Kid Safe Neighborhoods

What do your children need from their neighborhood to grow up healthy and strong? How do children like to play? What kind of a neighborhood would make children feel nurtured, comfortable and safe? Bigelow Homes has conducted extensive research to determine what factors contribute to a child's sense of safety, his need for creative exploration, his social development and his connections to his larger environment.

In HomeTown, you will find a neighborhood unlike any other in the Chicagoland area, one that actually fosters a child's growing sense of independence, while simultaneously providing a safer, more nurturing place to grow.

The outdoor area immediately surrounding the home is the space most important to small children. Children under 5 feel safer if they can see their front door and they like to play within 30 feet of the door. Children develop interpersonal skills when they can play freely with other children while parents only passively observe. Little ones develop motor skills and satisfy their inquisitiveness when they can briefly venture a short distance from the home without always relying on adults. A porch with a railing or a garden patio with landscaping provide an intimate outdoor "room" for imaginative play right near the door. Toddlers love to walk up and down steps and pre-schoolers love to sit on steps.

HomeTown's Living Courts provide just such a child-scaled environment. With homes nestled all around them, the Living Courts function like a private front yard for all the homes, completely removed from automobile traffic. Useful only to the neighbors who live along them, Living Courts are unlikely to have strangers or visitors passing through, and any who do come through will be noticed by neighbors.

Young children thrive along a Living Court. Each home has a garden patio or porch on the front of the house, which provides a comfortable "safe zone" for the child. The sidewalk through each Living Court provides a more adventurous space for tricycle riders, while still keeping them in sight of home. Living Courts are defined by landscaped gateways near the street, which give parents and children a natural barrier to further adventure, as in "You may ride your Big Wheel to the trellis and back, but don't go any farther."

Those barriers transform the entire Living Court into a playground. Children prefer hard surfaces such as concrete walks and patios, to grass for 65 to 80 percent of their play. HomeTown's patios, porches and oversized "widewalks" meet these needs. These wide sidewalks function like streets for kids. They are wide enough for two tricycles or Big Wheels to pass.

There is further research that points to the importance of these outdoor spaces. If children don't play enough with other children during the first five years of life, there is a greater chance that they will have some sort of mental illness later in life. (Alexander: Pattern Language) If informal neighborhood contacts are vital to young children, then they need a neighborhood that encourages those contacts. Children need some safe, common land, easily accessed from the child's own home, on which they can meet other children of similar ages.

As children grow older, they need safe ways in which to explore the larger world. They need the opportunity to venture beyond the home while still feeling safe, and parents need to feel assured that the child's environment will continue to protect him beyond the lot lines of his home.

In HomeTown, the entire neighborhood is child-friendly. For instance, our Neighborhood Parks are in central locations and are faced by homes with bay windows and front porches, creating "many eyes on the park."

Our streets have been carefully designed to slow traffic and increase pedestrian safety. Our traffic-calming devices like raised pedestrian crossings and tight corner turns make the neighborhood function like a school zone. You'll find that cars moving through HomeTown can only comfortably travel at 15 to 20 miles per hour.

HomeTown's child-centered design extends even to the houses themselves. For instance, the best floor plans for children have two features:

• A track on the first floor, that is, a loop that kids can run around as if it were a running track, from the kitchen to the family room to the living room to the foyer and back to the kitchen. Little children need to run, and much of the year the only place they can do it is indoors.
• A large kitchen open to a dining and living area so that kids can be within eyesight of mom without being underfoot. Small children have a strong need to be able to see mom while playing independently.
• From Day One, HomeTown has been designed for kids. When you visit, you will see for yourself why we say, "In HomeTown, kids rule!"