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POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT:
A DEMOCRATIC STRATEGY FOR NEIGHBORHOODS
Edward Schwartz, 1977
I want to propose a new basis on which to judge whether a
neighborhood is capable of revitalization--namely, its level of
political development. Once we go beyond the age of a community's
housing stock, most of the evidence of decline revolves around
social, even moral characteristics.
So-called "poor" neighborhoods most often achieve this
status when they show signs of increased vanda]ism, crime and
high fire rates, lower levels of neighborhood maintenance and
cleanliness, increased pessimism about the area's future, and
economic disinvestment by property owners. Yet these are not
structural or physical conditions; they reflect the civic culture
of the community. To say that poverty influences this culture is
reasonable, but to say that poverty determines it flies in the
face of 200 years in which ethnic groups used collective
disipline to overcome their problems.
Under this sort of characterization, people without money
lose all dignity as well. Planners merely assume that the poor
are incapable of exercising the control over their lives that we
associate with civic virtue and responsibility. Earlier
generations of ethnics used political organizations--unions, par-
ty machines--to achieve economic improvements. The new ways of
describing poor neighborhoods simply assume that the current
generation of ethnics is not capable of the same procedure,
despite an ab-mdance of evidence that it is. Thus,
many planners propose not to redistribute resources to the poor,
but to redistribute the poor to enough middle-class communities
so that they can be absorbed within them.
Unfortunately, this solution is almost a contradiction in
terms. If poor people really are inherently dirty as long as they
are poor, why won't they merely bring marginal neighborhoods down
as they are forced to live in them instead of being pulled up by
the bootstraps of the middle-class? It would seem that civic
problem- require civic or political solutions. There is no purely
economic strategy tnat by itself will do the job.
Alternatively, the so-called "stable, middle-class"
neighborhood where residents refuse to work together on common
problems would vanish overnight the moment real estate
speculators or developers decide to terrify the homeowners in-
to leaving. The difference between stability and instability in
both cases, then, is not economics--it is politics, defined as
the ability of people to organize their collective life.
Why, then, can't city governments accept the problem for
what it is and establish a rule that responds directly to
it--namely, if a neighborhood can be organized, it can be saved,
no matter how poor; if a neighborhood cannot be organ-
ized, it cannot be preserved, no matter how rich. Other factors
are important, to be sure--economic level, ethnic
characteristics, age of housing stock, family size, community
location. Yet they are important, in this framework, only inso-
far as they influence and can be influenced by organized
community activity. Political organization may be less likely in
a poor neighborhood that in a rich one, but it is not
impossible--as the Welfare Rights Organization has shown.
Through political action or civic action, people can save
themselves; without it, there is almost nothing anyone can do to
make a difference.
A community development strategy that took politics
seriously, then, would restore the term "community development"
to its original meaning--namely a process of community political
education. A Community Development Office would rank
neighborhoods not in terms of economic or physical
characteristics, but in terms of their level of civic
organization.
Consider the following five stages of political development,
moving from the lowest level to the hiqhest:
Stage 1. Disorganization
The neighborhood has no organized civic groups. There are a few
neighborhood institutions like churches, with some members who
live within the neighborhood, but these are doing nothing to
solve community problems. The political parties are not well
organized in the neighborhood and the voting turnout is
low.
Stage 2. Fragmented
The neighborhood has certain strong local institutions, like
churches, but these do not work together, nor do they focus on
the problems of the community. There may also be a few block
clubs dealing with immediate issues of cleanliness and
security, but there is still no civic organization trying to cope
with the neighborhood as a whole.
Stage 3. Organizing
A civic group or local party organization is working actively to
pull the neighborhood together. It boasts a small membership,
runs a monthly meeting, and has begun to deal with government and
private institutions around problems like housing and service
delivery. The neighborhood institutions--churches, agencies
are aware of the organization, support it, but do not give it
much help. The voting turnouts are better than average.
Stage 4. Organized
The civic group or party boasts a strong membership, including
representation on every block and at least 10% of the families.
It is meeting regularly with city officials and private
institutions on issues of neighborhood improvement, and its
monthly meetings bring out at least 25 or 30 people. The
neighborhood institutions contribute actively to the work of the
organization, either by donating space, or by encouraging their
own members to belong, or both. The group periodically brings
members to City Council meetings to testify on important neighbor
hood issues.
Stage 5. Communal
The civic group or party involves virtually everyone in the
neighborhood and runs an elaborate program of economic and social
development. Belonging to the neighborhood group would be almost
a requirement of citizenship in the neighborhood, and its members
would be involved in things like a local food co-op, or
day-care center or credit union, or community development
corporation. The neighborhood would have a block council whose
members would attend at least one monthly meeting, and whose
captains would get together regularly as well. The neigh-
borhood voting turnouts would be quite strong.
The role of a Community Development office, then, would be to
move neighborhoods rrom low levels of organization to higher
ones. The criteria for saving unorganized or fragmented
neighborhoods would be the willingness of local institu-
tions like churches or block clubs to undertake a process of
community organizing. If they would not, then the development
office would have every right to assume that the residents did
not care enough about the neighborhood to save it.
If they did care enough, however, the office would insure
that some results would flow up from each level of
organization--expanded trash pickups in response to community
cleanups; limited housing rehabilitation in response to block
organization, economic development in response to higher levels
of civic organization. It would be foolish to reduce the process
to a formula, since different neighborhoods would have different
needs. Yet this approach would at least give neighborhood
residents themselves a feeling that they could control their
destiny providing they were willing to work together in
the effort.
The alternative to redistributing or recycling the poor,
then, should reflect a proposition that most planners
ignore--namely, that through political organization, people can
create a civic culture that makes community development possible.
The idea may not sit well with the professionals, for whom
every problem must have a market solution. Yet it is consistent
with fundamental premises of democracy. It seems to me that of
all principles, these are the ones that a community development
program ought to be considering first.
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