1. The rent-control and no-growth struggles of the 1970s and 1980s exemplify the increasing interest of the Left in the locality as a focus of action, with perhaps Santa Monica, California, as a model case. The 1960s and early 1970s gave us the "community control" movements associated with Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Conservatives have always stressed the primacy of the locality. Neo-conservatives have further legitimated this view by borrowing from Tocqueville, calling the neighborhood one of the "mediating" institutions that make democracy possible in mass society (as in Peter Berger and R. J. Neuhaus, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy [Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1977]).

2. The notable exceptions to many of these descriptions are the early Puritan villages, which only goes to show how atypical they were, their ideological legacy notwithstanding.

3. Rupert Wilkinson organizes his summary of the literature on American character around the "magnetic tension between individualism and community" ( The Pursuit of American Character [New York: Harper & Row, 1988], 71).

4. The tension between individualism and community appears, among other places, in our contradictory images of city and country. For the most part, the city represents individual freedom, to the point of license, and the country represents communal fellowship, perhaps even to the point of oppression. (In some expressions, however, the city is a beehive of conformity, and the country, virgin land for individuality.) Most Americans prefer the small town, at least ideologically. For a comprehensive study of how Americans think of places, see David Hummon, Commonplaces: Community Ideology and Identity in American Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).

Nineteenth-century Christian reformers instantiated these beliefs when they tried to create functional substitutes for small towns in the big cities (see, for example, Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 , [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978]). And twentieth-century sociologists who pursued the causes of deviance in the anomie of city neighborhoods formalized these beliefs (a paradigmatic example is Harvey W. Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929]). break

5. See David Hummon, Commonplaces . On the quest for local community, see, for example, Robert Hine, Community on the American Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980).

6. One should not exaggerate the stability of these old-world communities. There was considerable migration in Western Europe. Also, famine, plague, and other horsemen of the apocalypse often disrupted village life.

7. See, for examples, Laurence Wylie, Village in the Vaucluse , (New York: Harper & Row, 1964); George Foster, "Interpersonal Relations in Peasant Society," Human Organization 63 (Winter 1961): 174-84.

8. This pattern is the sort of thing treated by Robert N. Bellah and his colleagues in Habits of the Heart (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).

9. Morris Janowitz, The Community Press in an Urban Setting , 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

10. The exceptions are largely "intentional communities," such as those of the Puritans or Amish, and transplanted European villages, such as some Scandinavian settlements in the Plains states.

11. For overviews, see Richard Lingeman, Small Town America (New York: Putnam, 1980); Hine, Community on the American Frontier .

12. This generalization should not hide the great variations among Americans in their orientations to locality, but rather highlight American tendencies. See Hummon, Commonplaces .

13. For example, Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage, 1973); Joshua Meyerowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Robert Wiebe, The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). See Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1978), for a commentary on these views.

14. One more direct study examined the extent to which real estate ads mentioned location as an attraction, comparing 1929 to 1979 Seattle. There was no change. Avery Guest, Barrett A. Lee, and Lynn Staeheli, "Changing Locality Identification in the Metropolis," American Sociological Review 47 (August 1982): 543-49.

15. See, for example, Stephen Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis 1880-1970 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 221-32, for a literature review; James P. Allen, "Changes in the American Propensity to Migrate," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67 (December 1977): 577-87; and Donald H. Parkerson, "How Mobile Were Nineteenth-Century Americans?" Historical Methods 15 (Summer 1982): 99-109.

16. This settling-down is striking not only as a violation of expectations (why we have such expectations calls for another essay entirely), but also because it contradicts other changes that should have accelerated mobility, such as the dramatic increases in college attendance, divorce, retirement pensions, growth of the Sun Belt, and publicity about other places to live. Perhaps the best explanations are economic—that a mature and wealthy economy provides sufficient jobs to reduce the number of job-related dislocations—and technological—that the continue

abilities to commute and travel widely reduce the need to move for a job or for other reasons. See Larry H. Long and Celia Boertlein, The Geographical Mobility of Americans , Current Population Reports, Special Studies, Ser. P-23, No. 64 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976), 27-58. They also look at such change data by age and education. The figure is drawn from Larry H. Long, Migration and Residential Mobility in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), 51; and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Geographic Mobility: March 1986 to March 1987 , Current Population Reports, Series P-20, No. 430, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1989), 2.

