Playborhood, by Mike Lanza, describes a related endeavor to transform one's yard into an inviting area for neighborhood kids. My wife and I have been discussing this quite a lot lately. How do we bring back neighborhood play so kids can get outside, meet each other, and just be kids?
That sounds fantastic, unfortunately I'd worry about the financial liability.
Even using age appropriate play equipment and a soft-fall surface, you'd likely still wind up getting sued if a kid broke an arm or worse.
Some quick Googling suggests you'd need to have the playground owned by an LLC and get it "commercial business insurance" specifically commercial playground insurance.
The problem with that is that you likely aren't zoned for commercial, so running a "commercial" (even free) playground from a residential property is unlawful.
And you can put up an "at your own risk" sign but given attractive nuisance doctrine it likely wouldn't protect you from full liability.
Then on top of that, if the playground was too popular, or some of the kids caused issues near by neighbours likely would complain.
I know I sound like a complete grinch. I think it is a fantastic idea. Just the more I consider it, the more issues and expenses crop up.
This comment is a grim reflection on the downfall of western civilization. I don't think society can recover from this level of evil bureaucracy that seems to have taken root.
Yeh. Here in Dublin, even in my inner city area which occasionally has some traffic. Parents just put out traffic cones reminding people to slow down. Small goalposts, chalk drawings on the road, skipping ropes come out as soon as the sun does.
This is solved by making friends with all your neighbors and your kids' friends' parents-- Then, when they do something bad, you ban only their kids from your yard (e.g. they can't play with their friends), and tell the neighborhood parents that someone is threatening the free communal play area
Public infrastructure and services are important responsibilities of local government. We should not be relying on people to offer up their homes as parks - let’s build some damn parks. Then the cost, liability, maintenance burdens can be appropriately shared.
Growing up in the suburbs my experience was there were very few children my age near me. Seems counter-intuitive since people move to the suburbs to have children, but I wasn't in a dense enough area apparently.
Imagine a forest with only young trees - that only happens if they all die young, or if the forest is growing back after a forest fire/clear-cutting. Similarly, the suburban "dream" is only realistic in new (empty) developments where families can move in and cluster together.
"Dream" is just doublespeak here... it's post-WW2 lifestyle advertising. They were convincing people to buy cheap remote land at a steep markup by putting a house on top.
Kids need kids their age. 3 years is a big enough difference until you are close to an adult. Between those who don't have kids yet, those who's kids are already grown, and those who kids are the wrong age because families are so small there just are not a lot of kids in the neighborhood anymore.
My kids play with the neighbor kids. They run up and down a whole bunch of contiguous backyards and ride bikes in the front. Everybody plays with everybody else's stuff. I wish I could share the secret to making that happen, but it just happened on its own. The kids decided to play with each other.
