For Release Sunday, November 28, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Could it be? That there’s a smarter way for cities and towns to bolster their local economies and tax bases?
We know the old and familiar way — grant tax subsidies or other special favors to nail down new office or factory prospects. Local tax bases take a hit and all taxpayers end up subsidizing the favored businesses.
But to draw both investment and talented individuals — demonstrably the base of strong economies in today’s globalizing world — cities might focus more intensely on the qualities that most prominently build residents’ attachment to their communities.
That’s the key finding emerging from three successive years of polling in which the Gallup organization has queried close to 43,000 people on commission from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (available at www.soulofthecommunity.org).
Notably, the usual suspects — jobs, the economy, safety — don’t register as the top drivers of higher attachment. Rather, the surveys indicated that loyalty to and passion for cities is most powerfully formed by “soft” factors.
First, the polling suggests, it’s social offerings — places where people can meet and mix, ranging from social community events to vibrant nightlife, all contributing to a sense that people of a community care about each other.
Second, it’s openness — a substantial share of residents feeling their communities are good places for older people, young singles, families with young children, or racial and ethnic minorities. They do tend to be more negative about the welcoming mat for immigrants, gays and lesbians.
Third, aesthetics — parks and attractive watersides, tree-lined streets, playgrounds and trails — contribute to feelings of attachment.
Finally, education — especially having colleges and universities in town — is nudging up in the surveys.
The significant point is that communities scoring well on these “soft” factors also have a higher economic rates of growth — local “GDP” — than jurisdictions which offer less “quality of life” assets and presumably stick with “hard” growth strategies like direct subsidies to business.
Gallup’s polling for the project covers 26 cities where the Knight brothers once owned newspapers. The range from such big urban centers as Philadelphia, Detroit, Charlotte and Miami to small-city America in such spots as Lexington, Ky., and Aberdeen, S.D. — in sum not a bad cross-section of urban America.
Not surprisingly, some of the lowest levels of citizen attachment were found in such economically hard-pressed cities as Detroit and Gary, Ind., and some of the highest in cities both university-rich and relatively affluent, such as Boulder, Colo., and State College, Pa.
But the significant “takeaway” of the survey is “to design interventions to increase residents’ attachment to the place they live” — regardless of the city’s size or current complexion — notes Paula Ellis, the Knight Foundation’s vice president for strategic initiatives.
“Our theory,” says Jon Clifton, Gallup deputy director, “is that when a community’s residents are highly attached, they will spend more time there, spend more money; they’re more productive and tend to be more entrepreneurial.”
Having been personally acquainted with the late George Gallup, father of the Gallup Poll (and modern opinion surveying), I’m sure he’d be delighted seeing the organization he founded probing the ties between a city’s civic values and economy. For years Gallup chaired the National Civic League’s All-America Cities juries, hearing and honoring stories of communities’ self-help efforts.
But Gallup’s poll for Knight goes further: It runs in the flow — and may well be the global leader for cities — of a growing trend to measure citizens’ sense of well-being and satisfaction by other means than cold fiscal reckoning.
The groundwork was laid by Nobel Prize winner economist Joseph Stiglitz’s criticism of standard GDP measures which gauge levels of production and money income, but ignore what easily matters as much or more — the safety and quality of peoples’ communities, social inclusion, educational opportunities and health, and controlling greenhouse gas emissions and other unsustainable burdens on the natural environment.
In today’s GDP world, the auto body-work and hospital bills following a car wreck qualify as GDP gains — but not a cleaned-up brownfield turned into city park or housing.
In response to Stiglitz’ findings, French President Nicolas Sarkozy last year announced he would include happiness and wellbeing in France’s measure of economic progress.
In Britain, the new prime minister, David Cameron, appears poised to initiate nationwide measures of citizens’ psychological and environmental well-being — notwithstanding, as the Guardian reports, “nervousness” of testing the public mood in the midst of draconian nationwide budget cutting.
Gauging peoples’ wellbeing, Cameron has declared, is one of the “central political issues of our time.”
If he’s right, it’s as important for cities as for entire countries.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.
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6 Comments
We need the local governments to wake up to this and take actions
Message received from Peter Brink– a wise observer of cities formerly with the National Trust for Historic Preservation:
I suggest that the summary in your excellent column on the Gallup/Knight drivers of community attachment should use their wording of “physical beauty and green spaces” in describing one of the three main drivers. This would seem to include the physical beauty of neighborhoods and downtowns, made up in good part of homes and buildings. The questions did not test “a sense of place,” which could well have included the heritage evident in a community. I can add that one of the reasons we chose to move to Vermont was the wonderful wholeness of beautiful countryside and beautiful communities, including their historic and architectural qualities. (The actual Gallup/Knight summary states: “… the study has found that three main qualities attach people to place: social offerings, such as entertainment venues and places to meet, openness (how welcoming a place is) and the area’s aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces)).”
