Open the book

This is going around, so I thought I'd play, too.

Here are the rules:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next four sentences on your blog, along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest!

The book by my computer monitor was The Search to Belong by Joe Myers, and the quote is:

Every planner and lender gradually learned the
rules. With the establishment of the General Housing Authority in the
mid-1930's, planning and lending practices standardized, eliminating many of the interesting quirks of the traditional city....

Beyond basic safety regulations, the justification for expanding codes was usually the protection of property values. The pessimistic view of society maintained that people had to be protected from one another. In residential ares, it was thought that, given the chance, some
people would immediately paint their houses hideous colors and find abandoned trailers to put in weed-filled front yards.

This is actually a quote from a book by Larry R. Ford called The Spaces Between Buildings. The quote comes from a chapter in Myer's book called "searching for a front porch" which examines how we have lost that middle space in our culture.

What I understand by this quote is that neighborhoods are designed with the focus of profitablity. I wonder what our neighborhoods would look like if building relationships were the focus. I'm guessing someone is doing that somewhere, but I don't know where.