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Well, there goes the neighborhood.

I really do enjoy life here in this Lakewood, Ohio, this plot of land where I have hung my hat for nearly three years now. In fact within weeks of moving in I was cheerfully confessing to having become a Lakewood Snob; this is my own term, and I don’t think most of the area conceives of any snobbishness on the part of our community. But I certainly feel that there is cause.

This is what a comfortable, livable urban existence “for the rest of us” should be. Some claim that Lakewood is the most densely-populated city between New York and Chicago; I don’t know about that but I would say it’s certainly density done right. A population right around that of Ames including the schoolyear student population, in a compact 5.6 square mile lozenge-shaped parcel carved out of Cleveland’s west side.

Lakewood is density without feeling of crowding, other than say a popular eatery like Melt around mealtimes. Lakewood puts the lie to sprawl-dwelling reactionary fears that density must mean high-rise towers and feeling packed-in like sardines; in fact I think most of us here own a car and it’s easy to get around that way, probably in part because it isn’t necessary and many of us leave the car at home for errands within the city. You can walk most places because the city is compact, and the city can support so many services and amenities in such a small space because of population density, which is achieved without tower blocks through the simple expedient of using most of the available space.

Instead of acres of sprawled-out “R1″ ranch homes, most of Lakewood’s housing is two or three stories. Lots of the houses are duplexes, which means residential streets feel inhabited rather than feeling like vast, empty plains between widely-spaced bunkers. Much of the commercial real estate includes one or two stories of housing above, like my apartment.

It’s just right, here; there’s a sense of life but you hardly have to dodge and weave to walk down the sidewalk; you can easily dash across the street and better still you have places to walk to. This isn’t the Garden of Eden certainly, and I recognize that to some extent Lakewood is supported by “externalities” of a sort; I can’t do all my shopping here and I assume that we’re a net exporter of employees during business hours. Still, this place really seems like it should be a model for smart development.

Plus, all this is affordable, and comes with local character. (Now how much would you pay?) Lakewood is packed with locally-owned bars and restaurants; I even did a cartographic guide to the bars once. Meanwhile, fast-food chains and big-box stores are almost unknown. The biggest “big box” is a supermarket and there’s really just no room for a walmart or home despot, etc.; there are a few chain establishments like a Schlubway and a Domino’s and a Dunkin’ Donuts, but aside from one Taco Bell the only big-league standalone drive-thru greasepits are banished to the fringes of the city and completely absent from “mainstream life” in Lakewood. (Cue ominous piano chords.) That is, for now…

This morning, I got up, stumbled around through the usual re-orientation to consciousness, pulled up teh intarweb and read with dismay of the “potential McDonald’s move to Detroit Theatre property.” Sacre bleu!

Oh the ignominy. When the theater closed several weeks ago, I wasn’t really concerned since it had always looked kind of shabby and I go to a movie theater at most once every two or three years anyway. Had I known, though… the Detroit Theatre is hardly “paradise,” but on the other hand “a parking lot” would be far less demoralizing than a McDonald’s.

Oh dear. No more easily-forgotten outposts in the provinces for McDonald’s Lakewood, now they’ve determined to settle for nothing less than prime real estate, to plant their flag right in the middle of the city’s major commercial thoroughfare. I rarely even see the other Golden Arch locations, and could overlook Taco Bell as the exception that proved the rule, but this development will clearly sweep away all those cherished illusions and put an end to the dream of locally-owned progressive-economy exceptionalism.

It would seem that we are not only to be assimilated, but must know that we have been. Sigh.

Bless the concerned do-gooders of Lakewood who organized a “community forum” yesterday (I guess I should check the Lakewood section of cleveland.com more than once a month), though it seems that their “concerns” will ultimately prove irrelevant. “City administrators made it clear that the site is privately owned, has been for sale for years and is zoned for commercial use. They also made it clear that if McDonald’s wants the property, they can not prevent them from acquiring it.”

And even if some sort of rearguard could “save the Detroit Theatre” (and I’m sure that signs in support of this cause will begin appearing soon alongside “Save St. Pat’s” and other such examples of front-yard-activism), if Mickey-Dee’s is really determined to expand into the center of Lakewood I expect they can find a space somewhere. I hate to pooh-pooh local community activism and don’t really want to see McDonald’s on a daily basis, myself, but I have a feeling that resistance is futile.

