Hi! Today's story is by Amanda Patchin. It's the first in a new series about Boise's neighborhoods. You can tell us about your neighborhood here, if you want. Thanks for reading!

In 2005 my now husband and I were house hunting. We wanted to buy a small home (all we could afford) and we wanted to be near BSU, where Jared was finishing up his bachelor’s degree and where I was about to start graduate school. Young, naive, and living in those heady days before the first big housing boom, we were tired of looking after just two weeks and three houses. We needed to figure something out because we were getting married in a few months and had no place to move in together.

The third house we found for sale was small, older, and well-lived in. The seller had lived there for fifteen years and she seemed more than happy to consider selling it to a young couple, just starting out. She accepted our offer; IHA’s first time homebuyer’s program allowed us to get a 100% mortgage with a reasonable rate and we happily started working on it in the weeks before our wedding.

We tore out the smoky brown shag carpet, painted most of the walls and began strategizing how to revitalize the non-existent landscaping. Our original plan had been to live there for the first few years of our marriage and then either sell it or rent it out to college students. But the longer we were there, the more we wanted to stay.

Our house was small, true, but the lot was large and well shaded by its own trees and by those of our neighbors. When our boys were born a couple years later we found that Manitou Park, just three blocks away, was a lifesaver for parents of toddlers. When we got a dog, we were delighted by the park’s off-leash dog hours, and as we made minor updates to the house and lawn, we loved our little space more and more.

It’s now been just over 16 years and we couldn’t be happier with our luck: settling in a lovely neighborhood with a rich sense of community almost by accident and then growing to appreciate its character and history. And, it turns out, we ended up living just one mile from where my parents lived when I was born which makes the whole thing feel half serendipitous and half inevitable.

Our house was built in 1920 and the builder’s descendants still live in the house next door to us. A few other houses in the neighborhood were built around ten years earlier and many others were added in waves in the fifties, the eighties, and in the last 20 years.

From a farm on the edge of Boise, to one of the city’s interior neighborhoods, South Boise Village is a unique and beautiful place.

Boise State’s indoor tennis courts and soccer fields sit at the west end, while Sonic Drive-in, an Idaho Youth Ranch Thrift Shop, a dentist’s office, Les Schwab, and an Urgent care center line Broadway Avenue along the east side.

Huge elms, oaks, and cottonwoods shade every street while the bench looms to the west providing shelter from the valley’s winds. Those shade trees make gardening in our neighborhood a matter of strategically finding the one unshaded spot in your yard, but the microclimate created by the hulking protection of the bench and by the trees’ shade means that you can plant earlier and harvest longer than up on the more exposed plains that stretch west and south.

South Boise “Village” – the name conjures up a small rural town, the kind of place where the old ladies know everyone’s business and the community is self-contained except for major purchases or sophisticated entertainments. “Village” evokes coziness, familiarity, and tradition. Unfortunately, as for subdivisions named “Tuscany” or “Camelot”, the name conjures a vision it cannot quite satisfy, although South Boise Village is a true neighborhood.

Villages are old and simple, have stores, pubs, and shops to serve immediate gastronomic and social needs, and they carry the weight of history in founding families and generations of tradition. However, zoning laws tend to limit the ways neighborhoods can cultivate village life in the middle of the city, but our little neighborhood, south of BSU, with easy access to the freeway and to downtown, manages to come closer than most.

The strict boundaries of South Boise Village only include one restaurant, although there are many more within easy biking distance. Addie’s Restaurant sits on the corner of Boise and Euclid Avenues and serves delicious cafe food. Formerly a downtown restaurant on Main Street, Addies moved into the space that housed Boise’s very first Mexican food destination: La Fiesta. Between the closing of La Fiesta in the early 2000s and Addie’s takeover in 2018, a series of other eateries tried to make the spot work for them. One restaurant, and one without a nightlife, can’t serve a village’s needs all alone.

To enjoy an evening beer, SBV residents need to get on their bikes and venture down Broadway, or the Greenbelt to enjoy Flying Pie, Jalapeno's, Bown Crossing, or downtown’s many options. Albertson’s on Broadway is the nearest grocery option and since its remodel is almost an entire village in its own right.

Also outside the strict boundaries of the neighborhood, but feeling a part of it, is the historic Rosedale Odd Fellows Temple on Broadway. The Odd Fellows are a fraternal order, like the Shriners, the Rotary Club, or the Freemasons. The meeting space that the Rosedale club built in 1908 still stands on Broadway where it houses a few business, including the hilariously named Knucklehead Barbershop. Along with the lovely older homes that dot the area, this beautiful old building gives the area a sense of history and stability. Designed by Tourtellotte & Co. – the same architect firm that did the Capitol, St. John’s Cathedral, and dozens of other beauties across Idaho and in Portland Oregon – the Odd Fellows Temple is constructed of cast concrete in a unique stepped gable facade. This facade earned the Temple a place on the National Historic Register, and that historicity seems to call for some renewal of community focus in its location. If the Odd Fellows don’t meet there anymore, perhaps the neighborhood eccentrics should form a club.

With subdivisions sprawling out across the old farmland West and South of downtown, a true neighborhood feels special for the character that can develop. Without a Homeowners Association or Historic District to restrict grass height, paint colors, or shrubberies, a neighborhood can grow a bit of individuality. Sometimes “character” is frightening, especially for people concerned about their property values, and yet, the sense of place that can develop when humans are free to choose their own house colors, the degree of manicure they want in their lawns, and which weird or wonderful plants they want to grow, is worth more, to me, than a sense of security around property valuations.

Of course one of the best things about our neighborhood is the kind of thing that is possible anywhere so long as people stay in one place long enough to connect with others. Living in one place for more than a decade, surrounded by people who are also staying put, we have developed friendships with many of our neighbors. Time, more than similarity, seems the best way of forming these kinds of connections. Having a lot in common with someone feels like the more important correspondence, but simply staying in one spot and getting to know the quirks, the needs, and the abilities of the people around you just because they happen to be there with you broadens the mind and emotions admirably. One comes to appreciate what is, simply because it is.

I tend to think of the tall trees, the varied architecture, the lush greenness of Manitou Park, or the easy accessibility of downtown when I think about loving my neighborhood. But when my husband and I chose to buy our home, we weren’t choosing those things. We needed a place to live, we found a house we could afford in what seemed to our naive minds a “good” spot although “good” was undefined. It was as we lived there, worked on our house together, borrowed tools from one neighbor, babysat for another, walked up and down and up and down the streets, that we came to love it for what it was.

My sons formed friendships with children living near us, but, of course, neither my sons nor those neighbor kids had even been born when we chose this spot. I love individual trees throughout the neighborhood but I could have loved others in other places if I had gotten to know them. The dog off-leash hours at the Park were marvelously helpful when our mutt Rudy was a puppy, but other parks have similar rules and so it was just being at Manitou Park that gave me my deep affection for it.

The “Village” in our neighborhood’s name is very much a signifier of what a neighborhood hopes to create through its association and its events and those things definitely matter for how well a place comes together. Just as significant, though, is the way people engage with a neighborhood. It is very easy to want to create the perfect community through rules, control, or selection. My experience has been one of growing to believe I am already in the perfect neighborhood and that I couldn’t have created it if I tried. Some of that is mere luck – South Boise Village is wonderful – but some of that is the transformation that attention brings.

I love my neighborhood, not least because it was already mine before I thought about how I felt about it.

With love from Boise,

-Amanda Patchin