Community Design CD12: Report: August 2007

Examine CD12's Geography of Race, Ethnicity and Class

The study of the linkage between minority households and factors such as housing constraint and segregation, or labor market opportunities and regional employment decentralization establish geographies of limited opportunity and mobility. People of Washington Heights and Inwood where do you go from here?

Early twentieth century housing policies encouraged defacto economic segregation. This contributed strongly to racial isolation, but also contributed to relatively successful economic clusters. Imbalances in wealth is a subject separate from establishing the capacity to create and protect it from the onset. However, since the 1990s changes leading to more successfully integrated (class/income/race) communities have been ongoing. There are two notable exceptions in Asian and Latino populations that require greater understanding and new policy. New York City is perhaps the most diverse city imaginable and because of this, the question of how language-based neighborhoods become more broadly functional in the larger society is a good question.

In effect, the process of “breaking out” from a localized economic model begins with families, small business formation, and remittances to home countries. The "economic multiplier" begins with the family. It involves extended social relationships that lead to savings clubs that can become credit unions and banks. Expanded reliance on the extended family helps to form structures of acknowledgement that become business partnerships. Cash sent home from wages or a business draws its capital from this capacity to internalize community development in “the family” and a neighborhood, but the policy point that needs to "sink in" is that both take a generation or two to develop and it requires being “left alone” and that it is self-imposed on many levels.

The publication of the “Newest New Yorker” series by the Department of City Planning, is evidence of the failure to move the dialogue beyond the obvious of who or where the "newest" live. The most recent wave of immigration (Hispanic, Latino and Asian) is born of civil law suits in the late 1960s that proved a pattern of discrimination in U.S. immigration policy. But this is the real point, the model of two to three generations of business and cultural development that re-builds places like the Lower East Side is now sliding into the world of myth. You can tell "bootstrap" stories. They would be true, but no one will believe them today -- must be myth.

The need to invent new forms of action research in places such as Washington Heights and Inwood is extraordinarily important in New York City. Here, over 80% of the population is Latino of which 70% is Dominican. This is important because we might bear witness to an enormous struggle to prevent a cultural disappearing act. The term Nos Quedamos defines this pressure as Project Remain and We Stay. The question must be what will remain of the Latino experience during a period of continuing household impoverishment, slow economic growth and declining real wages in Manhattan above 155th Street.

Enter Robert Putnam

The negative effects of localized social, economic and political diversity are overcome with a healthy sense of nationalism according to Robert Putnam’s highly disciplined research. This may be the case in general, but there are places that are “positioned” by more powerful social, economic, and political forces as containing “personas temporales” in Spanish or 临时人 in Chinese. In large cities such as New York, social solidarity allows strangers as the norm, in less diverse communities’, behaviors such as “sundown” towns become more likely. This positive/negative and jingoist/turncoat dichotomy is a two way street.

Concisely, Putnam’s recent half decade worth of research points to the global inevitability of diversity by pointing out its positives in a review of its negatives. His research has found that the more ethnically diverse the “neighborhood”, the less likely you are to trust your local storekeeper or dentist for that matter, regardless of his or her ethnicity. On the other hand the more ethnically diverse, the “city” the more likely you are to develop relationships that transcend the neighborhood’s social or ethnic sense of security as a product of internal social solidarity. Given the positive of an economic multiplier that secures wealth in the family and the neighborhood, then the negatives of diversity (not trusting those outside the family or neighborhood) are more likely overcome by establishing a base upon which negotiations and creative exchanges are possible.

Debate on these measures by research specialists from the Community Service Society and others would yield a set of variables such as cost burden, business ownership, and property control ratios, median and per capita wages; job access and reverse commute figures, linguistic isolation, and so on. These measures would be selected and built up to define neighborhoods that can and should be given time. Time to organize, identify strategies, and implement programs coordinated well enough to establish a powerful base for targeted improvements in an internalized capacity to control investment rates, protect tenants, and build businesses. The objective is to defend against resident and labor force displacement, whether or not it is compelled legally, illegally and otherwise. When the constituency sought is in effect, “new” every two to three years it is nearly impossible to accomplish these purposes. On the other side of this coin lies the possibility of well-known urban pathologies such as gang style resistance designed to “defend the block” from outsiders. These too are measures of grass-roots reaction to external threats that press down on the quality of life in the form of rapidly deteriorating building conditions, seasonal employment, and irrational, as well as, rational fear of immigration policies defined by “in or out” resident alien status that push people into a form of political invisibility.

The intellectual rigor of Putnam’s research team establishes strong controls for a wide range of factors such as poverty, residential mobility, and education to define measures of inequality. In a community such as Washington Heights and Inwood, Putnam’s term of “hunkering down” has value in its production of social solidarity. In the short term it provides a basis for increased diversity as a friendly force for building a modernizing society. Modernization is a proven asset for creative social exchange and economic growth. The central measure is therefore relatively blunt. In a place such as New York City it would be unlikely to hear vitriol in a “them and us” debate, complemented with demands to conform to “our” way of life. It is more subtle here, and wrapped up in an economic models used to define the higher and better use of real estate, especially in the form of housing. In this sense, neighborhoods such as Washington Heights and Inwood, can if supported in doing so, buy the time needed. The jargon used by Putnam defines a unique capacity to defend successfully against forces that would kill the formation of “bridging capital” that build group to group interdependence, neighborhood-to-city relationships and the “bonding capital” essential to healthy personal relationships.

Community Design CD12: Report

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Defining CD12

Thursday, August 16, 2007

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