Redefining the American Dream
A Q&A with Author Seth Kaplan, Part II
Last week, I shared Part I of II in my Q&A with Seth Kaplan, author of Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society One Zip Code at a Time. In that Q&A, Seth wrote the following:
“…What America has is a fragile society, and that the heart of our social decay is not something national but something local, with effects showing up downstream in our politics. The less we are connected to one another—embedded in institutions that support us and those around us in our daily lives—the more destructive our social problems are likely to be.”
In the below conversation, we discuss “social poverty,” brain drain, micro-institutions, and the power of particularity. In the midst of an “I”-focused and virtually obsessed society, what does it mean to prioritize the “we”—and to focus our time, efforts, and attention where we are?
Seth explores and answers these questions below. But you also have the opportunity to hear his thoughts live, this Friday, May 10 at 11:30 (EST). On Zoom, Seth and I will discuss his book and work in greater depth — you can sign up for that event at the link below:
I can’t wait to see you all there!
Cheers,
Gracy
Q: In Fragile Neighborhoods, you write that while economic poverty is a problem, “social poverty” is just as dangerous (perhaps even more so?). What is “social poverty,” and how does it impact people in the United States?
Mother Teresa once said, “We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.” When social ties are weak, material wealth alone is not enough to protect a society from the risks of social poverty—which is why drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, and mental health struggles are all too common in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, despite all disposable income that wealthier people enjoy. When our neighborhood social habitat doesn’t provide support structures, it takes a toll on our emotional, psychological, and physical health because our most basic needs aren’t satisfied.
What is social poverty? A lack of support from other people due to weak local institutions, unhelpful social norms, and a lack of robust social connections. In places that are socially impoverished, residents are less likely to receive help with their kids, locate a mentor or helpful contact when they need career help, or find support when they need hand-me-downs or extra cash to get through the month. More broadly, they are less likely to want to let another person know that they are in difficult enough straits to need help. They get stuck, and this yields more anxiety, isolation, and alienation.
Distinguishing between the material and social is essential. So well-off neighborhoods can be socially impoverished and poor neighborhoods can be socially rich. For example, the Amish, Hasidic Jews and enclaves of Somalis, Jamaicans, Vietnamese, and other immigrant groups usually have little material wealth but enjoy strong cultural and familial bonds. These strong social ties help them find jobs, get advice on navigating school or applying for college, and befriend neighbors. People help each other out, come together to manage difficulties, and support each other’s efforts to move upward in society.
Q: In the second part of your book, you look at practical solutions, and study the work of individuals who are trying a “sideways approach” to the social poverty we’re facing as a country. What are some of your favorite stories from these chapters? As you were interviewing these community leaders, were there any stories or experiences that surprised you?
To understand how we can restore our social fabric, I studied the successes of five leading-edge social repairers working to revitalize the relationships and social habitats across neighborhoods located everywhere from rural Kentucky to inner-city Detroit. Unlike most organizations working to address social problems, these organizations don’t simply breeze into town, apply Band-Aid solutions, and move on. Rather, they work hand in hand with local leaders and residents to strengthen the social institutions that have the most impact on people’s daily lives, through entry points like marriage, family structure, community, schools, and the built landscape. After establishing trust, they work to develop and implement models that can be sustained and scaled up locally over time. In many cases, they focus on fostering social ties across groups that previously did not exist (for example, across race and social class) and redefining the social norms across locales.
Each of the five stories behind these organizations offer a message of hope as well as a practical strategy and set of lessons that we can learn from. For example, Life Remodeled had a great idea to transform a fragile neighborhood—establish an opportunity hub that brings into the area dozens of organizations working on youth, health, and jobs—but by putting the “what and how” before the “who and when”, ran into a wall of mistrust with local residents. While a lot of this mistrust was the legacy of racism, some of it was also simply outsiders not giving locals enough influence and authority over what happens in their place. Chris Lambert, the founder and head of LR, had to learn how to become a real neighbor—someone people trusted with their neighborhood’s most important physical asset: the school building LR renovated to establish the hub. This entailed everything from showing up over and over again, breaking bread, having lots of small group meetings street by street, hiring locals, giving key local leaders an important guiding role, offering residents real say over what goes on in the hub, and continuously listening to their concerns. It was a difficult journey, but one with real reward and impact at the end of it.
While I found surprises in each of these stories, the biggest surprise in writing the book was how many people want to make their communities stronger and yet feel let down by larger forces in the country. This presents both an enormous challenge to our society as well as a great opportunity. How can we catalyze all this local energy to better our nation?
Q: As you studied and interviewed individuals working in community centers, schools, and other spaces, was there a particular community institution that struck you as more important than others in building associational health?