17. Long and Boertlein, Geographical Mobility; Long, Migration and Residential Mobility , 253-82.

18. See reviews in Suzanne Keller, The Urban Neighborhood , (New York: Random House, 1968), and Claude S. Fischer, The Urban Experience , 2nd ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), chapter 5. More recent studies include Robert J. Sampson, "Friendship Networks and Community Attachment in Mass Society: A Multilevel Systemic Model," American Sociological Review 53 (October 1988): 766-79; and Charles E. Connerly, "The Community Question: An Extension of Wellman and Leighton," Urban Affairs Quarterly 20 (June 1985): 537-56.

19. Housing style is hard to separate, in America, from home ownership (discussed below), but the detached house does seem to encourage neighboring, at least. See Carol J. Silverman, "Neighboring and Urbanism: Commonality versus Friendship," Urban Affairs Quarterly 22 (December 1986): 312-28; as well as Keller, Urban Neighborhood; and Fischer, Urban Experience , chapter 5. The issue of suburban government is more complex. On the one hand, participation in these polities tends to be low; they often have "caretaker" governments. On the other, when an issue threatens the typical consensus, these are strongly defensive and mobilized polities. See Fischer, Urban Experience , chapter 9; and "The City and Political Psychology," American Political Science Review 69 (1975): 559-71.

20. A national inquiry resulted in Report of the Country Life Commission , 60th Congress, 2d Session, Senate Document 705 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909); see also O. F. Larson and T. F. Jones, "The Unpublished Data from Roosevelt's Commission on Country Life," Agricultural History 50 (October 1976): 583-99.

21. See Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Black and White Immigrants Since 1880 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality , (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Kathleen Neils Conzen, "Immigrants, Immigrant Neighborhoods, and Ethnic Identity: Historical Issues," Journal of American History 66 (December 1979): 601-15; Avery Guest, "Urban History, Population Densities, and Higher Status Residential Location," Economic Geography 48 (October 1972): 375-87.

22. See, for example, Susan K. Lewis, "Spatial Context in Network Building: Does Place Matter?" (paper presented to the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, August 1988); Silverman, "Neighboring and Urbanism"; Keller, Urban Neighborhood; and Fischer, Urban Experience .

23. On the long-term pattern, see Lieberson, Piece of the Pie . For recent data, see, for example, Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, "Trends in the Resi- soft

dential Segregation of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians: 1970-1980," American Sociological Review 52 (December 1987): 802-25; and Denton, "Suburbanization and Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas," American Journal of Sociology 94 (November 1988): 592-626. On the cost blacks pay for this homogeneity, see, for example, Douglas S. Massey, Gretchen A. Condran, and Nancy A. Denton, "The Effect of Residential Segregation on Social and Economic Well-Being" Social Forces 66 (September 1987): 29-56. On concentrations of the poor, see Douglas S. Massey and Mitchell L. Eggers, "The Ecology of Inequality: Minorities and the Concentration of Poverty, 1970-1980," American Journal of Sociology 95 (March 1990): 1153-89.

24. Albert Chevan, "The Growth of Home Ownership: 1940-1980," Demography 26 (May 1989), 255.

25. See, for example, Edward Clark Clifford, Jr., The American Family Home, 1800-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); David P. Handlin, The American Home: Architecture and Society, 1815-1915 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979); Claire Cooper, "The House as a Symbol of the Self," Working Paper No. 120 (Berkeley: Institute for Urban and Regional Development, University of California, 1971).

