Going Solo

by Eric Klinenberg

  In recent years a number of groups have tried answering this question with projects designed to democratize the experience of “independent living” beyond the most affluent communities. No one believes that affordable independent living is going to come from the private sector. But in 1992, two nonprofit organizations, NCB Capital Impact and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (which funded the research for this book), launched Coming Home, a $13 million initiative to develop new models for assisted living that middle-class and even low-income seniors could afford.

  The challenges were formidable, because developing, let alone managing, these facilities requires different kinds of economic and political expertise. In most cases, dealing with complicated bureaucratic matters—securing subsidies and low-cost credit from government agencies, or integrating services with Medicaid—proves difficult enough to discourage all but the most motivated parties. And in their final report, the program reviewers noted that the local groups who remained committed to the project were rewarded with an endless series of punishments from the very public agencies that were supposed to help: “slow Medicaid eligibility determinations, slow payments, insufficient payments, delayed licensing processes, adversarial survey agencies and disinterested or unapproachable finance agencies.”14

  Ultimately the Coming Home project resulted in fifty completed assisted living complexes in thirteen states. Although most are in rural and suburban areas where development costs are low, a few are in cities—including San Francisco, Milwaukee, Tampa, and Burlington—where local agencies offered land or special loans and showed a genuine interest in solving the housing problems of their solo-dwelling senior citizens. The facilities are typically mixed-income communities, with some residents paying market rate and others no more than their social security insurance affords. And although some of the projects struggled in the late 2000s when the Great Recession arrived and states slashed funding for the elderly, while other projects that had been planned were deemed “infeasible” and never broke ground, the Coming Home staff says they found eager local partners in all parts of the country, and the number of residences they built actually exceeded their expectations.

  THERE ARE FEW GOOD MODELS of affordable housing for younger and middle-age singletons, and as a consequence the most marginal of them often live on the edge of homelessness, where a single misstep can result in disaster. Rosanne Haggerty first noticed this problem in 1982, when she graduated from Amherst College, moved to New York City, and began working with Covenant House, a Catholic charity that served the poor. The job came naturally to her. Haggerty had grown up outside of Hartford, Connecticut, in a large religious family that attended church in a congregation made up largely of poor old-timers, many of whom lived in cheap apartments and SROs. “I spent a lot of time in their apartments helping out or just visiting,” she tells me. “They weren’t especially nice places. But they were modest and dignified. Respectable. I came to appreciate that places like that could be decent homes.”

  In New York City, Haggerty encountered a very different kind of housing stock. Homeless shelters were makeshift places where nonprofits had squeezed in as many beds as they could fit. The SROs were dilapidated and dangerous. Though she was only in her early twenties and a relative newcomer to the city, Haggerty sensed that the housing problems in New York had become urgent. “It was the moment when our understanding of homelessness was starting to change,” she tells me. “It had always been a Bowery bum issue, confined to a small group of men and just a few places. We treated it like we treat hurricanes: Get them through the crisis and they’ll be fine. But it was getting bigger, and that didn’t work anymore. There were homeless people all over the city, and we’d see young adults come back to our clinic again and again because they didn’t have a place to go. That’s when I realized that no one had an exit strategy. Neither the city nor the charities knew what to do.”

  Haggerty left Covenant House for a full-time job at Catholic Charities in Brooklyn, and her first major task was helping to convert three church buildings into housing for the homeless and poor. During the planning process, she visited various shelters and SROs around the city, and she always came away disturbed by how they looked and felt inside. The SROs were particularly upsetting, because many were in beautiful old buildings with terrific bones. They had been neglected, even abused. Public areas had been divided and darkened so that no one would feel comfortable in them. The original molding and fixtures had been replaced with the cheapest materials available. “The problem wasn’t the buildings,” Haggerty explains. “It was the management and the design. I knew we could do it better. We could restore and maintain these places so that they’d look as good as everything else in the neighborhood, maybe better. We could renovate the public spaces inside so that the residents would want to use them. We could create housing that didn’t feel stigmatizing, places that people wouldn’t be ashamed to call home.”

  In the late 1980s, Haggerty got her first opportunity to try this experiment on a large scale. A few years earlier, Covenant House had purchased the neighboring Times Square Hotel as a real estate investment, but the project collapsed because the organization, beset by internal conflicts and a pedophilia scandal involving Father Bruce Ritter, failed to maintain the property and its 652 units. “It had once been a gorgeous residential hotel,” she recalls. “But it was in shambles, on the cusp of bankruptcy. I’d spent some time there when I volunteered next door, and I knew it had possibilities. I started a campaign to save it and convert it into low-income housing for people who lived alone, and a lot of people signed on. The problem was I couldn’t find an organization that would do it. That’s when I decided to start my own.”

