Your Town Needs A Coffee Shop!
Coffee Matters
– September 13, 2009
Your Town Needs A Coffee Shop!
About the Author
David R. Dunham (Co-Founder) is a pastor, blogger, and avid fan of pop-culture. He has long been interested in the arts. He received honors for acting throughout high school and college, even being given a scholarship for musical theater to Youngstown State University. He is also an amateur musician, with one album, Get Well Soon, released in 2004. David has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and in Pre-Theology from Ohio University, and a Masters of Divinity from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He currently teaches English Composition at Shawnee State University and serves as a staff pastor at Christ's Community Church. David and his wife Krista have two children, and they currently live in Portsmouth, OH. 
Third Places are an interesting concept, but in my experience coffee shops rarely fulfill the stated requirements. Especially, “Hominess takes precedence over pretense.” Coffee shops tend to have a very precise kind of decór. The kind that you would expect them to have—i.e., pretense.
Still, they can be engaging places and the regulars and atmosphere can work toward a special sense of community that is (unnecessarily) missing from First Places.
As far as another fantastic option for such a place: pubs or taverns. The relaxed, festive atmosphere of such places can meet or exceed that of coffee shops. For a sample, check out Gaiman’s treatment in the “Inn at World’s End” stories in the latter half of his Sandman series.
When I lived in Louisville I had a particularly wonderful Third Place: Java Brewing Co. a very nice coffee shop up the road from my apartment where I would spend a fair amount of time playing chess with strangers, catching up with other regulars and enjoying good books. It was my home away from home in many senses, but you are right to point out Dane that it our Third Places should, to some degree, be our homes…or at least in the community of our family.
And in the level of hospitality with which we carry out our homes! When I was in high school and college, our home was open to others at all hours. We would come home and some friend or another would be asleep on our couch. Or washing off the beach sand in our shower. Or browsing our library.
Ours was a First Place and a Third Place. The sense of community between family and friends was palpable.
I’ve tried to keep that in mind now that I have a family. It’s a hard ideal to aim for (since I now value my privacy more and more as I get older and sleepier), but the fact that I lived in that kind of Place for a time reminds me that such hybrids can exist.
very interesting, Dane. I wonder if it’s harder to get people engaged in that kind of an environment these days at someone’s home. People just don’t go to one another’s homes like they use to…am I wrong there?
What do you think, how do you turn your home into a type of Third Place? I can sense the response being hospitality, but how do you get people to feel like they can come over and just hang out in the first place?
I think the rise of suburbia since the Fifties has definitely taken a toll on hospitality and the feeling of welcome. This doesn’t make such a kind of living impossible, just harder to employ and harder to convey.
If one wanted to turn their home into one of these First/Third Place types of locations, there are some strategies they may help:
a) Be trusting of your guests and dump your materialism. If you’re going to worry that your guests might break, damage, or otherwise misuse the stuff you’ve collected, you’re never going to have completely comfortable guests. And without comfortable guests, you’ve only got a First Place that outsiders sometimes visit.
b) Never kick people out but encourage them to stay. Especially as you begin, people will want boundaries put on their visits (and may impose them themselves) simply because that is the common way in which our society works. Your guests need to know that they cannot overstay their welcome.
Ways in which one might ease their guests into a sense of comfort along these lines especially works well if your household has multiple members. At the beginning, have other members of the household go to bed, go to work, go to a movie, etc. while another stays behind to hang out. This eases people into the idea that their presence is no imposition. Eventually, they’ll be comfortable enough to continue hanging out long after the household has gone to bed.
c) Don’t lock your doors. Especially in today’s world, people are terrified of not being “safe.” Despite that, an unlocked door is an open door for guests. At my old place, I lived for more than ten years with unlocked doors and only experienced one burglary (some neighbourhood kids went rummaging for cash, presumably for drugs or Transformers).
d) Invite over lots of people. Often. If you only invite over a couple people, it doesn’t matter how comfortable they are. if you vacate the scene, they’ll leave too.
e) Let community rather than yourselves be the reason people visit. If the focus is on you as the host, if the reason they’re coming over is to visit you, then everything rests both on you and your presence. If people are coming to spend time in the atmosphere of your house, then you don’t even have to be present.
f) Have an inviting house. If your place isn’t a place that people want to be, then they won’t likely be there. And if they are, then not for long. Create a comfortable environment and provide lots of hooks for people. A computer or two with internet. Television for watching movies. Rock Band or some such. Boardgames. Books. Snacks, drinks. Plenty of places to sit (indoors and outdoors if possible). Tables or desks for people to work on homework or study. Et cetera.
Dane, I like these suggestions…as you can imagine I will push back a bit on some of them. I think boundaries are good for a family’s sake. If I am constantly having guests over it may put a strain on my relationship with my family. My first responsibility is to them and I need to make sure I am giving them my undivided attention whenever I can and when they most need it. So, in this sense, I think a boundaryless environment could have negative consequences.