While many institutions matter to the success of a neighborhood, family clearly has the biggest impact on the health of its associational life and the people who live there. Strong families are more likely to have a commitment to a particular place, keep a watch on streets (yielding less crime), and be involved in schools and churches, both of which incubate a lot of neighborhood relationships. Marriage and children keep you embedded in deep, mutually dependent relationships day in and day out in a way that no other commitment can, teaching you to trust, care, act responsibly, compromise, sacrifice, do for others, and act politely—all essential to a healthy, cohesive society. Family is also one of the greatest incubators of what I like to call micro-institutions, which grow organically out of school pickups, playdates, neighborhood parent groups, and other activities that lighten the daily load and bring people together.
As this highlights, one of the most important dynamics in any neighborhood are inter-family relationships—a topic rarely spoken about. The stronger these are, the more likely lots of micro-institutions—rarely registered but nevertheless immensely influential—will be spawned. A flourishing neighborhood will be abundant in both micro and small, local institutions, which combine to provide a web of social support nurturing us day in and day out, bringing joy in small doses on a regular basis.
These social influences explain why strong families tend to concentrate in some neighborhoods while weak families are more likely to concentrate in other neighborhoods, in each case generating significant spillover effects on the neighborhood’s institutions, norms, and social fabric. Economist Raj Chetty has shown how neighborhoods with large numbers of single-parent families pull achievement for all children down—including those living in intact families. The result is either a virtuous or a vicious cycle—with social habitats improving or deteriorating over time.
Q: One of the major harms to struggling neighborhoods or rural locales is the exodus of people who worry that staying put will limit their future prospects and even endanger their physical health at times. Of course, over time, this exodus often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more people leave, the more others are tempted to leave. As you write, “Left with fewer leaders, role models, working families, and economic resources in their midst, the social dynamics deteriorate even further, producing new social problems that obstruct change and reinforce harmful patterns.” How might we address, or at least begin addressing, this problem?
Every place needs a human resources strategy in the same way that organizations have. Whether you are looking at a rural county or an urban block, leaders need to ask: How do we retain and attract people? Neighborhoods—as well as towns and rural areas—need enough physical, economic/commercial, and social assets to continuously make the place attractive to individuals, families, and business if they are to sustain themselves over time. I walk through the practicalities of what’s needed in my book—things like strong local identities, schools, economic opportunities, mentors, mixed-income housing, main streets where people can meet, and institutions where leaders can blossom and steward an area. If, as we noted above, families are the keystone institution for rich associational life, then neighborhoods might start with what makes a place family friendly. Let’s ask our neighbors: Is this the kind of place you’d like to grow up? If not, what will make it that kind of place?
Many rural areas, smaller cities, and towns have been losing people in recent decades. To change this dynamic, they must market what makes them more attractive to people who have left or are tempted to leave as well as seek out those looking for a better life. Purpose Built Community, based in Atlanta, transforms distressed, disadvantaged neighborhoods by focusing on four pillars: improving and diversifying the housing stock; enhancing the management of schools; attracting gyms, retailers, and restaurants; and boosting economic vitality. The goal is to spark sufficient change in the underlying dynamic such that it can sustain itself over time. Lead For America draws students from top universities to serve two-year fellowships in public-serving institutions in towns and counties across the country with the idea that they will stay afterward to “build place-based initiatives, start entrepreneurial social ventures, and act as community hubs to broaden and deepen local connection.”
Let’s ask our neighbors: Is this the kind of place you’d like to grow up?
If not, what will make it that kind of place?
Rural areas, smaller cities, and towns generally have cheaper houses, closer family ties, more friendly neighbors, and more opportunities for residents to contribute to building up the place. And thanks to the internet, the wider world is still close at hand. They should lean into these advantages while looking for ways to address whatever shortcomings people may perceive. Benya Kraus, co-founder of Lead for America, describes this ideal: “There is this beautiful small-town pride, pride of place, and as a country, we’d be better if we all had that sense of local ownership to which our identity is tied.”
Q: You write, “we cannot assume that what works in one place will work the same way in another.” What does it mean not just to adopt a sideways approach, but to adopt a particular and prudential approach—one in which we account for the fact that different communities will require different modes of reform and care?
The social fabric of every locale can differ substantially from that of its neighbor. What works in inner-city Detroit is not going to work in rural Appalachia. Every neighborhood—or area, like a rural county—requires us to imitate, reinvent, adapt, and apply the methods used elsewhere in new and unique ways. These efforts should build on local strengths and become embedded in local practices. This entails listening and learning while understanding that whatever model worked elsewhere might not work where you are applying it, and that even within your region, what works in one neighborhood might not work in another. Partners for Rural Impact works closely with schools, local partners, and community leaders in Appalachia Kentucky to adapt their approaches to local needs. Whereas in one locale, the organization might work closely with a capable school principal to develop a college preparation program, in another it might have to work with teachers and community leaders to bolster students struggling in and out of school.
Developing strong relationships and giving locals a leadership role is essential to this process, as natives of any neighborhood or region have an intimate knowledge of people, problems, and ways of working that outsiders don’t, and as such are much more likely to know how to customize and prioritize initiatives and ensure that they get implemented as planned. As Dreama Gentry of PRI writes, “transformational change can only occur when local people do the work within their communities.”