26. See Chevan, "Growth of Home Ownership"; Daniel D. Luria, "Wealth, Capital, and Power: The Social Meaning of Home Ownership," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 (Autumn 1976): 261-82; Margaret Marsh, "From Separation to Togetherness: The Social Construction of Domestic Space in American Suburbs, 1840-1915," Journal of American History 76 (September 1989): 506-27.

27. New York Times (February 28, 1985), 17. Three-fourths of renters interviewed in 1982 in suburban Orange County, California, still hoped to own their own homes (Mark Baldassare, Trouble in Paradise: The Suburban Transformation in America [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986], 64).

28. See, for example, Constance Perin, Everything in Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977); and William Michelson, Environmental Choice, Human Behavior, and Residential Satisfaction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

29. In one report it dropped from a peak of 66 percent of the population living in owner-occupied housing in 1980-82 to 64 percent in 1988; "Home Ownership Found to Decline," New York Times (October 7, 1989), 1; and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census and You (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989).

30. One indicator of affordability is the ratio of the median sales price for a new single-family house to median family income (John S. Adams, Housing America in the 1980s [New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987], 83). The ratios are shown in the accompanying table. continue

Data drawn from Adams, Housing America , and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1988 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1987), 430, 685. The data suggest that, for two-earner couples, affordability has remained essentially level since 1965, but that for single-earner households, housing prices have escalated. These numbers do not, of course, factor in fluctuations in interest rates, taxes, or utility costs, or regional differences.

31. Chevan, "Growth of Home Ownership"; "Home Ownership," New York Times; Adams, Housing America .

32. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), 639, 683.

33. David Popenoe, Private Pleasure, Public Plight: American Metropolitan Community Life in Comparative Perspective (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1985).

34. The qualifier "most" is important. For certain people, particularly poor children, changes in urban land use—further dilapidation and business development of the inner city—and the recent drop in subsidized housing construction have narrowed housing options, as is evidenced by increased homelessness.

35. See, for example, S. W. Greenberg, "Industrial Location and Ethnic Residential Pattern in an Industrial City: Philadelphia, 1880," and S. N. Burstein, "Immigrants and Residential Mobility," both in Philadelphia , ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 204-32 and 174-203; and Kenneth T. Jackson, "Urban Deconcentration in the Nineteenth Century," in The New Urban History , ed. Leo F. Schnore (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 110-44.

36. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics , 133; idem., Statistical Abstract: 1988 , 374.

37. See, for example, Keller, Urban Neighborhood .

38. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics , 41; idem, Statistical Abstract: 1988 , 43. Most dramatically, elderly women increasingly lived alone. In 1900, 16 percent of noninstitutionalized elderly widows lived alone; in 1980, 67 percent did. See Tim B. Heaton and Caroline Hoppe, "Widowed and Married: Comparative Change in Living Arrangements, 1900 and 1980," Social Science History 11 (Fall 1987): 261-80; Frances E. Kobrin, "The Fall in Household Size and the Rise of the Primary Individual in the United States," in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective , 2nd ed., ed. M. Gordon (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), 69-81.

39. Some types of Americans, however, do depend on the neighborhood for their social networks: the poor, the elderly, and children, for example. See Claude S. Fischer, To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), chapter 13; the work of Barry Wellman, including "The Community Question: The Intimate Networks of East Yorkers," American Journal of Sociology 84 (March 1979): 1201-31; and Eugene Litwak and A. Szelenyi, "Primary Group Structures and Their Functions: Kin, Neighbors, and Friends," American Sociological Review 34 (August 1969): 465-81. Other recent studies include Connerly, "The Community Question"; Sampson, "Friendship Networks"; and Susan D. Greenbaum and Paul E. Greenbaum, "The Ecology of Social Networks in Four Urban Neighborhoods," Social Networks 7 (March continue

1985): 47-76. For reviews, see Keller, Urban Neighborhood; and Fischer, Urban Experience , chapter 5.