Along with that I am not sure how having an “unlocked door” would help. Again my first responsibility is to my wife and children. They need to be kept safe and, as best I can, I need to make them feel safe. Now we all know there’s no way to ultimately keep them 100% safe, and attempts to do so usually do more harm. Besides that I am not sure I see how an unlocked door is more inviting to anyone. I usually only lock my doors when I am not home or in bed, and I am not sure why people want to be in my home at those times anyways. But maybe I am just not seeing the connection you’re making.
Re negative effects of a boundary-less environment:
Of course it could have negative effects. A husband being a pastor would almost certainly have negative effects on his family as well. That is why I don’t recommend everyone hybridize their home into a First/Third Place. Especially in America, there are not many who would be up to the kind of lifestyle demanded by such prospects.
I think this may be due to the selfishness with which we guard our time. It’s built into us as Americans. By the time we’ve grown to our majority, society will have molded us into the kinds of people who put premium on our individualism and our personal use of time. And suburbanity doesn’t help us overcome our influences either.
So yeah, full conversion to a 100% hospitible life is not recommended to all or even to many.
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RE the unlocked door:
While I’ll leave your concerns about family safety to your own understanding of what that means (and agree that if your wife and child feel unsafe, an unlocked door would only lead to familial tensions), I’ll address the question “Why would someone want to be at my home if I’m either asleep or not there?”
To this, I’ll remind you that the hospitality scenario I outlined does not involve you as the reason people might gather at your house. The reason I outlined was, instead, because your house is a safe, relaxing, enjoyable place that is always available (remember, it’s a hybrid with a Third Place, not just a modified First Place). People want to be there because its the place for them to be. It’s their community home. And if your occasional presence is part of that, so much the better—but you can only ever be a part of the reason behind your home’s attractiveness as a place of gathering.
Again, the dismantling of American individualism in favour of something more community-centered. And again, not a kind of place just anyone can host because of that.
The Dane, simple question: how do you ever get anything done if you have people over all the time?
I guess when I thought of the combination of First/Third places I was thinking more along the lines of making our homes a place we actually like hanging out with our family. Where real relationship actually happens, versus the pseudo-relation that still happens in many homes.
I like the sentiments you have raised about real community happening in homes of friends, over the pseudo-community that may happen at the local coffee shop or pub. I think it’s probably true. Yet I am not inclined to agree with you that the guarding of our private lives is necessarily a selfish issue. I think there is something very important in investing in my family personally and privately, letting them have all my attention that is important.
I agree. I just don’t necessarily see selfish as all bad.
Fair enough.
Although the original author of the post, I seem to have arrived in this conversation late. That said, I’ve enjoyed catching up, and would like to share a few comments myself.
First, I agree with The Dane that few coffee shops meet Oldenburg’s definition of “third places,” and that it would be great to see more homes become “third place-like.” (In my definition that means where social capital is built). But then shouldn’t that be a goal of all social institutions? What about our churches, community parks, schools, places of work, and dare I say our political institutions?
Second, I am very impressed with the extensive thought Dane put into what it takes to create a sense of community within one’s home. Nice job!
Unfortunately, even when one succeeds at creating a hospitable atmosphere in one’s home, I don’t think it can live up to what Oldenburg describes as a “third place.”
In order for it to reach that level, a home would have to be able to create strong “bridging social capital.” And for that to happen, a homeowner would need to be willing to welcome individuals from disparate backgrounds into their home. That’s tough to do in a public place, but even tougher in a private home.
For those who are not familiar, “bridging” social capital can be described as the trust that is built between individuals of diverse backgrounds. It contrasts with the “bonding social capital” that exists between people of similar social backgrounds.
Although not explicit in my original article, I believe our rural communities need to increase the levels of bridging social capital because the lack trust between differing groups within a small town can be devastating to its future. That’s a lot to expect from a coffee shop, but every little bit helps.
Again, great conversation. We would welcome such conversation on our ReImagine Rural blog anytime. And kudos to The Dane for the efforts he has placed on developing a welcoming home.
Couple thoughts to add after talking with my wife:
1) She also had participated (as an occasional guest/visitor) in a home that functioned very much similar to so-called Third Places. The family had some college-aged kids and hosted foreign students while they studied abroad. The in-n-out atmosphere brought in many different people from many different walks of life. Not only disparate social backgrounds from within the local community (which is what my house had catered to) but a real cross-cultural exchange. This was in Kearney Nebraska.
2) Additionally, she related the story of a Third Place she used to frequent that hybridized with a First Place (and though she didn’t mention it, a Second Place). The place was a family-run coffee shop. Apparently the family lived upstairs and ran the shop as an extension of their family life. The community knew it as a coffee shop, but the family (a large family) really developed the business into something more genuinely homey than the fabricated homeyness of some of the more popular Third Places we could name. The mother would come out with homemade treats for guests. The children would man the registers or just hang out, whichever their lives allowed. This was a college town so kids were in there studying and hanging out and visiting the family.
Of course, like all Third Places, the audience to whom it catered could only be as disparate as the community would allow. (Coffee shops pretty notoriously cater to only a small subsection of any community in which they can be found.)