We’re checking out houses on Zillow in an area we’re hoping to move to.
I saw an awesome house this morning which pretty much checks all of our boxes. But the attached garage faces behind the house, towards an alley. It’s a new neighborhood, and the alley is more of a small street. In other words, it’s not a grungy, scary-looking alley.
Mr. brown is wanting to nix the whole idea of this neighborhood. He maintains that alleys are an invitation to burglars to break into your house, as they can avoid detection more easily in an alley. I don’t know. It seems to me that an alley lined with garages is going to see a lot of neighborhood traffic and not be a good place to hide.
Does anyone have any experiences or opinions about this?
I’ve lived in a house with an alley for the past 26 years. It’s an older neighborhood in the Chicago suburbs (most homes built in the 1920s-1940s), and alleys are the norm in this area.
When we moved in, the alley was gravel, but the village paved it about a decade ago.
The alley is as well-lit as the street, and we have never had any issues with it. It’s just fine.
Mrs. solost and I used to live in a house next to an alley. Never had any issues except one that did involve a burglar, but not with us as victims:
I was doing something in the backyard when I saw something on the grass on our side of a privacy fence with the alley on the other side. It turned out to be a clear plastic card holder with lanyard to hang around one’s neck, containing a cop’s badge, driver’s license and a number of credit cards and other stuff you’d ordinarily put into a wallet.
I contacted the cop and got it back to him, and got a gift certificate to a steakhouse as a thank you. It turned out he had left his badge & stuff in his car in his driveway a couple streets over and someone had broken into it. Apparently when the thief saw they had robbed a cop they were in a big hurry to get rid of the evidence and lobbed it into our yard while making a getaway through the alley.
In my neighborhood, the alleys are gravel and not well trafficked. Many of the break-ins seem to be via the alleys. Few residents use the garages in the alleys to park their cars and instead park in the street in front of their houses. It’s probably very different for alleys with more traffic.
My alley isn’t necessarily hugely-trafficked, but there are certainly enough times when I’m about to back my car out of the garage, and there’s another car passing through the alley, that it suggests to me that it’s well-used.
I do, however, see a lot of my neighbors whose garages are largely full of “stuff,” rather than cars. They may have two-car garages, but only have enough room in that garage for one car, because the rest of the space has a camper, a boat, etc., etc. So, a fair number of them are using street parking, as well as their garages.
I’ll also note that several of my neighbors have backyard lights, which they keep on all night; I imagine that concerns about break-ins, coming from the alley, are the reason why.
The neighborhood I’m looking at is too new to be accessible by the street view function. But I can look at it on satellite view, and the alleyway is on the wide side, well paved, with evidence of cars driving it and showing small driveways in fronts of garages. It looks well-trafficked.
My sis and BIL had that alley arrangement when they lived in San Mateo and it was fine–garage was completely detached so the only real drawback was schlepping in the groceries but apart from that, no problems. And McMinnville is not exactly Crime Central, personally I wouldn’t worry about it but if you still do, hang some security cameras looking up and down the alley and call it good.
Also, it’s likely set up that way to conform to the common Oregon rule of “no snout houses” where a house is only allowed to present a specific percentage of garage to the street side and main entry doors need to be clearly visible from the street. Makes for a nicer and more friendly looking neighborhood, and the garages on the alley allow for a big garage without it looking California Crappy out front lol.
That alley looks more like a street to me. In any case, I don’t see it as any more susceptible to burglary than any other house. I wouldn’t feel nervous at all about living there.
The house where I grew up was in the Baltimore suburbs and there were alleys everywhere - just wide enough for a garbage truck to go down - and I don’t think they were lighted. I never heard of any burglaries - then again, most yards had dogs, many who barked at strangers. Something to consider??
These kinds of neighborhoods are all over the place in Dallas/Ft. Worth and I don’t belive the alleys contribute to crime in any meaningful way. In my experience sneaking out of the house as a teenager, it was just as easy to hide on suburbian streets as it was in the alleys.
Good friend of mine has a house with an alley like that behind. Little narrower, little less lighting. No problems with burglaries, but the local prostitutes have the johns park their cars there.
Alleys were common where I grew up in Texas (relatively affluent suburb of Dallas). I don’t see how an alley is any more or less inviting to burglars than… whatever else would fill the void between the backs of houses.
That alley is about the size and width of the one behind my house, though ours is paved with concrete rather than asphalt. The other difference is that, as this is an older neighborhood, most of the houses have trees in their backyards, the canopies of which extend over the alley – it winds up not feeling quite as “open” as in that picture, because of that.
My Mom has a house in Denver with an ally. I do see the concern about nefarious activities. But the ally can be a helpful way to access the rear of the house for construction and such.
It sort of depends on how things are set up. And yeah. That’s not the kind of ally I’m familiar with. Looks like a small street. House looks great by the way.
When I was growing up in Queens the next block over was a block of row houses with an alley in the back giving access to garages. A friend of mine lived on that block, and I never heard anything about burglaries. It was 60 years ago, though.
Aside from the cameras idea, a (wired or solar-powered) motion-activated security light or three can make your property less attractive for People With Malign Intent than a neighbor’s property.
[as long as those lights don’t intrude on another neighbor’s home interior in an unwelcome way]
And the more of your neighbors that do the same, the less attractive the entire alley becomes to people who don’t have a good reason to be there in the first place.
