It's the talk of the town...

So Naptown's had a rash of things that qualify for the term "home invasion" in the last several months, leaving residents jittery and network news people ecstatic.

They have varied in nature, some being just "hot burglaries", a few where occupants are beaten and deprived of cell phones and wallets at gunpoint, and a couple of the especially scary "takeover" kind, where residents are wakened at gunpoint, tied up, sexually assaulted, driven to ATMs to withdraw cash...

The two most headline-grabbing of the latter type took place twenty-some-odd blocks from Roseholme Cottage, which is a little unsettling, but not surprising. 21st Century urban American geography is riddled with fault lines where gentrified neighborhoods or established old money ones rub hard up against the ghetto. The immaculate Tudors of Forest Hills are just across the Monon Trail from hardscrabble little bungalows, and it's not more than a ten or fifteen minute walk from the governor's residence at 46th and Meridian to neighborhoods where you keep your doors locked as you roll past abandoned Victorians with crack dens in the basement.

There's a reason that the previous occupant of this house installed doors that won't yield to a swift kick.

At the same time, the neighborhood where the takeovers occurred was far more suburban in nature, if not in geography. Whereas Roseholme Cottage is on a typical urban street where the houses are cheek-by-jowl and consequently there's a neighborhood dynamic where everybody knows everybody else's business, these houses were on bigger lots laid out with an eye to fostering seclusion and privacy, which has downsides not often thought about.