Moreover, to be honest, I’m a little uncomfortable with the aim of such resistance given that it seems to be little more than snobbish, even “elitist” NIMBY-ism. People can kvetch about “traffic” or “litter,” but I don’t think that’s the issue here; “property values” may get closer to the truth and I think even it’s of dubious legitimacy, but I suspect that a lot of “concerned citizens” simply don’t want McDonald’s “spoiling” Lakewood. That’s my own feeling, and it could be that I’m projecting. But it isn’t as though such phenomena are rare.

I read the San Francisco Chronicle, after all, so I’m quite familiar with Californian nose-wrinkling at the approach of large, national chain businesses. I also remember regular outbreaks of reactionary suburban NIMBY-ism back in Des Moines.

And when it comes to McDonald’s, in particular, I also can’t help recalling an instance of embarrassing liberal-elitist whining from my Des Moines years and almost literally right in my own backyard. Longtime SB fellow-travelers may recall Ed Fallon, the progressive challenger defeated by Chet Culver. When I lived in Central Des Moines, he was my statehouse rep, and I loved the guy. Liberal, earnest, generally down-to-earth; you’ve got to love someone who organizes a frisbee golf tournament as a fundraiser.

But even I winced at a newsletter in which Ed bemoaned the arrival of a new McDonald’s franchise in our mostly low-income, minority neighborhood. As I recall Ed mainly restricted his complaints to relatively “legitimate” targets like litter and that trademark vegetable-grease smell. But I’m pretty sure his reaction was in fact driven largely by a real-life liberal-elitist perspective, offended by the encroachment of cookie-cutter corporate junk-food into his bohemian neighborhood.

Because it seemed like he was determinedly ignoring the obvious question of just who was carrying all of those discarded paper cartons and wrappers out of the place, who was keeping the brand-new McDonald’s busy, as I recall, 24 hours a day? Who was, in fact, apparently delighted at the arrival of McDonald’s?

It seemed then and seems now, to me, that the equally-obvious answer could only be his own constituents. This was a relatively poor, unfashionable residential neighborhood in central Des Moines, remember; I’m pretty sure that “outside” traffic would have accounted for only a small part of the restaurant’s business. And certainly litter on the sidewalks would, logically, have been the result of frequent, local, foot-traffic.

Perhaps I verge on stereotyping, but aside from my intuition the evidence alone would seem to suggest that the very people Ed Fallon was supposed to represent were, in fact, thrilled with the availability of low-priced “convenience food” within walking distance. Perhaps even-more thrilled than were the residents of my hometown, who waited in a seemingly-ridiculous line to partake in the presumably much-welcomed arrival of McDonald’s in Anamosa a couple years ago.

I’m sorry, Ed, and I find it rather unfortunate too, but the fact is that there’s a McDonald’s damn-near everywhere because people damn-near everywhere genuinely desire their awful garbage-food, and choose to spend money on it and to go back and keep going back again and again.

So, who are we, of more-easily-offended tastes and stomachs, to impose our preferences on everyone else? You can make pieces of a true, public-interest, argument against some elements of McDonald’s, I suppose. But that’s really an argument against changing McDonald’s as a whole system; it’s not an argument for keeping a particular McDonald’s out of a particular neighborhood.

Especially when that neighborhood, like Lakewood, is already jam-packed with businesses serving up not only greasy, fried food, and caffeine, but alcohol as well; I love Lakewood’s bars, but in fairness to McDonald’s it’s very probably a lesser threat on the poison-vending scale than many of this fine city’s beloved local establishments.

Which, in a putatively-free country of equality before the law, seems to leave awfully-little justification for trying to block McDonald’s from Lakewood just because one thinks it ruins our image. About all a city can really do is placate the community ego with various building and sign requirements, like the contrasting city of Hudson which in my opinion just ends up looking petty and stupid; McDonald’s with a wooden sign is still McDonald’s.

The addition of McDonald’s presence to my daily life, however, is still a bummer, no glossing over it. But then, much of what’s happening at any given moment in this nation, and on this planet, is a bummer. All that most of us can do is keep trying to carve out spaces, physical and figurative, where the evil and the oppression and the repellant are held at bay, for a little while longer. Which, disappointingly for the community-minded, often means smaller and more personal spaces because shared spaces are shared with many people of different tastes and values, who have their rights however lamentable those tastes and values may be.