To sum up: The available evidence suggests that busyness, economic distress, and the pressures associated with two-career families are a modest part of the explanation for declining social connectedness. These pressures have targeted the kinds of people (especially highly educated women) who in the past bore a disproportionate share of the responsibility for community involvement, and in that sense this development has no doubt had synergistic effects that spread beyond those people themselves. With fewer educated, dynamic women with enough free time to organize civic activity, plan dinner parties, and the like, the rest of us, too, have gradually disengaged. At the same time, the evidence also suggests that neither time pressures nor financial distress nor the movement of women into the paid labor force is the primary cause of civic disengagement over the last two decades.39 The central exculpatory fact is that civic engagement and social connectedness have diminished almost equally for both women and men, working or not, married or single, financially stressed or financially comfortable.
CHAPTER 12
Mobility and Sprawl
COMPARED WITH THE CITIZENS of most other countries, Americans have always lived a nomadic existence. Nearly one in five of us move each year and, having done so, are likely to pick up and move again. More than two in five of us expect to move in the next five years.1 As a result, compared with other peoples, Americans have become accustomed to pitching camp quickly and making friends easily. From our frontier and immigrant past we have learned to plunge into new community institutions when we move.
Nevertheless, for people as for plants, frequent repotting disrupts root systems. It takes time for a mobile individual to put down new roots. As a result, residential stability is strongly associated with civic engagement. Recent arrivals in any community are less likely to vote, less likely to have supportive networks of friends and neighbors, less likely to belong to civic organizations. People who expect to move in the next five years are 20–25 percent less likely to attend church, attend club meetings, volunteer, or work on community projects than those who expect to stay put. Homeowners are much more rooted than renters, even holding other social and economic circumstances constant. Among homeowners, only one in four expects to move in the next five years, compared with two-thirds of renters. Because of their greater rootedness, homeowners are substantially more likely to be involved in community affairs than are renters.2
Just as frequent movers have weaker community ties, so too communities with higher rates of residential turnover are less well integrated. Mobile communities seem less friendly to their inhabitants than do more stable communities. Crime rates are higher, and school performance is lower, in high-mobility communities. In such communities, even longtime residents have fewer ties with their neighbors.3 So mobility undermines civic engagement and community-based social capital.
Could rising mobility thus be the central villain of our mystery? The answer is unequivocal: No. Residential mobility can be entirely exonerated from any responsibility for our fading civic engagement, because mobility has not increased at all over the last fifty years. In fact, census records show that both long-distance and short-distance mobility have slightly declined over the last five decades.
During the 1950s, 20 percent of Americans changed residence each year, 7 percent moving to a different county or state. During the 1990s the comparable figures are 16 percent and 6 percent. Americans today are, if anything, slightly more rooted residentially than a generation ago. In 1968 (when civic engagement was near its peak) the average American adult had lived in the same locality for twenty-two years; three decades later that figure remained essentially unchanged. Although historical data on residential mobility are incomplete, residential mobility may never have been lower in our national history than it is at the close of the twentieth century. Homeownership also rose over the last few decades to set an all-time record high of 67 percent in 1999. Americans’ expectations about the likelihood of moving over the next five years have been steady for at least the last quarter century.4 If our verdicts on pressures of time and money had to be nuanced, the verdict on mobility is unequivocal: This theory is simply wrong.
But if moving itself has not eroded our social capital, have we perhaps moved to places that are less congenial to social connectedness? Now, as in the past, connectedness does differ by community type. Compared with other Americans, residents of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas (both central cities and their suburbs) report 10–15 percent fewer group memberships, attend 10–15 percent fewer club meetings, attend church about 10–20 percent less frequently, and are 30–40 percent less likely to serve as officers or committee members of local organizations or to attend public meetings on local affairs. (Figure 50 and figure 51 illustrate these differences.) As we noted in chapter 7, residents of small towns and rural areas are more altruistic, honest, and trusting than other Americans. In fact, even among suburbs, smaller is better from a social capital point of view.5 Getting involved in community affairs is more inviting—or abstention less attractive—when the scale of everyday life is smaller and more intimate.
Is this pattern perhaps spurious? Could it be that the type of people who congregate in the biggest metropolitan areas are somehow predisposed against civic engagement? To rule this out, we reexamined the evidence, simultaneously holding constant a wide range of individual characteristics—age, gender, education, race, marital status, job status, parental status, financial circumstances, homeownership, region of the country. Comparing two people identical in all these respects, the resident of a major metropolitan area, either in the central city or in a suburb, is significantly less likely to attend public meetings, to be active in community organizations, to attend church, to sign a petition, to volunteer, to attend club meetings, to work on community projects, or even to visit friends.6 Metropolitans are less engaged because of where they are, not who they are.
