by Joel Garreau
Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself … Individualism is of democratic origin.
De Tocqueville, however, did not see this as a fatal problem:
It is difficult to force a man to take an interest in the affairs of the whole state. But if it is a question of taking a road past his property, he sees at once that this small public matter has a bearing on his greatest private interests …
What’s more, I have often seen Americans make really great sacrifices for the common good. When help was needed, they hardly ever failed to give each other trusty support.
De Tocqueville specifically noted, with his uncanny prescience, that community was rarely the same thing as formal government here.
Americans are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations … but religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fětes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the Antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. In every case, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.
I have come across several types of association in America of which, I confess, I had not previously the slightest conception … The first time that I heard in America that one hundred thousand men had publicly promised never to drink alcoholic liquor, I thought it more of a joke than a serious matter and for the moment did not see why these very abstemious citizens could not content themselves with drinking water by their own firesides.
In the end I came to understand that these hundred thousand Americans, frightened by the progress of drunkenness around them, wanted to support sobriety by their patronage …
Nothing, in my view, more deserves attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America … Even if we do notice them, we tend to misunderstand them, hardly ever having seen anything similar before … The most democratic country in the world now is that in which men have … carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires.
That is why, to this day, Edge Cities are the places where we invent new institutions to create community, new ways to connect with each other. Community in Edge City is disparate people voluntarily seeking connectedness in a single whole.
Many of these communities are as familiar as the Girl Scouts, the Sierra Club, and the Rotary. But as de Tocqueville predicted, the variety and scope are astounding. Not surprisingly, associations designed quickly to build community in Edge Cities are often created the way Edge Cities themselves are—ad hoc, innovatively, sometimes strangely, and usually starting from nothing.
Bob Kelley is the chief executive officer of an outfit called SO/CAL/TEN, short for the Southern California Technology Executives Network. Orange County has been a magnet for high-tech firms. It attracted a horde of hard-driving, proud entrepreneurs, who started up their own companies and flourished. But when these individuals had difficulties, they found themselves isolated. It was, indeed, lonely at the top, not least because so many of these aggressive, action-oriented people were worried about exposing weakness. Further, many of these honchos had moved to Southern California from someplace else; they knew nobody.
SO/CAL/TEN became a kind of shelter for them. It is headquartered in Newport Beach, where 180 of these techie executives come together, in groups of eight to twelve, to be, in effect, constructively vulnerable. They acknowledge and describe the problems they have run into with their companies, and find out whether anybody else has dealt with a similar conflict. It is, essentially, safe ground.
The business of comparing notes on the pains of growing companies, meetings with venture capitalists, and other commercial activities at first went well enough. But soon it became more than that. People who worked together started playing sports together. Some who had come together for business reasons stayed together to work on the Orange County Philharmonic, Opera Pacifica, and the Boy Scouts. Members found themselves being invited to one another’s weddings.
Then there was the day, Kelley remembered, that a chief executive officer walked in and announced that he had just been diagnosed as having inoperable cancer. Help me, he asked the group. What am I going to do?
That was the day this group really became more than a technical support structure; it became a community. It inspired trust and caring. The man came to the group to get his head together before goig to his wife. Since then, Kelley said, other personal problems have surfaced, with executives reaching out for help with everything from an extramarital affair to a child on drugs.
This is not an easy country to feel alone in. Singles know that. It is why Irvine has a branch of an outfit called Great Expectations.
Great Expectations was originally created by Jeffrey Ullman in the Los Angeles Edge City of Century City. It may be the ultimate high-technology matchmaker. More than a dating service, Great Expectations finds its main market, Ullman explained, among people in their thirties who are professionally secure, earn a decent income, are comfortable with their lives, but single—and not happy with that. The object of the game for this market, Ullman explains, is to stop dating. They are sick of people fixing them up with “jerks, airheads, and flakes”; sick of the bar scene’s fake sincerity; beyond the kicks of the one-night stand. They are in the market to find somebody with whom to get serious. That means quickly meeting, in a safe and non-threatening environment, people who are reliably (1) single, (2) in the right geographic area, (3) looking for a relationship, (4) of like interests, and (5) reasonably solid professionals. It is not easy in Edge City for these singles to find each other, says Ullman. They work fifty, sixty, and seventy hours a week. In a large urban area, it’s risky to approach somebody whose looks you like. “We don’t smile at strangers as much. If we make eye contact, we look away, as in ‘Oh, I’ve been caught.’ ” Many of the time-honored ways to meet other young people are not available. People in the Great Expectations market have already been through school. The church choir isn’t doing it for them. Neither is hanging out near the chips and dips at the supermarket, waiting for a party.
“So these people end up very dissatisfied, and for a long time they stay at home. They figure, better you should read a book, or do some work, or go out with same-sex friends, than go through all that,” Ullman says.
