Building a community? what is the problem?
Community building has always been a bit of an intrigue for me. Perhaps this is rooted in my being raised in a New England suburb that I found incredibly disconnected from itself. I found only a fantasy connection to the television shows or movies that showed towns where everyone knew each other. Then I was thrust into sharp contrast with what I’d grown up in to knowing my neighbors in my building, on my block, and most of the shop keepers down the street after a short time of living in New York City. I had moved to the city in August of 1995, right when Mayor Giuliani was getting into full swing with cleaning up Manhattan.
This is where the real fascination of the subtleties of social interconnection began to be apparent and astonishing to me. My friends and I had a little vintage clothing store on 24th St. between 2nd & 3rd Ave. which we lived above and had a little tree in front of. Surrounding it was a healthy mulching of litter, none of the street lamps on the block worked, and no one spoke to each other as we shuffled to our apartments. One day, we cleaned out the litter near the tree and built a little fence around it which we painted with care. On nicer days we took to sitting in front of the store by the little tree with its fence when business was slow. The owner of the Italian restaurant, a few doors down, loved seeing this as it reminded him of his earlier days in Italy, so he would bring us a bottle of wine quite often. While enjoying our wine we ended up saying hello to our various neighbors as they passed us heading home and invited them for a cup. Soon, we all knew each other and literally, a few months later, the street lamps magically worked and the streets were no longer drowning in trash. Our new found neighborly interactions may simply have coincided with the mayor’s neighborhood by neighborhood clean-up, but the effect on me was profound to see it all unfold at once and it felt like it had originated from us; the neighbors.
The Mayor’s efforts in Manhattan was seen both as cleaning up the city as well as gentrification. One could now walk around Time Square without fear of being pick pocketed, but it also seemed to have turn into Disneyland overnight and lost much, if not all, of its allure. It became a vortex tourist center which, if I could help it, avoided or passed through quickly. Twenty years later there is no way I could afford at 40 to live in that same neighborhood of Murray Hill where I lived at 19.
After New York I moved to Denver, Colorado in the year 2000. Denver was undergoing a similar city and social transformation. What had been a dusty downtown of decaying beatnik fame, the city council had sold to convert to a tourism center complete with a Hard Rock Café, a variety of chrome bars, and corporate retail stores. This had just happened around my arrival, so the nearby, culturally rich Capitol Hill and Five Points neighborhoods were still unaffected. There were popular bumper stickers that read “Native Coloradan” and “Texans…” or “Californians Go Home”. There was decidedly a counter culture reacting against this new influx of population growth in their city. This died out within a few years, to the point where five years later people who arrived when I did considered themselves from Colorado, though those born and raised there still chided these pronouncements as a local joke that was now somewhat accepted.
Eight years later, I attended a community meeting which was to address “the problems in Capitol Hill”. There were about 100 people there, two of which were renters who lived in the neighborhood of which I was one. At one point the various landlords all spoke of lobbying police to patrol the neighborhood more to cut down on crime and I couldn’t help myself any longer. I mentioned that nothing makes me feel less safe than a load of police driving around my neighborhood, so if we’re going to lobby for something, why don’t we lobby for tax incentives to small businesses that people will be inclined to walk to. More small businesses like this, better for the local economy, more people on the street, more people seeing one another on the street, more people know their neighbors and suddenly you have a safer neighborhood. Surprisingly, they liked this idea.
Ideally these new businesses would be coming from the people from that neighborhood, or at least the city, which would be growing its own local culture along with its local economy. I see this as an example of social permaculture; start small, use small and slow solutions, value diversity, each function supported by multiple elements, multiple functions, and working with the existing culture and community rather than against it.
Later I learned this concept was not at all new, but something touted loudly in the 1961 book by Jane Jacobs; The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This was simply a concept I felt I’d seen work in NYC in that neighborhood on 24th St. and saw no reason why it wouldn’t work in Denver or anywhere else.