Q: In your last chapter, you beautifully describe your own neighborhood in Kemp Mill. You describe your children’s Jewish community school, weekly kiddush, countless neighborhood activities, and the beauty of Shabbat. It’s such a beautiful vision of what a community can and should look like. On Shabbat, you write, “Streets become full of people walking—to a neighbor’s house, a park, a prayer service, a celebration. Whenever we walk somewhere (or just sit outside), we meet many familiar faces and easily get caught up in conversations. When the weather is good, parks fill up with the noise of children playing together…. Meanwhile, families invite each other over for meals, where we spend long hours (3-4 hours is the norm for us) in deep (and not so deep) conversation over food and drink.” This vision of communal care is so powerful. So few of us have it. What advice would you give to those of us who yearn for this type of deeply rooted community, but do not have it?
While each person who grows up secular and then chooses a religious lifestyle has a different reason, for me it was the warmth of relationships and sense of belonging that mattered more than anything else. I was looking for something that I could not find elsewhere and ended up exploring my Jewish roots at a synagogue. What I thought was a quick stop for a few hours ended up as a journey into the beauty of Shabbat and embrace of a neighborhood-based community. Slowly but surely in the months and years that followed I returned to such experiences more and more often until it became at first a regular and then a central part of my life.
If you are Christian, I would ask what your own church could do to become more of a community. Is there a way to mark space and time in ways that can better bring people together? Can you knit together the variety of Christian institutions in your area so that they overlap and support each other better? Is there an opportunity to make place a more central role in your faith practices? (This was the case for Christians from the early days of the faith until only a few generations ago—remember the parish?)
Of course, a religious lifestyle won’t appeal to everyone. We can all foster more meaningful relationships and build stronger, more supportive communities by recalibrating our priorities to better balance individual and collective needs. Practically speaking, this means prioritizing family, children, community, neighborhood, and local institutions more than other causes or even ourselves at times, with a recognition that our own well-being depends as much (or more) on belonging than on autonomous “freedom.” Family and children keep us embedded in deep, mutually dependent relationships day in and day out in a way that no other commitment can. Reorienting our charity so that it has a strong localist bent with lots of volunteering embeds us in local institutions with people living nearby.
Tocqueville wrote, “The love and respect of your neighbors must be gained by a long series of small services, hidden deeds of goodness, a persistent habit of kindness, and an established reputation of selflessness.” In fact, formal organizations are most influential when the social connections they nurture take on a life of their own, extending beyond official meetings and activities sponsored by the organization and into public spaces, shops, and homes. As Mauricio Miller, founder of the non-profit UpTogether, puts it: “Positive actions are constantly happening in every neighborhood and if our society recognizes these home-grown efforts and invests in these efforts, we get millions of tipping points, everywhere.”
If the original understanding of the American Dream could shape our ambitions,
it would remind us to seek happiness and meaning in our relationships and social
structures (and habitats)—and not in the freedom that comes from
escaping those relationships and structures.
Q: Why do you think a reconsideration of the American Dream is vital to restoring neighborhoods and our communal life?
This tension between the individual and the community is a long-standing feature of American life, and the balance has swung back and forth many times through our history. Whereas the American Dream was once about developing a social order in which every person’s potential could be fulfilled, today it has more to do with individual success, material gain, and social mobility. Historian Christopher Lasch called this a “sadly impoverished understanding…its ascendancy, in our time, measures the recession of the dream and not its fulfillment.”
The result is a much-weakened social fabric, with disconnection the norm and a marked decline in neighborhoods and communal life. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks writes, “When the ‘I’ takes precedence over the ‘We,’ the result is weakened relationships, marriages, families, communities, neighborhoods, congregations, charities, regions, and entire societies.” Can we restore the original vision?
If the original understanding of the American Dream could shape our ambitions, it would remind us to seek happiness and meaning in our relationships and social structures (and habitats)—and not in the freedom that comes from escaping those relationships and structures. This means searching outward for the obligations a higher calling urges us to take on, not inward for purely individualistic ends. Jonathan Haidt explains that when he first began writing The Happiness Hypothesis, he believed that
happiness came from within, as Buddha and the Stoic philosophers said thousands of years ago.…But by the time I finished writing, I had changed my mind: Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.
As I note in the book, recognizing the importance of social institutions and habitats should also make us humble. Though we might have the desire to fly free as a bird in whatever direction we want to soar, we depend on “fences” to keep us from wandering too far astray on the ground. Instead of shying away from this reality, we should be embracing it. Deep meaning emerges from accepting limits—the limits of time, space, and choice.
Seth D. Kaplan is a leading expert on fragile states. He is a professorial lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, senior adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and consultant to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, US State Department, US Agency for International Development, and OECD as well as developing country governments and NGOs.
As a reminder, Seth and I will discuss the above ideas—and more—on Zoom in just over a week. Don’t miss it!
Is this discussion available on youtube? (At least I couldn't find it there when I searched for it today.)