Four—
Ambivalent Communities:
How Americans Understand Their Localities

Claude S. Fischer

Americans of the Left and of the Right esteem the local community. It rests in the pantheon of American civil religion paradoxically close to that supreme value, individualism. In our ideology, the locality is, following the family, the premier locus for "community," in the fullest sense of solidarity, commitment, and intimacy. Thus, activists of all political hues seek to restore, empower, and mobilize the locality.^[1]

This chapter reviews, in broad strokes, the complex changes that have shaped the American locality and Americans' attachments to it in this century. Over the years, Americans have become more committed, in practical ways, to their localities, even while enjoying access to ever-widening social horizons. This localism has served most individual American families well, but the political role of the locality exacts severe costs to the national community.

Contrasting Visions of Community

Americans' affections for "community" are ironic, for much of American history and ideology undercut traditional local solidarity. Unlike Europe, the United States lacks the feudal experience of closed, corporate communities; its founders resisted hierarchy; marketplace liberalism undergirds its economics and politics; its settlers were linguistically, religiously, and culturally diverse; its people have always been mobile; its once-dominant farmers usually lived in isolated homesteads; and in all, unlike Europe, Americans have been, consensus has it, intensely individualistic.^[2]

In spite—or perhaps because—of these conditions, Americans have glorified and sought the local community.^[3] From before Tocqueville to beyond Riesman, observers have described us as inveterate joiners, people in quest of fellowship. The quest has been for the locally based association as much or more than any other. Although American culture esteems the wilderness as an escape from society, as for Thoreau, it simultaneously values the small, rural community as the locus of intimate society, as in Brook Farm. Most Americans believe that small communities preserve morality.^[4] Politicians' rhetoric celebrates the virtues of the small, local community. (Recall Geraldine Ferraro's claim in 1984 that her corner of Queens, New York City, was really just a small town—like Mondale's Elmore, Minnesota, and Reagan's Dixon, Illinois—and by being that, entitled her to the same halo of grassroots innocence that the others claimed.) And local political autonomy has long been entrenched in strong home rule, dispersed authority, and checks against central government. Americans continue to subscribe to "community ideologies," beliefs about the inherent connection between place and persona , theories that where we live partly determines who we are, and most often that the best people are to be found in the smallest, most localized places.^[5]

This contradiction between individualism and the pursuit of fellowship has yielded paradoxical forms of "voluntary community" in the United States. The classic old-world village, nowadays viewed through pastel prisms, was a place of constraint. Confined together by barriers of geography, poverty, illness, ignorance, law, prejudice, and custom, most old-world people lived out their lives in a small group, shared a common fate, and knew one another intimately.^[6] This familiarity, by the way, did not necessarily mean affection.^[7] In contrast, Americans have more typically found their fellowship in voluntary associations, be it clubs, churches, or neighborhoods. They have also joined or left those associations as each individual deemed appropriate.^[8] We can see this voluntarism in the American approach to caring for the unfortunate, well expressed in George Bush's "thousand points of light" rhetoric. And so with our neighborhoods. They are, as Morris Janowitz termed them, "communities of limited liability," associations in which we invest our families, wealth, and concern—but we guiltlessly leave them for larger houses, more rewarding jobs, or finer amenities.^[9]

With minor exceptions, Americans founded their towns as business ventures.^[10] Developers platted the land and advertised its bountiful future. Settlers came and then left in search of a higher standard of living.^[11] Indeed, they left in vast numbers, making for a great churning of population in nineteenth-century America, through big cities and small towns alike. Despite sentiment, then, we have for the most part

long treated our residential communities as "easy come, easy go," rather than as social worlds that envelop us.^[12]

Is Ours a "Rootless" Society?

How has the connection of Americans to their localities changed over the years? Many believe that ours has become an ever more "rootless" society; sage commentators diagnose "placelessness" as the source of modern America's ills.^[13] The facts are more complex. In several ways, Americans have become more "rooted" to their localities, and in several ways, less rooted. To simplify these complexities, I will argue that, in net, several historical changes have increased Americans' commitments to their localities, decreased their dependence on the locality for sociability, but increased their political—and thus, social—significance.

We cannot directly judge how people of earlier periods felt about their localities and compare them to people of today, but we can examine several changes that, logically, should have affected Americans' attachments to place.^[14] Several historical changes probably increased how much Americans care about and invest themselves in their localities.