Figure 50: Community Involvement Is Lower in Major Metropolitan Areas
We can also discount the possibility that small towns simply attract more gregarious people. Holding constant where people now live, civic engagement is not correlated with whether one would prefer living in a big city, a suburb, or a small town. Most people live in the size of place that they prefer, but where preferences and reality diverge, it is reality, not preferences, that determines civic engagement.7 Living in a major metropolitan agglomeration somehow weakens civic engagement and social capital.
More and more Americans live in precisely such settings. Figure 52 traces changes in where Americans have lived over the last half of the twentieth century, distinguishing among three broad categories: 1) those who live outside metropolitan agglomerations as defined by the Census Bureau—that is, in small towns and rural areas—have fallen from 44 percent of the population in 1950 to 20 percent in 1996; 2) those who live in the central city of a metropolitan area have slumped slightly from 33 percent in 1950 to 31 percent in 1996; 3) those who live in some metropolitan area, but outside the central city—that is, in the suburbs—have more than doubled from 23 percent in 1950 to 49 percent in 1996. In the 1950s barely half of all Americans lived in a metropolitan area, whereas in the 1990s roughly four in five of us did. Throughout this era we have been moving to places that appear to be less hospitable to civic engagement. Moreover, the best available research found no evidence of suburbanization abating in the 1990s.8 Thus the decline in social connectedness over the last third of the twentieth century might be attributable to the continuing eclipse of small-town America.
Figure 51: Church Attendance Is Lower in Major Metropolitan Areas
Americans have been moving from the countryside to the city for more than a century amid constant jeremiads from antiurban prophets of social doom. “[New York] is a splendid desert—a domed and steepled solitude, where a stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race,” wrote Mark Twain in 1867. “A man walks his tedious miles through the same interminable street every day, elbowing his way through a buzzing multitude of
men, yet never seeing a familiar face, and never seeing a strange one the second time…. The natural result is …the serene indifference of the New Yorker to everybody and everything without the pale of his private and individual circle.” A few years later social philosopher Henry George broadened the indictment of American urbanization beyond Gotham: “Squalor and misery, and the vices and crimes that spring from them, everywhere increase as the village grows to the city.”9
At least until recently, however, urbanization appears to have had no deleterious effect on our civic involvement. In fact, Americans were moving into the city in great numbers throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, all the while that civic engagement was high and rising. Moreover, the recent declines in all forms of civic engagement are virtually identical everywhere—in cities, big and small, in suburbs, in small towns, and in the countryside.10 No part of America, from the smallest hamlet on up the scale, has been immune from this epidemic. So more must surely be involved than simply urbanization.
Figure 52: The Suburbanization of America, 1950–1996
Could disengagement perhaps be linked not to urbanization, but to suburbanization? Suburbs have been a feature of American life since the mid–nineteenth century, driven in large measure by revolutions in transportation. First the streetcar and later the automobile enabled millions of us to live on the leafy urban periphery, while enjoying the economic, commercial, and cultural advantages of the city. After World War II widespread car ownership combined with a government-subsidized road- and home-building boom to produce accelerated movement to the suburbs, not different in kind from the earlier trends, but different in degree.
Suburbanization meant greater separation of workplace and residence and greater segregation by race and class. Such segregation was hardly new to American cities, but increasingly in the postwar period it took on a new character. In the classic American city neighborhoods tended to be homogeneous, but municipalities were heterogeneous, often in a crazy-quilt pattern with Ukrainian blocks adjacent to Irish areas, Jewish neighborhoods next to black ones, and servants living near the upper-class homes they served. In a suburbanized America municipalities were increasingly homogeneous in ethnic and class terms.
Initially, the postwar wave of suburbanization produced a frontierlike enthusiasm for civic engagement. The booster mythology fostered by suburban developers was positively communitarian. Ran one ad for Park Forest, the Chicago suburb closely studied by urbanist William Whyte for The Organization Man:
YOU BELONG IN PARK FOREST!
The moment you come to our town you know:
You’re welcome
You’re a part of the big group
You can live in a friendly small town
Instead of a lonely big city
You can have friends who want you—
And you can enjoy being with them.
Come out. Find out about the spirit of Park Forest.11
This was not mere hype, for Whyte reported that Park Forest was a “hotbed of participation. With sixty-six adult organizations and a population turnover that makes each one of them insatiable for new members, Park Forest probably swallows up more civic energy per hundred people than any other community in the country.” A few years later sociologist Herbert Gans, who had actually moved into Levittown, New Jersey, to study its social life, reported that Levittowners were “hyperactive joiners.” The image of suburban life that emerged from studies of the 1960s was one of unusually active involvement in neighborhood activities.12 Americans, it seemed, were rediscovering the civic virtues of small-town life.
