I live in the Lower Burns Park neighborhood in Ann Arbor. I was recently asked what I liked about living there, and why I decided to live there, and what has made me stay.

It's always hard to know why you do anything, and if I remember right, we bought our house in less time than it took for us to decide on buying a couch. That was back in the day, of course, when an Ann Arbor house would go on the market on a Sunday and would be sold on a Monday, and you had to be quick or else you would still be renting. Now, you get a bit more choice, but there's still a lot of complicated decisions to make.

In retrospect, here's what I'm happy about and what I'd hope to change.

Transportation

The biggest plus of where I live is that I can walk downtown. It took a few years for me to be able to work up to it and to get a good sense for how long it would be to make the trip, but now I am confident that I can leave at 4:58 p.m. and even if it's really snowy make it to Community Day Care to pick up my younger son on time by 5:30 p.m.

The bus system in Ann Arbor is good enough that if you choose your life carefully you don't have to drive to work. Three useful routes - the 5, 6, and 36 - go right through my neighborhood, and in the morning the 36 runs frequently enough that I don't even check the schedule. A bit of an extra hike to Crisler Arena gets me onto the University of Michigan bus system, with direct routes to North Campus. Bus riding is not perfect, and there's no really good way to go east and west along Stadium with the current route system.

When we were house hunting one concern was being able to ride a bicycle to campus without going up steep hills. Steep is, of course, a relative term - we are talking Ann Arbor, not Pittsburgh. Since we moved in, a portion of Packard has been repaved with a bicycle lane, and there's now a bicycle store in the neighborhood where a pet store with snakes used to be. It's even possible to bike to the park and ride lot on South State Street, which has been helpful for shared commutes to Detroit.

I've been lucky enough to never have to make a difficult commute to the nether reaches of Oakland or Macomb County, but there was a time in the dot-com boom era that my travels took me to Detroit Metro Airport regularly. I'm happy that we live close enough to the freeway for it to be convenient, but not so close that there's a loud roar of traffic day and night.

Destinations in the neighborhood

A good neighborhood needs good groceries, close enough by that you can walk to the store for a six-pack of beer or a gallon of milk or a can of frozen orange juice without it being a big production. When we moved in, the Food and Drug Mart on the corner was the neighborhood corner grocery, and when it closed everyone was collectively worried that a neighborhood meeting place had disappeared.

We're lucky enough now to have five choices - Stadium Market, Kroger, CVS, Produce Station, and Morgan and York - that range from party store to grocery to specialty store. Trader Joe's is not that much farther away, although the last time I remember walking there it was far enough away that I mistimed the arrival of a summer thunderstorm and got drenched on the way back. Note to self: check the weather before walking to the grocery.

It's always also good to have a quick, convenient place to go for coffee, breakfast, or an inexpensive meal. The neighborhood is close enough to campus to have Mr. Pizza serving up student-sized and student priced meals, and Caribou Coffee holds down cafe responsibilities where the Food and Drug used to be. It's only a bit of a walk to Benny's Family Dining for an Olympic-sized breakfast.

I love the local library; I wish it were a little more local. When we moved in, the branch library was the Loving Branch at Platt and Packard; after it closed, the Ann Arbor District Library moved a mile closer to Packard and Eisenhower with the Mallett's Creek branch. As it turns out, it's a 30-minute walk or a 15-minute bus ride to either Mallett's or downtown, not close enough to stop in without planning but still convenient.

When we were house hunting, the real estate agent talked about how wonderful it would be as a place to raise kids. We were childless at the time, but now that we have two kids, we appreciate that we're within walking distance to schools and that there's good sidewalks and a crossing guard to help get my older son across Packard when he walks or rides to school by himself.

Neighbors

A neighborhood that's walkable to campus tends to draw people who spend time on campus. Some of that means students, and there are some blocks not too far from where we live where the game-day student party presence is seen and heard and known for miles around. We're just a few blocks away from the edge of the beer pong zone, but still close enough that one of the things that gets talked about on the neighborhood mailing lists are noise ordinances and litter laws and the encroachment of the student ghetto.

There are neighborhood mailing lists, one that I started for my block 8 years ago and a second one that's about a year old that formed when there was a rezoning of some of the streets in the neighborhood. It's always good to be able to get a hold of your neighbors, to share news and to figure out how to borrow something that you won't need more than once a year. The last time I asked to borrow an aluminum extension ladder I got 7 offers to share. The traffic for the most part is not much different from a Craigslist or a Freecycle list, except that you're more likely to be able to walk to the person you're sharing something with.

A really good neighborhood has some kind of meeting hall, a place that's public enough and big enough that you can gather indoors in the winter for a public meeting. Up until now, this has been the one gap I've seen, since we have had to trek to Pioneer High School for most larger scale public meetings.

Coming up on Feb. 1 from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. is a winter meeting of the Lower Burns Park Neighborhood Association, which will be held in the yoga studio of the Zen Buddhist Temple on Packard at Wells. The agenda is still coming together, and I'm looking forward to seeing my neighbors.

Edward Vielmetti walks around town for AnnArbor.com . You can reach him at 734-330-2465 or at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.