Reduced residential mobility is one such change. Americans are more mobile than other Western peoples, and they have always been highly mobile. But this mobility has been declining. Historians, by comparing lists of town residents from one year to another, have found that Americans in the nineteenth century were at least as geographically mobile and perhaps twice as much so as contemporary Americans.^[15] Since World War II, Census Bureau evidence shows, the total rate of moving from one house to another generally dropped (see figure 4.1). Among those who moved, proportionately more crossed county lines recently, a change attributable to suburbanization and thus implying that these movers remained in the same urban area. The year-to-year fluctuations can be tied to oscillations in the job and housing markets. But the general picture is one of modestly increasing residential stability .^[16]

In cross-national perspective, however, Americans remain notably more footloose than Europeans, although only a little more so than the other continental Anglophone countries, Canada and Australia.^[17] The reasons are probably structural (our many dispersed metropolises), historical (our open-door immigration until 1924), and cultural (our famed individualism). What has probably changed over the years is a modest shift from "push" to "pull" mobility. Some pushes on nineteenth-century Americans to move—such as land shortages, job losses, disasters, and poverty—weakened in the twentieth century, while pulls—such as retirement communities, climate, college, and job opportunities—expanded.

4.1
Percentage of U.S. Population Changing Residence in Previous Year.
SOURCES : Larry H. Long,  Migration and Residential Mobility in the United
States  (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1988), 51; 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.
NOTE : Year  refers to the twelve months prior to the spring of the indicated year.

Americans' greater residential stability has probably increased their attachment to their localities. Studies have repeatedly shown that the longer people live in a place the stronger their emotional and social commitments to it.^[18]

Another secular change that, in net, probably increased local commitment is the dispersal of the urban population. Despite the popular image of the ever more crowded city, over the last century, American metropolises have been spreading and thinning out. As a result, proportionally more Americans live in suburban single-family houses, located in small, autonomous, suburban municipalities. For about a generation now, more Americans have lived in suburbs than in either center cities or non-metropolitan areas. These, low-density housing, and suburban governments, in turn, tend to encourage local commitments.^[19]

(What about the great migration from farm to city in this century? In that area, one of rural Americans' chronic problems was their difficulty in forming communities—in organizing associations, mobilizing politi-

cally, or seeing one another socially.^[20] For former homesteaders, the move to town probably increased local involvement.)

A third change, one connected to the growth of urban sprawl, has been the evolution of class-homogenous neighborhoods. At least until the early streetcar era in the 1880s, all but the affluent lived close to their jobs. The elite had their suburban enclaves, but different classes mixed in city neighborhoods, although residents were sometimes well separated by ethnicity. Today, neighborhoods are less segregated by ethnicity—greatly excepting black ghettos—but more finely differentiated by income level.^[21] Greater local homogeneity also reinforces neighboring and attachment to the neighborhood.^[22]

The great exception of the black ghettos in fact gives emphasis to the general increase in local homogeneity. During the twentieth century, blacks, at least those in the North, became more segregated from whites, even as white ethnic groups, and for that matter Asians and Hispanics, became less segregated from one another. This racial divide has provided to whites neighborhoods devoid of what many find to be the unsettling presence of blacks. It has largely confined blacks, including many in the middle class, to districts with other blacks, including the very poor. Analyses by Douglas Massey and his colleagues suggest that there may have been some small breaches in racial walls recently, but for poor blacks, geographic isolation increased through the 1970s.^[23]

A fourth trend is increasing home ownership. Over the century, most American families came to own their homes, with the fastest increase occurring between 1940 and 1960, as figure 4.2 illustrates. The most dramatic change was among the young. In the 1940s the median age of male homeowners was forty-one, but in 1970 it was 28.^[24] Home ownership has stagnated in the last fifteen to twenty years of housing inflation and economic doldrums, but remained historically high. (These data do not consider any increase in homelessness.)