40. Barrett A. Lee, R. S. Oropesa, Barbara J. Metch, and Avery M. Guest, "Testing the Decline-of-Community Thesis: Neighborhood Organizations in Seattle, 1929 and 1979," American Journal of Sociology 89 (March 1984): 1161-88.

41. S. Dinitz, F. Banks, and B. Pasmanick, "Mate Selection and Social Class: Changes During the Past Quarter Century," Marriage and Family Living 22 (November 1960): 348-51, versus Norman T. Moline, "Mobility and the Small Town, 1900-1930: Transportation Change in Oregon, Illinois" Research Paper No. 132 (Chicago: Department of Geography, University of Chicago, 1971), 120-21; see also Claude S. Fischer, Person-to-Person: The Telephone, Community, and Modernity, 1880-1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, forthcoming).

42. The quotation comes from Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 66. For academic analyses of the "placeless realm," see, for example, Melvin M. Webber, "The Urban Place and the Non-place Urban Realm," in Explorations into Urban Structure , ed. Melvin M. Webber et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 79-153; and Ronald Abler, "Effect of Space-Adjusting Technologies on the Human Geography of the Future," in Human Geography in a Shrinking World , ed. R. Abler, D. Janelle, A. Philbrick, and J. Sommer (Belmont, Calif.: Duxbury Press, 1975), 35-56. For a literary treatment, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). The "annihilation of space" was a phrase American Telephone and Telegraph used in its advertisements.

43. One skeptical note was sounded by Malcolm M. Willey and Stuart A. Rice, Communication Agencies and Social Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933). Willey and Rice, who argued that the telephone and automobile augmented local interaction more than they did distant ties.

44. By one estimate, "in 1902, local governments paid for 51.3 percent of all government services and delivered 64.0 percent. Today [1989], they pay for 14.1 percent and deliver 22.0 percent." See G. Ross Stephens, "Federal Institutional Centralization as a Response to Crisis: 1902-1988" (paper presented to the Southern Political Science Association, Memphis, Tenn., November 1989), 10; and idem, "State Centralization and the Erosion of Local Autonomy," Journal of Politics 36 (February 1974): 44-76.

45. According to Stephens ("State Centralization"), local governments received 51 percent of their revenues from their own sources in 1902 but only 18 percent in 1970.

46. On voter interest in levels of government, see Robert L. Morlan, "Municipal versus National Election Voter Turnout: Europe and the United States," Political Science Quarterly 99 (Fall 1984): 457-70; and Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie, Participation in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

47. In 1902, localities raised for themselves $41 per capita; in 1970, they raised—adjusted for inflation—$268 per capita (calculated from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics , 1133). Local governments increased their take, in terms of Gross National Product, from under 4 percent in 1902 to over 5 percent continue

in the 1980s. This pales beside the states' increase from 1 to 12 percent and the federal government's from 2 to 25 percent, but nevertheless represents real expansion (Stephens, "Federal Institutional Centralization," appendix table 6).

48. See Joseph L. Tropea, "Rational Capitalism and Municipal Government: The Progressive Era," Social Science History 13 (Summer 1989): 137-58; Joel Tarr, "The Evolution of the Urban Infrastructure in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," in Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure , National Academy of Sciences (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1984), 4-66.

49. Eric Schmitt, "Home Rule Gradually Slipping in New York Area," New York Times (August 10, 1988), A15.

50. Between 1947 and 1985, federal civilian employment grew from about 2.0 million to 3.0 million (51 percent). Municipal employees— not including employees of school districts—expanded from 1.2 to about 2.5 million (105 percent). (State employees grew fastest, from under one to nearly four million, 338 percent.) U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics , 1100; idem, Statistical Abstract: 1988 , 282. Between 1950 and 1985, local expenditures, including those for education, grew slightly faster than all federal expenditures, including those for defense ( Historical Statistics , 1123-34; Statistical Abstract: 1988 , 247, 294).