As suburbanization continued, however, the suburbs themselves fragmented into a sociological mosaic—collectively heterogeneous but individually homogeneous, as people fleeing the city sorted themselves into more and more finely distinguished “lifestyle enclaves,” segregated by race, class, education, life stage, and so on. So-called white flight was only the most visible form of this movement toward metropolitan differentiation. At century’s end some suburbs were upper-middle-class, but many others were middle-middle, lower-middle, or even working-class. Some suburbs were white, but others were black, Hispanic, or Asian. Some were child focused, but others were composed predominantly of swinging singles or affluent empty nesters or retirees. Many suburbs had come to resemble theme parks, with uniform architecture and coordinated amenities and boutiques. In the 1980s “common interest developments” and “gated communities” began to proliferate, in which private homeowner associations and visible physical barriers manned by guards supplemented the invisible sociological barriers that distinguished each community from its neighbors. In 1983, 15 percent of the development projects in Orange County, California, were gated communities, and within five years this fraction had doubled.13
One might expect the numbing homogeneity of these new suburban enclaves to encourage a certain social connectedness, if only of the “bonding,” not the “bridging,” sort. Suburban developers in the 1990s, like their predecessors in the 1950s, continued to sell community. “Remember the street you grew up on?” ran one Internet ad. “Where neighbors knew neighbors. Live there again—at Greenfield at The Wheatlands. Greenfield is a traditional hometown for families who aspire to the good life.”14
Most evidence, however, actually points in the opposite direction. Not only are canvasing politicians and Girl Scouts selling cookies excluded from exclusive communities, but the affluent residents themselves also appear to have a surprisingly low rate of civic engagement and neighborliness even within their boundaries. In a careful survey of community involvement in suburbs across America, political scientist Eric Oliver found that the greater the social homogeneity of a community, the lower the level of political involvement: “By creating communities of homogeneous political interests, suburbanization reduces the local conflicts that engage and draw the citizenry into the public realm.”15
When ethnographer M. P. Baumgartner lived in a suburban New Jersey community in the 1980s, rather than the compulsive togetherness ascribed to the classic suburbs of the 1950s, she found a culture of atomized isolation, self-restraint, and “moral minimalism.” Far from seeking small-town connectedness, suburbanites kept to themselves, asking little of their neighbors and expecting little in return. “The suburb is the last word in privatization, perhaps even its lethal consummation,” argue new urbanist architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, “and it spells the end of authentic civic life.”16
More than sixty years ago urbanist Lewis Mumford observed that “suburbia is a collective effort to lead a private life.” Now, however, the privatization of suburban life has become formalized and impersonal. Gated communities are innately introverted, as traditional urban neighborhoods were innately extroverted. As two close students of gated communities, Robert Lang and Karen Danielsen, report, “In the past, suburbanites used gentle nudges to prod neighbors to act responsibly—when their grass grew a bit too high, for instance. Now a representative from the community association comes by to precisely measure grass and, for a fee, will mow lawns that have grown unruly. The whole process formalizes a social exchange that has historically been informal.”17
The preeminent historian of the American suburb, Kenneth T. Jackson, concludes:
[A] major casualty of America’s drive-in culture is the weakened “sense of community” which prevails in most metropolitan areas. I refer to a tendency for social life to become “privatized,” and to a reduced feeling of concern and responsibility among families for their neighbors and among suburbanites in general for residents of the inner city…. The real shift, however, is the way in which our lives are now centered inside the house, rather than on the neighborhood or the community. With increased use of automobiles, the life of the sidewalk and the front yard has largely disappeared, and the social intercourse that used to be the main characteristic of urban life has vanished…. There are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon.18
In the ea
rlier postwar period the larger structure of the typical metropolitan area remained monocentric—people lived in the suburbs but continued to travel into the central city for work and commerce. Gradually, however, both jobs and shops migrated into the suburbs, too, producing agglomerations of shopping malls, corporate headquarters, and office and industrial parks—what urbanist Joel Garreau calls “edge cities.” The older, radially structured urban areas of the Northeast were succeeded by the sprawling, polycentric megalopolises of the Sunbelt. At the beginning of the twenty-first century more and more of us commute from one suburb to another. More and more of our shopping is done in a megamall in yet a third suburb. Segregatory zoning policies have excluded such gathering places as local shops and restaurants from residential areas, at the same time that federal tax policy encouraged the shopping center boom.
Rather than at the grocery store or five-and-dime on Main Street, where faces were familiar, today’s suburbanites shop in large, impersonal malls. Although malls constitute America’s most distinctive contemporary public space, they are carefully designed for one primary, private purpose—to direct consumers to buy. Despite the aspirations of some developers, mall culture is not about overcoming isolation and connecting with others, but about privately surfing from store to store—in the presence of others, but not in their company. The suburban shopping experience does not consist of interaction with people embedded in a common social network. Fewer and fewer of us actually spend much time in the central city or in any other single site. As one Californian observed, “I live in Garden Grove, work in Irvine, shop in Santa Ana, go to the dentist in Anaheim, my husband works in Long Beach, and I used to be the president of the League of Women Voters in Fullerton.” Our lives are increasingly traced in large suburban triangles, as we move daily from home to work to shop to home.19
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