Although Americans have long vested their dwellings with important moral qualities—a proper house both reflects and nurtures noble values^[25] —in the nineteenth century, Americans did not esteem ownership as they do now. Many middle-class families were content to be renters. The connection between property and propriety apparently arose around the turn of the century, when increasing affordability, suburbanization, and ideologies of domesticity combined to make ownership easier and socially correct. Then, in the twentieth century, rising affluence, new mortgage instruments, government subsidies, tax breaks, and in the 1950s the family boom spurred home ownership to its current levels.^[26]

Today, home ownership, preferably of a single, detached house, is the American ideal, despite the financial hurdles involved. In a 1985 poll, for example, 76 percent of respondents agreed that people who do not

4.2
Percentage of Housing Units That Are Owner-Occupied.
SOURCE : U.S. Bureau of the Census,  Historical Statistics of the United States,
Colonial Times to 1970  (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975),
646; U.S. Bureau of the Census,  Statistical Abstract of the United States 1988
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1987), 688; U.S. Bureau of
the Census, Census and You  25 (December 1990), 5.

own their homes are "missing out on an important part of the American dream."^[27] Being a renter is stigmatizing unless the person is in a transitional stage, a young single, or elderly.^[28]

Growth in home ownership has slowed and even declined slightly in the late 1980s.^[29] A sense of crisis about middle-class housing arose, a sense that Michael Dukakis tried to exploit in his presidential campaign in 1988. In historical perspective, still, the decline has been mild. Demographic changes in the last thirty years—aging of the baby-boomers, more divorce, delayed marriage and child rearing—should have led to home ownership sagging much more than it did. The big drop in ownership during the 1980s was precisely among Americans under thirty, who were increasingly putting off marriage and childbearing. Still, income losses, housing speculation, and financing changes strained many families, forcing some to rely on two incomes when they would have preferred one, and pushing some home-seekers out of the market.^[30] Other would-be owners turned to condominiums or, in rural areas, mobile homes.^[31] The proportion of available housing that is single detached units has dropped since the 1960s.^[32] This shift to condos or trailers also contributes to a sense of crisis, since the American dream is so closely tied to the single-family house. Altogether, much of the concern arises

from a comparison to the late 1960s, when, with boom times, owning a detached house was easier than now and seemed so normal.

Despite fluctuations owing to changes in demographics and economics, the great increase in home ownership during the twentieth century is unlikely to be soon reversed.

These conditions—urban sprawl, segregation, and home ownership—distinguish America from most European societies. David Popenoe credits them for creating a higher level of neighborhood involvement in the United States than he observed in either Sweden or the United Kingdom.^[33] Changes in these conditions over the last few generations, along with declining mobility, would all seem to have helped Americans further attach themselves to their neighborhoods and towns. Besides, most Americans have enjoyed increasing freedom of choice in where they live. Freedom can mean lack of commitment and transiency; but it seems here to have made it easier for most people to find and stay in places they most prefer.^[34]

Yet, other changes in the twentieth century may have reduced commitment to the locality. One such change has been the increasing separation of home and workplace. Although some commentators have exaggerated the extent to which home and work were entwined in the past—most people in days gone by were not independent craftsmen working in their homes—the distance between where people live and where they work expanded, particularly with the coming of streetcars in the 1880s.^[35] Working outside one's home area probably detracts not only from the time people spend in the neighborhood but also from their subjective feeling of commitment to it.

A second such change is the increasing participation of married women in the labor force. In 1900, 6 percent of married women worked for pay; by 1987, 56 percent did. (The rates for divorced women, a growing fraction of all women, were much higher.)^[36] Though married women's employment has typically been part-time, it does mean that fewer American households have a "traditional" homemaker at home all day, the same homemaker who critically connected the family to the neighborhood.^[37]

Third, households shrank. With the virtual disappearance of servants, boarders, and lodgers, with later marriage, more divorce, and fewer children, the size of the median American household shrank from 4.8 people in 1900 to 2.7 in 1987.^[38] We can assume that, generally, the fewer people at home, the less attached the household is to the locality.

Thus, in the complex weave of twentieth-century social changes, some drew Americans closer to and some pulled them from their neighborhoods and towns. Could we assess past people's identifications, senti-

ments, and actions more directly, we would not need to so indirectly estimate the change in local attachment. As it stands, the changes that more tightly bound people to places probably outweighed those that weakened the bonds, and the best estimate is that, contrary to convention, Americans are more "rooted," practically and sentimentally, to their communities than ever before.

