EDIT: Due to a lack of support for a rented business we were running (Fit & Lit) and rumours of individuals wanting to force us out of the New Haven community because we didn’t sponsor ALL events, we decided to leave. After posting about the collapse of New Haven due to the mistreatment of one of the former owners, the current owner, and scammer, Brian Lake, banned all three of us, you can read about the downfall of New Haven here.

A little under a year ago, some of you may remember that we had a month-long stay in Cedar Creek, which didn’t end all that well. You can read about that here. Well, a little under a month ago, Lizzy and I decided to branch out from our main home at The Grove Country Club Estates and try out another one of the planned community places, this time we went to New Haven.

For the folks who haven’t read the Cedar Creek post, or who have only been reading the blog for the past 8 or so months, a quick recap on what “planned communities” are in SL. You basically have two distinct types, loose RP and enforced RP. With both of these types, they are generally set within a “theme”. That could be Steampunk for the likes of New Babbage (loose RP) or Caledon (loose RP). It could be a University theme like Woodcrest (enforced RP) or Cedar Creek (enforced RP). The basics are simple. It’s either casual non-enforced RP, or it’s a much stricter style of enforced RP. Both types are embedded within a town or a city, usually made up of 1 or more regions.

That town or city is either fully planned, like New Haven, in other words, you rent a house/business already provided for by the estate admins, or you outright buy the land itself and rez your own house (or build one) and as long as it stays within the building code, you can live in it, which is what New Babbage and Caledon do.

These days with planned community the days of outright buying the plot of land and building or buying your own themed house, which is what Caledon and New Babbage pioneered more than 10 years ago has made way for the fully planned town, where the houses, style, landscaping and looks of the regions all flow into each other and the houses generally all stay within the same theme. In the case of New Haven, that theme is a small town in the state of Maine, which is on the northeast coast of the United States.

New Haven is a contiguous estate of 25 regions, two of which were added very recently. The 26th region is split off and is a dedicated sandbox for the use of renters/residents only. There is ample sailing waters to the south, east and west including docking rights/mooring rights to moor/dock a boat in the two main docking areas to the south of the main town. Along with sea rights is the absolutely phenomenal road network which spans practically all 25 regions and joins up the eastern large island to the “mainland” western island via two bridges.

You can also expect to see the “real life” stuff here, there is a general hospital, police department, and infrastructure department and the fire department is currently on a recruitment drive at the time of writing this.

The level of real-life detail even goes down to garbage collection with weekly collections across multiple regions by the infrastructure staff who drive a big bin lorry (that’s UK for Garbage Disposal Truck) and even walk the bins over to the back of the truck which then tips the bins over and dumps the empty bins back on the ground.

It’s the attention to detail that you will see across the entire 25 regions of the main town. From the garden work to the decent housing, from the road network to the business/commercial rental buildings, from the estate managers to the events team, it runs like one seamless “government” with even a mayor of the city as well.

The overall telling sign of the popularity of a place is the availability of homes to rent. At the time myself and then later on Vic Mornington (more about him later) decided to give New Haven a try after the disaster last year of Cedar Creek, there was a waiting list. As far as I know that waiting list is still ongoing. It took about 3 days for a house to become available for Vic and about 2 days for me. As far as I can see the availability of houses in the older regions has opened up slightly as the new houses in the two new regions were snapped up and people moved out of their old homes into the new ones. To put it plainly, you will probably need to be on the waiting list for a house.

Myself (it’s Lia writing this) and Lizzy moved into a house just off of the Stonybook farm regions, which is where Vic Morningtons “the Attic” pub is located.

The three of us as “The Charlie’s Angels” and Vic decided to chip in to open a pub in the attic of an empty farm barn right in the middle of what is basically farmland in the Stonybrook region which has little plots of land available for rent for people growing MyStory stuff, think of it as little allotments if you are in the UK. Vic has already kicked off regular Friday events, with more one-off and semi-regular events like live singers to come in the future.

Now, here’s the part that readers of the old Cedar article are waiting for, the cons. Are there any? Yes, they are, but they are not huge deal breakers like they were for the time we spent at Cedar Creek. First up is the fire and police department. The fire and police departments do lean heavier on the staffing for US times, however, for the police dept there is a handful of EU-time people who do pop on now and again and drive around patrolling. None of them have yet caught me speeding in the old Jag SS100 though *grins*.

It’s that leaning towards US time which is a big problem for not only New Haven but also for Cedar, New Babbage, The Grove, heck, name a planned community and you can add it to the list. Where it became a deal breaker in the last planned community we lived at though was the closed-off events system and the massive family cliques that had formed at Cedar.

The events here are far, FAR more open for anyone to add their events than Cedar Creek ever was. There also isn’t a tight control on the events by the “families”. The dedicated events team for New Haven made adding events, at least according to Vic Mornington, as easy as it was to do events for New Babbage. In other words, you contact the events team, they find a place and can even supply a DJ and decor, and that’s it, you are done!

Where New Haven has excelled though is the community itself. Within the first week of being in Cedar, the accusations of myself, lizzy and fen of being alts were public. We even went on voice with one of these “families” but it still wasn’t enough. The lacklustre Police Department, crewed at that time by people who simply couldn’t drive in SL started accusing me of metagaming while driving. This cliquish mentality bled into the events that we attended as well in the final week of us being there where all three of us got the feeling that we had been blackballed by the three powerful (and egotistical) families.

None, and I mean NONE of the problems we faced at Cedar has appeared in New Haven. From the perspective of Vic running events to myself and the girls just dancing at these events and setting up places for light roleplay in the future. New Haven, its community, its organisation staff and its roleplay staff have all made us feel extremely welcome, to the point that the three of us are considering dropping the land we have in The Grove and going all in at New Haven if a large multi-bedroom property becomes available.

The proof of all of this culminates in the estate itself. The fact that New Haven is still growing, having added two new regions over the past week, with more coming soon down the pipeline, means that there is still a lot of interest in people moving into the town.

Yes, if you are in the UK/EU the RP is a bit on the quiet side, yes, the Fire Department and the police department during UK and EU times are a bit short-staffed. However, everything else that makes a community an actual “community” is there. From the friendly management to the friendly community, to the regular timed EU and US events the foundation is there for New Haven to keep growing…as other places stagnate or cut back their regions.

Visit New Haven City Hall – http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/New%20Haven/131/109/23

Visit The Attic (regular events on a Friday) – http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Stonybrook/94/100/28

Written by Liandra Aries & Liza Blackwood
Input from Fenella Baily