  Haggerty launched Common Ground in 1990, with help from a board made up of other homeless advocates and an attorney whose firm did pro bono work to establish its charter. Although she was not yet thirty, Haggerty had seven years of experience renovating buildings for the homeless, and she knew exactly how to get city funding for the Times Square project. After three years of renovations, Common Ground reopened the hotel in 1994 as an entirely new kind of SRO. About half the residents are formerly homeless, and they struggle with everything from substance abuse to mental illness and HIV. But the other half is made up of the working poor, including aspiring actors and artists and a variety of blue-collar laborers who have a hard time finding a place for themselves in the local rental market. Haggerty hoped that those who were used to working every day would mix with those who weren’t. The groups can help each other, whether it’s dog walking or helping find a job. “The hotel is designed to be a vertical village,” she explains. “The rooms are small, but everything else is as grand as we could make it. There’s a garden roof deck and a large community room on the top floor with amazing views of the city. We built a library, a computer room, an art studio, a medical clinic, and a gym. We restored the lobby so that residents would feel proud when they came home or met visitors.”

  In addition to these architectural renovations, Common Ground remade the SRO’s service delivery system, offering everything from health care to counseling to job placement, so that residents wouldn’t have to rebuild their lives on their own. Haggerty says that most low-cost housing for poor singles may rescue people from homelessness, but they also remove tenants from their network of family, friends, and neighbors. “In those places residents often wind up feeling even more alone than they did on the streets,” she explains. “So we needed to strengthen their support systems—to create a substitute for the aggressive daughters—to help them navigate the system and get back on their feet.”

  The redesigned SRO proved to be more effective than anyone at Common Ground had imagined. As word of its success spread through news stories and glowing policy reports, foundation officers and local officials throughout the United States came to visit The Times Square, and the organization won funding to expand its model on a larger scale. By 2011, Common Ground had renovated twelve SROs
and nearly three thousand individual units in the New York metropolitan area, and six other buildings were under construction. It had established partnerships with organizations in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., and branched out into larger projects, including a neighborhood-level initiative to prevent homelessness in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “It’s been totally consuming,” says Haggerty, who’s now working on a doctorate in sociology at NYU (where I teach) in whatever spare time she can find. “But obviously we haven’t even scratched the surface of this problem, because there are just so many people on their own who can’t afford to live in our cities. The housing option we’re trying to create is going to become more and more necessary. Our biggest challenge isn’t keeping up with the demand, it’s catching up. And right now we’re not even close.”

  THE MAIN REASON that there’s not enough affordable housing for people who live alone is that our metropolitan areas weren’t built for them, and we’ve failed to redesign cities and suburbs to meet the needs of a singleton society. Compact residential units in apartment buildings, not single-family homes. Walkable and densely populated neighborhoods. Proximity to a range of commercial goods and services, attractive public spaces, and restaurants, bars, and cafés where residents can meet. Good public transit. These are important for people who live in all kinds of domestic arrangements, but they are especially important for those who live alone, because they are such heavy users of the places that support local social life.

  As it happens, these metropolitan amenities are also the key elements of more environmentally sustainable cities. For although, as one British study recently reported, singletons tend to consume more land, energy, and household goods than those who live with others, these statistics are misleading.15 After all, a family of four with two cars, long commutes, and a 2,500-square-foot house in the suburbs will leave a greater carbon footprint than four individual city dwellers who live in compact apartments and use public transportation (or, better, walk) to reach work. That’s why Manhattan, the capital of America’s singleton society, is also the nation’s greenest city.16

  Manhattan is not the only urban center that’s begun adapting to the new social environment. Planners and developers in cities across the United States are starting to build better accommodations and amenities for the unprecedented number of singletons who live in them. Some urban officials have made special efforts to attract the coveted demographic of professional singles that Richard Florida calls “the creative class,” in hope that they will stimulate the local culture and economy. Cities in Europe, Japan, and Australia have made even more progress. In Stockholm, where 60 percent of all households have just one occupant, a generous supply of publicly subsidized housing in urban centers and a rich, locally based neighborhood life make living alone an affordable and often quite social experience. Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, and London offer not only robust public transit systems, but also an increasing number of small residential apartments, many of them rental units and condominiums designed for young professionals, the fastest-growing segment of the singleton society.

  Unfortunately, the fastest-growing part of the American metropolis is the suburb, and that’s also the place that’s proved most inhospitable to people who live alone. While many singletons prefer cities, others share the cultural preference for suburbia that’s so common in the United States and are frustrated by the paltry housing options now available. Rollin Stanley is the director of planning for Montgomery County, Maryland, an affluent area just north of Washington, D.C., and southwest of Baltimore and home to popular commuter havens such as Silver Spring, Germantown, and Rockville. Stanley, who’s in his early fifties and lets the bangs of his wavy brown hair fall across his brow, spent his early career in Toronto, where he got support for promoting more walkable, ecologically sound neighborhoods, places where residents could live, shop, and socialize without traveling far to work. “Coming to an American suburban area has been an entirely different experience,” he tells me. “And this is the fundamental problem: People here are scared to death of traffic. They don’t want to build apartment buildings or expand the commercial districts because they think it will bring congestion. They honestly believe it’s a threat to their way of life.”