The Fate of Local Ties

On another dimension, however, Americans have probably become less rooted to their residential communities: social ties. Although this evidence is also indirect, probably fewer of Americans' relatives, friends, and associates live near them than was true in earlier generations. (I am not referring here to "neighboring," defined as casual interaction with people living nearby. Americans are often "neighborly" but rarely socially close to their neighbors.) In one study, fewer than a third of respondents' important relations were with people living within a five-minute drive. This dispersion was even greater for the middle class. The neighborhood provides proportionately few of middle-class Americans' important ties.^[39]

How much recent generations differ from earlier ones in this regard is uncertain. On the one hand, Avery Guest and his co-workers found that neighborhood associations in Seattle in 1979 hosted fewer social activities than they did in 1929.^[40] On the other hand, a few researchers have asked whether marrying couples are coming from increasingly distant homes—an index of dispersing social contacts—and the answers are mixed.^[41] So far, the evidence for a historical dispersion of social ties is largely indirect: Those people who seem most "modern"—the educated, affluent, young, and urban—tend to have more spread-out networks than those who seem less so. By (a perhaps unwarranted) historical translation, then, we should have seen an increase in the dispersal of social relations.

We can also infer a decline in local ties from other social changes. Those changes that presumably uprooted Americans from their communities also should have scattered their networks: separation of home and work, mothers working, and smaller families. On the other hand, the changes that seemingly rooted Americans also should have contained their social ties: residential stability, suburbanization, neighborhood homogenization, more home ownership. Yet an additional consideration is changing communications and transportation. As early as 1891, an observer claimed that the newly developed telephone had introduced an "epoch of neighborship without propinquity." With the addi-

tion of cheap automobiles, analysts often claimed, space was "annihilated" and relations transcended distance.^[42] It stands to reason (although reason is sometimes wrong), that with affordable telephones and automobiles, not to mention airplane tickets, people can sustain social ties at farther distances than their great-grandparents could have. We can enjoy an evening with friends who live twenty miles away or celebrate Thanksgiving with kin in another state. Whether, or to what extent, Americans' ties are in fact more dispersed today than previously is still unproven.^[43]

The best guess is that there has been a historical change, that Americans' social lives are today less localized than they were a century ago. The more striking conclusion, however, is that the change may not have been as great as we imagine.

The Persistence of Local Autonomy

Localities are more than where we live and the people with whom we dwell. They are also polities. It is especially in "home rule" that the American affection for the locality is problematic. Although tested through the twentieth century, local autonomy continues to shape crucial aspects of daily life, perhaps satisfying most Americans, but undermining the collective good.

Spurred by economic growth and economic crises, technology, and war, state and federal governments undertook vast new responsibilities in the twentieth century, dwarfing the localities in scale and public attention.^[44] Also, local governments increasingly depended on cash infusions from the outside, the major shift occurring during the Depression.^[45] Higher levels of government usurped some authority from the localities. Early, state governments took over, for example, regulation of utilities and road management. In later years, federal authorities intervened in voting, schools, and zoning to protect civil rights and the environment. These changes probably also shifted media and citizen attention toward higher levels of government.^[46]

But the fundamental principle of local autonomy, long distinctive of the American system, has not been breached. Although dwarfed by the growth of state and federal authorities, local governments also increased their financial role in this century.^[47] Other changes also strengthened the autonomy of small—especially suburban—municipalities. States granted small cities greater financial independence, including the right to incur debts. Town control over land use, notably through zoning, expanded.^[48] In recent years, some authorities, especially the courts, have been able to intervene in local decision making,^[49] but the basic independence of

the locality remains. One sign is that since World War II the number of municipal employees has grown twice as fast as the number of federal employees.^[50]

Most urban Americans now live in the small towns surrounding the center city,^[51] and these are the better-educated, more affluent, and whiter urban Americans. They live in distinct, albeit neighboring, communities that differ from one another and surely from the center city in population profile, finances, and land use.^[52] Suburban residents, although usually content to leave politics to caretaker governments, do mobilize to protect the legal, fiscal, and social boundaries of their towns.^[53] By moving across a municipal line, usually by doing little more than crossing a street, some Americans can obtain better civic services at lower tax rates; choose among different housing styles, prices, and taxes; enroll their children in schools unburdened by poor students; and otherwise "purchase" by their relocation a better "basket" of social goods.^[54]

Even within large cities, localities' clout seems to have grown through neighborhood movements. Neighborhood ideology arose at the end of the nineteenth century, was encouraged by Progressive reformers and planners, and then was renewed by "community power" militancy in the 1960s and 1970s.^[55] Neighborhood movements have defended local communities from intrusions, resisted growth, and contested with downtown business interests. Critics, however, charge them with creating urban paralysis by NIMBY (not in my backyard) vetoes of citywide endeavors. Although new politics and new laws, such as required "impact" assessments, empowered many low-income neighborhoods—it is hard to imagine that Robert Moses could bulldoze the Bronx today—neighborhood power is still more easily and more often exercised by the same sorts of advantaged people who protect their exclusive suburbs, some of whom now live in gentrified city quarters.

