Rebuilding A Sense Of Community
Not long ago, a beloved local hardware store in Simi Valley shut down after some 30 years in business, driven out by a national “big box” chain that had opened nearby. The store’s closure stimulated the usual bittersweet news stories. Residents nostalgically recalled the store’s hometown atmosphere and personal service that had helped give their community an identity over the years, even as they bought their hammers and window frames at the chain store. Simi Valley would never be the same, they lamented.
This kind of story has been a staple in U.S. journalism ever since the first “big box” chain, F.W. Woolworth Co., began pushing small, locally owned retail stores off the Main Streets of America. It’s always a good story, because it allows us to bemoan the passing of small-town America and wonder aloud how we will be able to sustain communities without a strong foundation of thriving mom-and-pop commerce.
Throughout the 20th century, locally owned businesses--the newspaper, the bank, the department store--not only served as economic foundations for U.S. communities, they also were the social and cultural glue that held them together. The owners lived in the town where their businesses operated and were just as tethered to the town’s future as the lowliest factory worker. Today, the local newspaper is typically a link in a chain whose headquarters is on the other side of the country, the local bank is usually owned by a bigger one based in Charlotte, N.C., and the local department store is tethered not to Main Street but to Wall Street. Even the local hospital seems destined to be a for-profit operation and securitized by some investment banker in world capital markets.
So, can we really count on local commerce to serve as the glue of U.S. cities in the 21st century? In the decades ahead, all kinds of local businesses either will be gobbled up by chains or digitalized into websites on the Internet. How can the intimate community connections of the Main Street era thrive in a future of cookie-cutter mini-malls and one-click shopping? How will we rebuild the social and cultural fabrics of our towns?
It’s instructive to remember that Main Street always included more than just commerce. Civic and community institutions also played an important role in shaping towns. Typically public or nonprofit, they were not yoked to the expediency of local commerce but to the more enduring common interests of a town’s residents. On the Main Street of 70 years ago, alongside every bank was a library and within blocks of every newspaper or department store was a civic auditorium.
Today, these civic institutions--libraries, performing-arts centers, schools, farmers’ markets, youth-sports leagues,service clubs--are on the rise again. They hold the potential to be the new glue of U.S. towns by drawing people back into community life.
Ironically, these are the same civic institutions that have suffered as a result of the decline of Main Street commerce. As community culture diminished, schools downsized, libraries closed and arts centers and museums fell into disuse. In many cases, these institutions deteriorated because they depended on outmoded ideas about taxation and philanthropy to survive. A more cutthroat global economy has meant that most communities no longer have the luxury to spend either public or charitable dollars on what many view as community frills. Furthermore, the local base of wealth and leadership required to maintain the necessary financial support is vanishing.
Yet, all these civic institutions are reinventing themselves. Paradoxically, the same technological changes that have hastened the decline of local businesses have compelled civic institutions to reexamine how they connect with their communities. People will no longer visit them simply because they are there. After all, why go to a library or a museum when you can sit in your bedroom and quickly scan information or art exhibits on the World Wide Web? Recognizing they must change, civic institutions have begun to reach out and grab their townspeople with innovative approaches.
Libraries offer the best example. No civic institution has been thrown more deeply into crisis by the financial and technological changes of the last 20 years. Because of the tax-revenue squeeze, libraries cannot count on automatic financial support from governments. Because of the emergence of the Internet, many are questioning the library’s traditional role as a community’s central repository of information unavailable anywhere else.
Many libraries are rising to the challenge by transforming themselves into places where townspeople go not just to read but to do. The successful library is a parade of people, activities, programs, attractions--a collection of events that draws people away from their televisions and computers and, by doing so, helps them restore the sense of community identity that has been missing ever since the local bank or the local department store got swallowed by a chain.
Other civic institutions are similarly transforming themselves. Museums and performing-arts centers are making unprecedented moves to establish more intimate connections to their surrounding communities. In addition to their traditional role as centers of learning, schools increasingly serve as meeting places for neighborhood organizations, many of which grew out of local PTAs. In poor neighborhoods, they also act as catalysts for social services, involving parents in crime-prevention efforts or programs to reduce drug use.
There’s no guarantee that even these civic or nonprofit institutions will remain free of the trend toward placeless commoditization. Who would have believed a decade ago that local nonprofit hospitals would be passing from the scene? More and more civic institutions will feel similar pressure in the future. Seeking to cut costs, many local governments are still stripping down or attempting to privatize these centerpieces of community life. Riverside County, for example, recently turned its entire library system over to a private company based in another state, in hope of improving service and reducing costs.
While these attempts at privatization make financial sense to the politicians who champion them, they represent a fundamental misreading of the role that civic institutions play in community life. When Main Street commerce declined, government tried to pick up the slack. In time, however, government lost credibility as well as revenue. The restoration of these vital civic institutions--hence: the renewal of America’s communities--will not come from business alone, or from government alone, or even from government trying to pretend it’s a businesslike operation, as in Riverside County. Rather, it mostly will come from the civic and nonprofit sector, where business, government and community leaders cooperate to forge a new and lasting political consensus about community life. These days, more often than not, community nonprofit organizations are the entities that can “get things done.”
None of this should suggest that there won’t be any Main Street commerce in the 21st century or that surviving local commerce won’t play a formative role in creating a new civic identity. But it’ll be a different formula. The traditional local bookstore or hardware store will survive, oddly enough, by expanding into a regional chain or metamorphosing into a specialty or boutique operation capable of exploiting global commerce. On Main Street in downtown Ventura, for example, one locally owned mystery bookstore thrives mostly because of its online sales operation upstairs, not because of its books downstairs.
In equally unexpected fashion, this metamorphosis will combine with the revival of civic institutions to rebuild the fabric of our communities. By tapping global markets rather than relying on local markets, local businesses will stabilize and make money. This will enable their owners to become the community leaders who will help reinvent the civic institutions that will give our communities their sense of cohesiveness and identity in the 21st century.
