The Dislocation of Relocation

(Cross-posted from the Breakthrough Generation blog)

Much as I love my fellow leftists, we have the habit of continually making some pretty crippling oversights in our political views. For example, we very often underestimate the importance of community and social connections. Nowhere is this more evident than in proposals, such as the 1994 “Moving to Opportunity” initiative in Chicago to move massive numbers of families out of poor urban neighborhoods and disperse them into the suburbs: proposals that are not nearly as uniformly beneficial as many leftists would like to think they are.

Such ideas are fundamentally flawed insofar as they fail to take into account the non-material impacts of picking a family up and moving them to a new subdivision, neighborhood, or town. Moving, particularly when it involves crossing racial and/or socioeconomic lines, is a difficult thing to do. You arrive in your new “home” as a stranger in a strange land, a de facto outsider even in the most welcoming of communities.

But community is not just a network of acquaintances: it is a set of practices, customs, and shared understandings that can only be fully grasped over time. Rather than being something that simply exists, every community is actively created, and then sustained, by its constituents. The practices can be as weighty as voting, as mundane as putting out the recycling for pickup on the correct day, or as ingrained as using the correct local slang words. But they are all essential to the character of a particular community. To do them, and do them correctly, is to be included; to fail to do them, even if you tried your best, is to be marked as outside the shared experience of the locals (epitomized by that most exclusionary of questions – “you’re not from around here, are you?”).

Relocating people out of urban ghettos and into the suburbs flies in the face of this notion of community. The newly-settled often find themselves unmistakably differentiated from their new neighbors, be it by skin color, preferred style of clothing, accent, or any number of other characteristics. After all, the whole point of these programs is to bring people out of the cities and into areas with a “healthier” culture, which must necessarily be different from that of the urban areas in at least a few important ways.

It is likely that at least some of the values, support systems, and norms of suburban communities are indeed healthy ones, ones that we would like to see develop in all groups of people. But relocating people to the suburbs fails to highlight these contrasts, or if it does, it highlights them in a way that serves to alienate and discomfit the new arrivals. The poor may end up making more money after moving to the suburbs, but the act of moving tears them from the fabric of their community and then clumsily tries to incorporate them into a fully-developed suburban social scene. The aftereffects of this often mitigate the quality-of-life improvements stemming from increased income.

So how do we address the very real problems of life in urban ghettos without destroying communities? To me, the solution is to go directly to the urban areas themselves. Fix up inner-city schools rather than busing kids out to the suburbs. Invest in after-school programs and other extracurricular activities. Rebuild dilapidated buildings, creating jobs in construction as well as in whatever companies end up occupying the new spaces. Yes, any sort of intervention will inevitably force some aspects of an existing community to change, and as such, these types of efforts are not entirely free from the destructive effects I described above. But by allowing people to stay in the same homes and social networks, we would preserve quite a lot of what made that particular community what it was, something that is far more important than most leftists are willing to admit.