Or, for a hefty $2000 a year, these singles can avail themselves of Great Expectations. Its routine is complex, involving three levels of screening on each side, which makes everybody feel less vulnerable. Great Expectations leaves medical testing up to the individuals. Nonetheless—and most important—the system saves time. “You should be able to find ten good people in an hour, using Great Expectations. How long would it take you to meet that many people on the outside?” asks Ullman.
As a result, Great Expectations is now the largest dating service in the world. It grosses $45 million a year, has made the Inc. 500 as one of the nation’s fastest-growing companies, and has been written up in everything from Ms. to The New Republic. Its forty-five North American branches are overwhelming in Edge City locations from Nassau-Suffolk, Long Island, to King of Prussia, to Orlando to Houston to Mountain View, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, to Bellevue, near Seattle, and to Edina, outside Minneapolis. The network has thrived by producing serious and stable relationships in brand-new places in the absence of the webs that used to be formed by family and society.
Leaps to create other senses of the word “community” have been made across even more astonishing divides. One of the more mind-bending TV spots for any local political race in the 1980s in America had to be Michael Woo’s cable effort. Woo is of Chinese descent, and looks it. He was running for th
e Los Angeles City Council. The council at the time remained one of the West’s more white-bread political institutions. But in the Thirteenth District, where Woo was running, forty languages and dialects were in common use. So to become the first Asian-American elected to this bastion of Anglo power, Woo made an entire commercial in Armenian. He read it phonetically, from cue cards. His message? It was about ties that bind. He explained how some very different ethnic communities—there’s that word again—can strongly share important values: a sense of identity, a belief in family and church, a respect for elders.
It worked. In 1985, he was elected.
By far one of the largest new definitions of community in Southern California was created in Irvine by Tim Timmons. Timmons, forty-five, came to Irvine in 1975 as a professional motivational speaker, doing the corporate circuit, pumping up salesmen, renewing their flagging enthusiasm. After five years of that, Timmons realized that Irvine was a place with a far larger market than the one he had tapped. (Timmons is the kind of person who to this day refers to the Irvine area as his “market.”)
So he started a church. The South Coast Community Church.
Timmons acknowledges up front that he has never been ordained. “I didn’t think it was critical. I wanted to be able to deal with people eyeball to eyeball and just read ahead a little bit in the Bible. I wasn’t interested in acting like I had it together. It was more critical to be one of them.”
It worked. Timmons now has a flock of ten thousand. More than six thousand show up to be ministered to on any given weekend at one of four major services, the first of which is on Saturday night. Most churches in America have fewer than 350 souls. Timmons has a staff of sixty-eight, including twelve pastors. “I realized we would have phenomenal growth and impact, because I saw the church as the vehicle to create community here, where there is a lack of it,” he said.
When he was first thinking about starting the church, Timmons recalls, a lawyer friend happened to say, “In the old days in Santa Ana, we had community.”
“I said, ‘Keep talking.’
“And he said, ‘I see my neighbors and talk to ’em. But we don’t have community.’
“I told him about what I wanted to do. He said, ‘That may be one of the few things that could pull off a major community in this area.’
“All of a sudden, that clicked for me. So we started the Bible study in May 1980, and started the church in a gymnasium in Corona del Mar in August of 1980. We’ve gone from four hundred in that summer to a little over ten thousand in ten years.”
Timmons probably will never go down in history as a theological scholar. “Christianity is so filled with man-made garbage and man-made deviations and rules,” he says. “I was growing up, I was given ten things I couldn’t do if I wanted to get my ticket to Heaven. Well shoot, I looked at these and saw about eight of ’em were my goals in life.”
He goes to great lengths to dissociate himself from any whiff of culthood. His brand of Christianity is very laid back; he prefers to think of it as “pragmatic.” He likes to keep appointments not in his office, but in the homey confines of the Village Pantry, a nearby coffee shop, where he shows up wearing shorts and a gym shirt and Converse sneakers. He goes way out of his way to avoid being judgmental. His catalogue of $3.00 inspirational tapes runs toward such selections as “Game Plan for Living: A Strategy for Personal Success.” He’s very observant about money. He reveals his salary to anybody who asks. It’s $120,000. Not chickenfeed, but not out of proportion to the mortgages in these parts. He drives a Jeep with no vanity plates.
In short, Timmons has been careful. As a result, an informal survey of cynical Southern California journalists voted him the big-time local pastor they figured least likely to wind up in front of a grand jury on their watch.
No one, of course, can judge Timmons’ relationship to his God. But on a secular plane, he seems to have come up with a pretty good recipe for creating community in a place that desperately wanted some. Sixty percent of his flock did not have a previous connection to a church, he says.
Timmons sponsors parties in the courtyard of the church compound that give kids a place to go after football games on Friday nights. There is free pizza, free bands, free soft drinks, inconspicuous adults, no booze, and no drugs. He attracts two thousand to twenty-five hundred kids at a pop.
