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Citizen Hern — Page 2
You could say that Matt Hern has a complicated relationship
with risk. He’s been kicking at the rules ever
since his teens. Back then he was back-talking teachers,
getting thrown out of his prestigious private school,
dressing like a jerk-off punk, and hot-wiring cars.
His joyriding phase ended late one night when he and
his pals rolled a stolen Buick. (They walked away before
the cops showed.)
Two decades on, Hern’s still taking chances. He
personally bears the bulk of insurance liability for
the Purple Thistle, an alternative youth centre he founded,
even though he’s handed off day-to-day management
to the centre’s youth. He rents a creaky old house
just off Commercial, with no backyard fence, no alarm
system, no double locks. He’s let troubled kids
and runaways occupy spare beds. A trapeze hangs in the
living room. His two girls—aged 10 and 16—make
the decision on how often they should attend school.
“Matthew still lives an entirely risky life,”
complains Hern’s father, Riley, a retired child-protection
officer, over the phone from North Saanich. “He
has no assurance about anything. No full-time job. He’s
almost 40 years old. He comes up with all these incredible
projects and ideas, but most of us would consider our
own welfare first. He’s bringing up two kids—where’s
his rent going to come from? How’s he going to
pay for things?”
Yet, for all this precariousness, Hern’s girls
are thriving (to his chagrin, his 16-year-old daughter,
Sadie, is a fastidious attendee at Templeton High),
and his brash ideas have made him an internationally
sought-after speaker. In the past year he’s expounded
on radical democracy, deschooling, and urbanism at universities
and conferences from New York to Istanbul. And his “insecure”
home glows with what a visitor can only describe as
an immense feeling of ease and, well, security.
Real security, says Hern, can only come from relationships.
He and his neighbours know and trust each other. They
keep an eye on one another’s property and kids.
This is enabled, partly, by density—there are
plenty of eyes on the street—but also by lifestyle:
he and his neighbours spend less time commuting (and,
if the Drive stereotype is true, fewer hours working),
so they have time to invest in everyday conviviality.
They walk the ’hood. They really do pass time
on front porches. It’s New Urbanism without the
Disney veneer.
“Some people go from their house to car to work
to shopping without ever actually living in their neighbourhood,”
Hern says. “But the less you rip past in a car,
the more you actually live here, the more you notice
what’s happening in your ’hood and the more
you’re likely to work to make it a better place.”
Efforts to danger-proof the city actually have a way
of making communities less safe, he argues, because
they take responsibility out of individuals’ hands.
“If authorities always regulate and control the
way we behave,” he says, “it undermines
our capacity to take care of each other, to negotiate
risk on our own.” With security guards patrolling
our local streets, we get out of the habit of taking
care of each other. An example: Last Halloween, a couple
of teenage girls in Santa tuques hauled a bus driver
out of a trolley and pummelled her, right on Commercial
Drive. Nobody on the street—which is now crawling
with private security guards—stopped them. Presumably,
they felt it was someone else’s job. Finally some
passengers came to the driver’s aid.
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