  But the current arrangement, a sprawling landscape of large single-family homes accessible only by automobile, is unsustainable—and not just for environmental reasons. “Washington, D.C., has more people living alone than almost any other city,” Stanley explains. “And the parts of Montgomery County that have refused to make a place for them are already suffering. Housing prices are down. Tax revenues are way down. The municipalities here need revenue and it’s not clear how they’ll get it.” The places that have best weathered the downturn are what he calls “urban lite” communities, such as Silver Spring and Bethesda. In Montgomery County, the average home is a single-family house that sells for around $500,000. But these places have a range of housing options, at different sizes and prices, and their mix of amenities entice the people who are still hunting for housing: young singles, senior citizens trying to downsize their domestic arrangements, and immigrant workers.

  “This isn’t a fleeting issue, and it’s not just about the recession,” Stanley adds. “We’re dealing with a major demographic change. Montgomery County has enough single-family housing to last forever. Today only about a quarter of our households have married couples with children. And almost two-thirds of our seniors live in private houses. When they die, or decide to move into something smaller, we’ll have more single-family houses than we know what to do with.”

  As he sees it, what Montgomery County and others like it clearly do need is more diverse and affordable housing choices, as well as more small-scale commercial development—not big-box stores or strip malls, which require automobiles and do clog up local roadways, but stores and restaurants that residents near modest downtown suburban areas could reach on foot. “We’re starting to see some development for the DINKS—dual income, no kids—families. Now I want to get some projects for SINKS [single income, no kids] to break ground, and I’ve told everyone that Generation Y wants to move here. They grew up in suburbs, and they’ll stay here for a long time if we can give them the taste of the city that they need.”

  This vision for the future of the suburbs outside the nation’s capital is not widely shared by the people who’ve lived there longest, however, and they tend to be the ones who are most invested in civic affairs. When Stanley rolled out his master plans for Montgomery County, he got fierce resistance from home owners, particularly those near the areas where he wants to promote urban lite developments. Each project generates a mini controversy, he says, so the pace of change is painfully slow. Now, after a few years in the region, Stanley says he’s developed a new strategy for debating the issue. He’s started warning those who refuse to make room for singletons that their resistance is bad for everyone, including, perhaps especially, themselves. “There’s a real risk that we’ll miss the chance to adapt suburbia for the way we’re currently living,” Stanley insists. “And we’re all going to suffer, because as we get older we’ll find that it doesn’t work for us anymore. We’ll want less space and better proximity to amenities when we can no longer drive. And you know what will happen? We’ll wind up having to move to Florida or California. We literally will no longer fit in our hometowns.”

  CONCLUSION

  ANXIETY ABOUT BEING DISCONNECTED is an age-old condition. It’s in Genesis, when God, concerned about the potential power of a unified human community, “confounds” the language shared among residents in the Tower of Babel, leaving them unable to communicate or understand each other. It’s in Plato’s Symposium, when Aristophanes explains that Zeus, who also feared the power of a united human species, split us in half. Before then, the story goes, every person had four arms, four legs, and a two-sided face, with integrated male and female qualities. Now each of us is an incomplete individual, condemned to feel alone unless we fin
d the companion who makes us whole.

  Concerns about various forms of alienation and social fragmentation are also hallmarks of modern culture, as are debates on why we wound up this way and how we might come together again. In fact, inquiries into these very issues helped inspire the first major works of social science, including canonical works in economics, psychology, political science, and sociology, by big thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud.

  Contemporary social scientists have taken the study of human disconnection in new directions. Instead of grand philosophical theories, today’s number-crunching academics traffic in surveys, using powerful statistics to convey who we are and what troubles us now. In recent years, blockbuster findings about our purportedly heightened social isolation have sent commentators into a new cycle of anxiety-laden debates about the reasons we’ve become so atomized. Some, such as the startling discovery that one in four Americans has no one with whom they can discuss important matters, turn out to be unfounded. Others, like those documenting the number of hours we spend in front of screens rather than in face-to-face interaction, seem to discount the social nature of what we do online. But if we often exaggerate the extent of our disconnection, there is no mistaking the fact that today more people throughout the world live alone than ever before, and that even more will likely join them when they are affluent and secure enough to pull it off.

  The meaning of these facts can be debated, however, and making sense of them requires looking beyond the numbers. The cultural critics and political officials who worry about the rise of living alone don’t acknowledge that living alone is an individual choice that’s as valid as the choice to get married or live with a domestic partner. Nor do they recognize that it’s a collective achievement—which is why it’s common in developed nations but not in poor ones. They tend to overlook the fact that neither individuals nor societies see living alone as a goal or an end point—which is why social movements to promote the interests of singletons are so difficult to organize. And they don’t admit that living alone has not led to the “decomposition” of collective life and the end of meaningful social commitments, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter and many others feared.