He actively seeks out members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and preaches at their funerals. He has a ministry for singles who are thirty and over. He has another one for singles in their twenties. Another for single parents. Another to get kids ready for adolescence. He has a children’s ministry, a junior high school group, a high school group, and a college group. He has sent missionary groups to help people in Romania and China. “Who knows if it does the Chinese any good,” he says. “Does our people a lot of good.”
A competing evangelical nondenominational church that he refers to as “obnoxious Christians” spent the previous election trying to run homosexuals out of Irvine. “We did not do that,” Timmons stresses, firmly. His stand on abortion boils down to community social work. “We’re saying, look. If you have an unintended pregnancy, if you are considering abortion, please call us. If it’s a financial situation, we will pay for the baby, we will pay for your counseling, for your medical care and for the delivery, and we will help you get the baby adopted or whatever you need to do. There’s 20 percent of the people who are anti-abortion and 20 percent pro-abortion, okay? I’m going for the 60 percent in the middle who are basically lost. They’ll always gravitate to the normal. What I want to show them is that the person of Christ is very, very normal and that that will make you normal as well. And that’s the real issue here. We’re all abnormal. Our M.O. here is “I’m not okay, you’re not okay. But that’s okay. See?”
In fact, Timmons is running something of a spiritual shopping mall. You can see it in his physical plant. The anchor is the fan-shaped twenty-five-hundred-seat auditorium with no kneelers but marvelous acoustics; a strong whisper at the focus of the stage echoes easily off the far back wall. Most of the surrounding structures look like low-rise corporate offices but function as spiritual boutiques. They contain meeting rooms of various sizes to which demographically targeted groups go to have their specific needs met. Some Sundays, he has to use satellite parking with shuttle buses. Timmons describes himself as “audience-analysis oriented,” but says he’s never found a need to advertise. In the basement there is a day-care center. Of the four hundred families enrolled in it, he says, 70 percent are not even part of his church.
What does community mean to him? “I think community is where people feel safe. I think it’s where they feel that they’re not going through this thing alone. There’s something about that ache of loneliness that everybody’s got. You’ve got to make contact somehow.
“We have a time in our service where everybody stands and they greet one another and I usually give ’em something to do. If the Lakers are playing I’ll say whisper a prayer for the Lakers. It’s the kind of thing where you’ve got to get people to touch people. I sense that’s what they need. All these transplants need a safe environment where they can trust and depend on somebody. They need to know that they’re not alone.”
Perhaps it is in such fashion that roots are put down in an Edge City the size of Minneapolis that was nothing but a cattle ranch twenty-five years ago.
Tom Nielsen, vice chairman of the multibillion-dollar Irvine Company, is a calm, solid man. The face of his son, John, got a lot of its best chiseled features from him. Of course, the two look more clearly alike if you discount the senior Nielsen’s buttoned-down corporate garb and adjust for windage with John, who has been known to show up for an appointment with long blond hair, peach fuzz on his face, glasses with thin gold rims, and a shirt marked with the logo of a pizzeria.
Tom Nielsen is a thoughtful man. He says ruefully, of the early years of Irvine, “I don’t think we thought of ourselves as building cities. There was no vision that we were building a
city for tomorrow. We were doing a better job of suburbanizing Southern California and trying to take the conflicts out of traffic patterns.” It is he who, unbidden, volunteers that he has a son who is critical of all the works of Irvine. It is he who urges me to speak to John.
Tom Nielsen grew up in Orange County, in Fullerton. He remembers when “it seemed that the three miles from Fullerton to Anaheim was a long distance. You’d actually leave one place and go through some orange groves and arrive at the other one. Yes, I played in the orange groves. Well, now you don’t know where Fullerton and Anaheim or any place stops and ends.”
That’s not the only thing that’s changed since he was growing up, he acknowledges. “The way we’ve built houses—there’s nothing that encourages you to get to know anybody next to you. You never see anybody in the back yard. I’ve lived in houses where all around me I didn’t know any of the neighbors. It didn’t bother me because I was so busy. We moved from place to place. Maybe I don’t have the same need—the sense of this community that they’re complaining isn’t here. It doesn’t resonate to me personally.”
When we first spoke, he mentioned, “I’ve talked about that at length to my son who is a writer. My son? He grew up in a lot of different places. Never really lived in Irvine. I don’t think he’d like to live in Irvine. Why? For all the reasons you’ve cited. We argue about this all the time.
“Have we created a place where you can have roots? I think you can. I admit my dad did stay in the same house for forty-five years. I don’t know how my children would feel. We didn’t stay in any house more than five years; I don’t know where their roots are. I know where John thinks they are. He thinks they’re at a place called Piru, where we lived in a huge old Victorian mansion and he was in the midst of a community that was a very special place for him.”