We all know this to be true. So why is it so hard to put it into public policy? We travel to Hawaii and Tuscany for the scenery and quality of the community life but we buy more and more stuff advertised on billboards in our own backyards.
Great piece. The Soul of the Community research is so very important at this moment because it reveals a set of opportunities that should be incredibly attractive to leaders at all levels (civil society actors and government officials), champions of the vibrant “deliberative democracy” movement, and the philanthropic community; when people feel attached to their communities they are more creative, productive and prosperous — and it is possible to design interventions to increase attachment that depend as much and more on social imagination as on money. Anyone who has serious love for their community, as I do for mine in Brooklyn NY, knows full well that social imagination is essential in our lives—and we also know quite a bit and are always learning more about how to deploy that imagination to improve neighborhood aesthetics, opportunities for meaningful social interaction, and openness. And our troubled economic times has made that imagination ever-more important. It’s unfortunate (and often unjust) to miss out on opportunities for improving one’s life because of how resources are distributed, but it’s absolutely tragic to miss out on opportunities because of failures of imagination. This research should not be interpreted to suggest that money doesn’t matter; those with greater resources will certainly have more time to dedicate to the development of their social imagination and therefore, issues of economic justice cannot be shunted to the side when thinking about attachment. However, money isn’t enough and the “low hanging fruit” around possible interventions to increase attachment – those that would not require significant investment of money to pull off successfully, but instead depend on creativity and collaboration – are plentiful indeed.
Community gardens, member-operated food and child-care cooperatives, and super-fun playgrounds are a few of the things that my own neighborhood has which contribute to the love and loyalty of its residents— and they each exist and thrive, in very large measure, because of the ongoing efforts of ‘ordinary folks’ who have busy lives and are often struggling to make ends meet. My active involvement in my community is essential, as is the involvement of a critical mass of my neighbors. And it’s important to note that my community involvement has its origins in economic necessity, rather than in a sense of civic responsibility; my ability to access cheap, high quality food and childcare, as well as a variety of green spaces to enjoy in our mainly concrete world, is dependent on my active collaboration with neighbors. The work we do together can sometimes be time consuming but we have come to feel that it is vital, and so we continue to find time to participate even as we struggle to balance work and family. And in the process of working together to paint walls and plant flowers, we build social trust and our attachments are only deepened. There’s a virtuous circle at work here, and one that can and should be widely replicated through particular kinds of interventions.
Another element of the Soul of the Community work that is especially timely concerns the Gallup finding around openness; in our hostile, polarized political landscape where we have ever-greater capacity to tailor the torrent of information to create perfect echo-chambers and gated communities of the mind, it is hard to imagine that people might actually want to interact with people who are different from themselves. But anyone who has done the work of engaging communities in problem-solving knows that people do in fact crave opportunities to interact with lots of different kinds of people. And those who have lived in diverse, vibrant communities also know that life is better and happier when your neighbors aren’t identical to you and/or each other. In the 1890’s, American landscape/park designer Frederick Law Olmstead created the main green space in Brooklyn, Prospect Park, and he was intentional in designing its paths and pastures so that people from very different backgrounds would be obliged to socialize together. The brilliance of this idea is not lost on anyone who spends a great deal of time in the park, and the role it plays in life in Brooklyn resonates with the Soul of the Community findings in curious and instructive ways.
While I agree with the comment above that leaders must sit up and take notice of the Soul of the Community findings, and use those findings to inform their decision-making, the Gallup findings should also be viewed as a call to action for all of us who either professionally or personally (or both, in my case) can attest to the civic and democratic power of what John Dewey called “social intelligence creatively applied.”
My son is in East Timor at present. He said the people are dirt poor but happy friendly inclusive helpful cheerful. They have nothing in the material sense. He has seen a vastly different life style and happiness levels far above what he sees living in Sydney.
Seems quality of life there is rather better than here in Australia in many ways.
The growing interest in measuring “citizens’ sense of well-being and satisfaction by other means than cold fiscal reckoning” is visible in the field of public health’s gradual embrace of a broad definition of “health” and concomitant broadening of focus on determinants of health such as those assessed in the Soul of the Community project. A tool for addressing those determinants through the kinds of civic engagement that Alison Kadlec rightly emphasizes is the Health Impact Assessment.
Used for years in Europe and elsewhere but relatively new to the U.S., an HIA may grow out of a community’s interest or concern about potential impacts of a pending decision, or that of a public or private decision-making entity. Its process is deeply rooted in philosophies of equity and participation, transparency and evidence; it marries stakeholder wisdom and priorities with scientific evidence so that all involved gain new types of knowledge and become better able to make health-promoting choices. The process can enrich community capacity and efficacy and deepen social connection, while sensitizing “outside” decision-makers to the interests of those affected, helping all “sides” work together toward positive outcomes.
The North American HIA Practice Standards Working Group issued Version 2 of the Minimum Elements and Practice Standards for Health Impact Assessment last month. They can be accessed at the above link.