What are the problems where you live? Is it impossible to find a parking spot at the Christmas concert? Are the PTA parents overeager and bossy? Is the social calendar overcrowded?
Or does your neighborhood have the opposite problems? The church is crumbling, there are no volunteers to coach Little League or money to maintain the infield, and there are no family activities available since the go-kart place went under during the pandemic.
The most terrible inequality in America right now is the inequality of connection. The unequal distribution of civil society is the fundamental story of our country. Wealthier places tend to have more institutions, such as “Friends of the Park” or a local youth sports league. Poor places tend to lag on everything but churches per person.
The exceptions and nuances to this rule are intriguing and laid out in a new research paper titled Is Civil Society Becoming a Luxury Good?
The authors, American Enterprise Institute scholar Howard Husock and Fulbright scholar Laura Oleson, studied the concentration of nonprofit groups in communities in four states and detected various patterns to explain the exceptions to the rule that higher income means more community.
First, among the places with the most nonprofit organizations were those with both rich and poor. That’s sensible: You have both supply and demand of charitable donations and volunteer capacity.
More interesting were the poorer towns with high social activity. Peru, Indiana, was one, along with Clarksdale, Mississippi. These towns have not only the churches that dot many poor places, but also local civic organizations founded explicitly to preserve and build up the community. They are also distant from big cities and so have to form their own identity. The average working-class small town or neighborhood — Compton in Los Angeles and Portchester, about an hour outside of New York City, are the examples — are civil society deserts. Why?
They lack the distinctive identity that would generate enough local pride to drive community-building. Portchester and Compton are just collections of ZIP codes more than coherent places.
So, America has plenty of community cohesion, but not in the world of grim strip malls and sprawl.