51. The proportion of urban Americans who resided in "places" whose populations were under 50,000 dropped as low as 38 percent in 1930 but grew to a majority of 51 percent by 1970 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics , 11). The trend, by another measure, continued. In 1970, 47 percent of urban Americans lived in "cities" of under 50,000, and by 1986, the percentage was 49 (idem, Statistical Abstract: 1988 , 32).

52. See John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), especially chapter 5; Alan K. Campbell and Judith A. Dollenmayer, "Governance in a Metropolitan Society," in Metropolitan America in Contemporary Perspective , ed. Amos Hawley and Vincent P. Rock (New York: Sage, 1975), 355-96; Mark Schneider and John R. Logan, "The Fiscal Implications of Class Segregation: Inequalities in the Distribution of Public Goods and Services in Suburban Municipalities," Urban Affairs Quarterly 17 (September 1981): 23-36; and Scott Greer, Metropolitics (New York: Wiley, 1963).

53. On suburban politics, see, for example, F. M. Wirt, B. Walter, and E. F. Rabinovitz, On the City's Rim: Politics and Policy in Suburbia (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1972); Scott Greer and Ann L. Greer, "Suburban Politics," in The Changing Face of the Suburbs , ed. Barry Schwartz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 203-20; Fischer, Urban Experience , 283-85. One common kind of resistance is to metropolitanwide government. See, for example, Campbell and Dollenmayer, "Governance"; and Mark Baldassare, "Citizen Support for Regional Government in the New Suburbia," Urban Affairs Quarterly 24 (March 1989): 460-69.

54. The consumer language is borrowed from economists who have described this governmental fragmentation as an ideal marketplace where buyers can choose their preferred basket of services at their optimal price from a number of sellers (that is, townships). On the fiscal disparities among suburban municipalities, see Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes; also Kenneth T. Jackson, continue

Crabgrass Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For a recent study of how this fragmentation sustains school segregation, see David R. James, "City Limits on Racial Equality: The Effects of City-Suburb Boundaries on Public School Desegregation, 1968-1976," American Sociological Review , 54 (December 1989): 963-85.

55. On the history of neighborhood mobilization, see, for example, Zane L. Miller, "The Role and Concept of Neighborhood in American Cities," in Community Organization for Urban Social Change: A Historical Perspective , ed. R. Fisher and P. Romanofsky (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), 3-32; Joseph L. Arnold, "The Neighborhood and City Hall: The Origin of Neighborhood Associations in Baltimore, 1880-1911," Journal of Urban History 6 (November 1979): 3-30; Patricia Mooney Melvin, "Changing Contexts: Neighborhood Definitions and Urban Organization," American Quarterly 37 (Summer 1985): 357-68; Ira Katznelson, City Trenches (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); and Harry C. Boyte, The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).

56. Peter Rossi, "Community Social Indicators," in The Human Meaning of Social Change , ed. Angus Campbell and Philip E. Converse (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972), 87.

57. In 1986, the median purchase price of an existing single-family house was, for example, $168,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area versus $82,000 in the similarly sized Detroit area, a ratio of 2:1. The ratio had been 1.8:1 in 1980 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract: 1980 , 459). Within metropolitan areas, variations can be at least as great. One analysis compared identical new houses in three suburban San Francisco counties and found contrasts greater than 2:1 depending on specific location (Herbert Smokin Associates, Palo Alto, in San Francisco Examiner [March 25, 1990], F18).

58. This issue was raised by David Hummon.

59. See, for example, Carol J. Silverman and Stephen E. Barton, "Private Property and Private Government: Tensions between Individualism and Community in Condominiums," Working Paper No. 451 (Berkeley: Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, 1986).

60. This issue was raised by Alan Wolfe.

61. Per capita, federal employment did not grow in the last forty years (Stephens, "Federal Institutional Centralization," 4).

62. Bender, Community and Social Change , chapter 5.