Nice house, and the garage is attached?
Looks like a traditional neighborhood development, porches in front, garage in the alley. Garbage pickup in the alley too?
I don’t see much yard. I wonder where the neighborhood kids will choose to play their games street or alley.
Alleyways in some neighborhoods in the Twin Cities turned into a problem in the 70s, when the economics of the areas went downhill but were usually resolved by residents being active and vigilant. Motion detector lights help but so did neighborhoods that would have “best looking alley” competitions with everything being spruced up and replanted.
Growing up in Houston, we did NOT have alleys. Our back and side fences were also our neighbors’ back and side fences.
On one hand, there wasn’t any real avenue for burglars to get up behind your house, without having to go through your neighbor’s yard, but on the other, when the fences got knocked down in a hurricane, etc… there was often some frustration if that fence wasn’t actually on your side of the line, and your neighbor was lazy about getting it fixed.
Living in a house with an alley (NE Dallas), the fence situation is much more clear, but there’s a little less security I feel. At the same time, we put up a 8 foot fence with all the hardware on the inside, so that anyone trying to get over it has to scale flat wooden planks, and can’t climb the stringers, etc… Which seems like common sense to me, but we’re literally the only house on the alley who did it that way- everyone else put the flat planks on the inside, and the stringers/hardware on the outside. I guess it looks better from inside the house that way or something.
I grew up in a house with a detatched garage facing an alley. The garage was broken into once and some tools were stolen. Then again, our house was broken into once and some items were stolen, and the house didn’t face the garage at all.
I have lived in one and seen many houses with garage entrances on the alley. No problems with crime with the ones I am familiar with. More of a space issue with people trying to park a vehicle behind the garage and encroaching into the alley. Also if you lived on the wrong side the snowplows would go down the alley one way and all the snow would end up on one side.
My biggest concern was forgetting to close the garage doors. Remedied that by having a switch that turned on a light (actually a 2 bulb unit in case one burned out) on the side of the garage facing the house. Light on, door(s) open. Light off, door(s) closed.
Curious as to what kind of switch you used? I have one that does the same thing, but I’d like to know what you installed.
ETA: The switch I have is a Cutler-Hammer, almost identical to this one:
Beautiful looking house. And really nice layout. The idea is to have a nice porch out front, rather than a front load garage - to create more of a sense of a community. Or a long impermeable concrete driveway. Really nice looking area.
Hubby is IMO worrying too much. If he really worries, like someone said, put in a motion light.
I grew up in Chicago, w/ alleys and detached garages. We LIVED in the alleys. 
I am not good with my electrical terms but it was a spring loaded push button “on” switch. When something pushed the button in it was on. My brother was a maintenance manger for a local factory and I described what I wanted to do. He came back with 2 switches, one of each door, mounted them in the door track so when top/back roller was in the furthest travel position in the track by the opener (fully open) it would push this switch on and turn on the light. As soon as the door closed it would spring back into the off position. The only downfall I could see was it showed if the door was fully opened, if the the door was partially closed the light would be off showing it as closed when it may not bee. I supposed if there was a push button “off” switch something could be mounted at the bottom of the door track that would show that the door was fully closed.
Yeah, that’s similar to what I have. And it’s mounted the same way. My garage door has to be completely open to engage the switch.
Thanks for the reply.
Nice tall fence. Lock that gate, and you should be fine.
Yep.
Yeah, the garages are attached. The neighborhood almost looks like a 55+ neighborhood to me, partly due to the small yards you discuss. That would be a selling point for me. Larger yards are nice, but harder to maintain when you’re getting old and creaky.
Anyway, we’re not due to start looking in earnest for another six months or so. At this point we’re scoping neighborhoods and typical house prices. We took a long vacation in the area this last April, and toured many neighborhoods for miles around trying to find communities with just the right suburban/semi-rural/not too far from amenities and doctors balance. From what I can see, this neighborhood looks like a winner and I’d like to put it on our short list. Hopefully I can argue in its favor with Mr. brown should a house come up when we start to look.
I like alleys, but I grew up with them and live with them here in Chicago. That “alleyway” in the listing looks nicer than most streets I see here. I like garbage going out back – I like garages being behind my house, not aside them, but that’s because that is what I’m used to. I’ve lived here in a fairly densely populated part of the city, where alleyways are places for dumping all sorts of garbage (like sofas, cabinets, giant crates of stuff, which would look horrible out front), discarded scrap metal hunters (I left a broken side door out in front of the garbage at 4 p.m. on a Sunday and it was gone an hour later – our old house had a chain link fence removed, and same deal), the occasional miscellaneous garbage picker, and rats and stray cats. In about four decades of living with a garage in the city, we’ve only had one break-in into the garage (back in 1985 or so). It’s not even something remotely on my radar of things to look out for in a new house.
Born and raised in Chicago, so I just assumed that alleys were standard. As pulykamell said, it was nice having the garbage pickup in the back, as well as the garage opening into the alley. The house I owned before I moved down to NC had an elevated CTA train running over the space between the alley and my garage, so there was plenty of room back there. The alleys I lived by were just about as well lit as the streets, so there was never an issue with possible break-ins.
It as a bit of an adjustment after I moved to having to put out the trash and recycling bins out to the curb on collection days; I was used to just having them sit by the alley and filling them (or piling stuff around them when they got filled) and not having to worry about how it looked.
When I think of an “alley”, I think of something more like this
The photo the OP linked looks more like something I occasionally see,
where the front of the property is on one public street and the back of the property faces another public street - this is the view from around the corner.
Yeah, around here, it’s typically like this (mine is very similar, minus the view of downtown):
https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/back-alley-in-chicago-picture-id187275086
conform to the common Oregon rule of “no snout houses”
TIL what a “snout house” is
A ‘snout house’ is a house with a garage that protrudes in front towards the street.
Our alley is a gravel street about 1.5 cars wide in most places, but a whole lot of living goes on back there. Garbage pickup, vehicles coming and going (and parking), and people walking over to visit neighbors. Mr. Brown doesn’t need to worry. And as someone said upthread, MacMinnville isn’t a real high crime area. (We lived 15 miles from Mac for 33 years).
Nice house, BTW.
Our first house had the garage in the back facing an alley. The only problem we had is that alleys were the last things that were plowed after it snowed. So if there was a sizeable amount of snow, we couldn’t get out of our driveway unless a neighbor with a plow or snowblower cleared the alley.
I know someone who lives in a house with an alley that runs along the tracks of the Brown Line (Chicago Transit Authority mass transit train). The tracks are on an embankment that put the wheels about head height. The trains are moving pretty fast on that stretch and the NOISE approaches discomfort.
Jake: How often does the train go by?
Elwood: So often you won’t even notice it.
The Brown Line was the one that ran behind my house, east of there. The noise wasn’t so bad inside, probably because the train was a bit further away and higher up. The bedroom was at the front of the house, so all we heard was a moderately loud rumble. When we were checking out the house pre-purchase we did make a point of going there one of the days when my wife was having one of her migraines so she could check out whether the noise would aggravate her head.