchair.

I recognized almost every face, but most of the names were new. People were eager to share their stories. I discovered that I knew many of the neighbors from other contexts—Little League, the Y, or the Mandarin immersion program at the boys’ elementary school—without realizing they lived on the street. A woman whom I serve on a school committee with lives just up the block.

My neighbors filled me in on the local history. I learned all about the Greek American man who had owned our own home from 1945 to 2011, when he died at age 102. And my neighbors also talked through the history of their own homes. Many houses on our block had stayed in the same families for a couple of generations; no one wants to sell, because here in the heart of greater Los Angeles, no one could ever afford to buy back in.

My neighbors are a diverse group—in race, ethnicity, age, and occupation. What we had in common, in this slice of upper-middle-class Southern California, was higher education. By my account, more than half the residences had at least one person with a UCLA degree.

Old-timers told me there hadn’t been a block party since 2001. That one was held right after 9/11, as a way to calm fears. Several people said that we should have a gathering every year.

After four hours, it was dark and a little cold, but most of the neighborhood was still on the street. I excused myself to put the kids to bed. But I didn’t want to leave.

The post Our Block Party Wasn’t as Bad as I Feared appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

New York-based photographer Gail Albert-Halaban recently spent a year exploring that question in Paris, peering from one building into another to capture intimate moments: a girl practicing her clarinet, a woman with a cat in her lap, a man reading a book.

You may feel like a voyeur looking at these photographs—some of which are currently on view in “Paris Views” at the Kopeikin Gallery in Culver City—but these images are not only staged and shot with a normal focal-length lens, they’re a collaboration among Albert-Halaban and the people on both sides of the view. The people loaning their homes for the shoot described what they saw and imagined to their neighbors across the street—and the neighbors talked about what their lives were actually like. Collectively, both sides came up with a plan for a photo: what time of day it would be taken and what it would depict. In the process, new relationships formed, which was a key part of the project.

“It used to be, we’d go to the corner store or deli and meet our neighbors, but now we live in a world that’s so mediated by computer screens,” says Albert-Halaban. This project is all “about having face-to-face contact with our neighbors, so instead of just watching and judging them, we can become brothers and sisters.”

The Paris photos weren’t her first foray into window photography. She previously spent six years taking similar photographs in New York City, mostly in her Chelsea neighborhood. For this “Out the Window” series, friends and acquaintances would tip her off to a compelling view, and she’d write to the subjects to explain the project and ask to set up a meeting. Most people were interested and willing to participate.

It was a little trickier in Paris, where people tended to be shy about letting a photographer into their home. But with the help of Cathy Remy, the photo editor of M, the magazine section of Le Monde, Albert-Halaban took 10 photos in October 2012—all of which appeared in the next month’s edition of M. The final project, now collected in a book called Gail Albert Halaban: Vis à Vis (Editions De La Martinere, 2014), includes 70 photographs taken between 2012 and 2013. Aperture published the English version, Paris Views.

One photograph shows a mother standing in front of her child’s crib. At first, the woman said she was too busy to be photographed. But once she agreed to meet, Albert-Halaban found they had a lot in common. “I saw her messy child’s room and it was just like my messy child’s room,” Albert-Halaban says. “She’s a working mom who’s always multitasking.” The mother—who revealed that she and the father of her child were once neighbors who watched each other through their windows—is now a good friend of Albert-Halaban’s.

These interactions made Paris feel like home for Albert-Halaban. In her own “quirky” building in Chelsea, all the people know each other. There’s a mystery writer on the fifth floor, a painter on the seventh floor, and a person who makes honey. Their relationships were strengthened by Hurricane Sandy, which hit the day after Halaban-Albert flew to Paris in 2012. Though she missed the disaster, she heard from friends and family back in New York City about the important role that neighbors played for one another. “My apartment had electricity and became the place where people hung out. … People really became friends.”

Looking ahead, Halaban-Albert is planning to take her project global. So far, she’s hit Utrecht, Holland, and Istanbul, Turkey. The gifts she brings to each meeting of the neighbors may differ—in Paris, it was wine; in Holland, chocolate—but the rewards are similar everywhere.

“I truly believe that if, instead of just watching each other, we actually met and engaged with our neighbors, we’d be much better neighbors,” she says. “We’d have a much stronger community.”

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