The Place of Place

Peter Rossi has pointed out that "the world has become increasingly cosmopolitan, but the daily lives of most people are contained within local communities."^[56] Place still matters. The variations in house prices between and within regions, for example, mock economists' models and futurists' projections that the nation is leveling out into a uniform, placeless realm.^[57] How important place will be in the future we can only speculate. Will "cocooning," a media buzzword of the 1980s, typify the next decades, or will there be increasing cosmopolitanism? Much will depend on economic changes and demographic shifts. Unless the economy fails, American wealth should help sustain residential stability and home ownership. As baby-boomers move beyond child rearing and then retire,

they will increase geographical mobility, but they will also release more single-family housing for their grandchildren. Spots of inner-city gentrification notwithstanding, the sprawling of the metropolises continues, augmenting suburbanization and "exurbanization" beyond the suburbs. That trend suggests yet more homogeneity, low-density housing, and autonomous political localities.

Most Americans would, in all likelihood, applaud those trends. Raising a family in a detached house, in a homogeneously middle-class, suburban locality, governed by people much like oneself, seems almost ideal. As with other equity issues, even Americans who lack this privilege would preserve it. Experts may criticize localism for its "collective irrationalities" costly to residents themselves—traffic congestion, governmental paralysis, unbalanced growth, domination by business interests, and so on—and for its "externalities" costly to the wider community—ghettoization of the poor, abandonment of the great cities, unjust tax burdens, and so on. No matter. In America, the free pursuit of the private good is the public good. Localism is, as much as ever, an instrument to that good.

Herein lies a seeming contradiction: an inconsistency between the locality's communal role and its role as a vehicle for individual interest.^[58] American ideologies of community paint the locality, especially the small one, as a site for fellowship, in contrast to the atomism of the wider, especially the urban, world. Many Americans value and enjoy the congeniality of a local community. They often resist that same local community, yet, when it constrains their interests, be the constraint in taxes, behavioral codes, or infringements of private property. Neighborhood organizations, for example, typically awaken when outsiders threaten residents' safety or wealth. Otherwise, the energy that drives them usually rests dormant. Neighborhood groups rarely act as local governments. Other evidence of the priority of the individual comes in negotiations within condominium complexes, where collective needs and rules run up against assertions of home owners' rights.^[59] While Americans value the locality as solidarity, it takes second place to individual freedom.

Another seeming contradiction appears between the persistence of home-rule politics and the dramatic growth of the national government.^[60] How can locally oriented Americans tolerate the Washington behemoth? One answer is that the national government has not grown as much as we think.^[61] More important, growth in the federal government's role and in its income was a response to seemingly unavoidable crises. The Depression justified social engineering and costly programs. The world wars and the Cold War justified other national initiatives. Officials invoked the Cold War, for example, to rationalize the interstate highway system and subsidies to higher education. And still, the United States is, by Western standards, an incomplete welfare state. The reality is that

Americans generally resist government at all levels, but give more grudging preference to local rule by like-minded neighbors as the lesser evil.

National action, piecemeal as it is, also occurs in response to translocal coalitions. That was one lesson, for example, of the Civil Rights struggle, which as movement and as legislation ran roughshod over local autonomy. The environmental movement is a more complex example. In some ways, it too imposed national concerns over local ones, for example, threatening local jobs for old trees or peculiar fish. (In other ways, though, it reinforced the NIMBY pattern of localism, legitimating a "draw up the drawbridge" style of conservatism.) Although local events—Love Canal, for one—dramatized the environmental agenda, the movement's power still appears to rest on coalitions of interests that are translocal.

A strategy to move the nation in a progressive direction would in a similar way involve rethinking the ideology of locality, an ideology really more attuned to privilege than to reform. Thomas Bender has pointed out the dangers of confusing values attached to "community" with the needs of the public, political sphere. To insist, for example, on personal knowledge of political candidates may mean selecting the lesser rather than the better candidate. Or, to cry for "local control" for a community wealthier in needs than in resources may end by perpetuating disadvantage.^[62] It is important to look clear-eyed at the consequences of America's localism, not with romanticized nostalgia.