Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time
Seth D. Kaplan
272 pages, Little, Brown Spark, 2023
Millions of Americans are clustered in neighborhoods beset by crime, discrimination, and housing and food insecurity. They are alone and adrift, both geographically and socially removed from places where the wealthier and better-educated live, and excluded from most of the gains and opportunities the nation’s economic growth brings. The dynamics affecting these places cast a deep shadow on the lives of many, especially children living in poverty, who are more likely to experience physical or psychological trauma. These neighborhood effects explain why children who are born poor are increasingly likely to stay that way. This is especially so for Black people, who are not only less likely to move up the income scale, but also more likely to be stuck in one of these distressed neighborhoods over many generations. While invigorating impoverished neighborhoods has been a recurring focus of public policy and private initiatives for over a century, most efforts fall far short of their goals, at best making an impact on one relatively small area or on the lives of only a small minority of residents. How might we do better?
In Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time, I leverage my years of work on fragile societies all over the world to analyze the root causes of these place’s decline while exploring how those on the frontline—in places such as Detroit, Appalachia Kentucky, and Baltimore—are working to reverse it. My focus is on practical solutions centered on neighborhoods and place-based institutions that can repair the fractured social connections at the heart of our communities and society. When change is hyperlocal, that means we all have an opportunity to contribute.
The excerpt below comes from the penultimate chapter, where I list 10 operational lessons for philanthropists, nonprofits, and policy makers based on the five entry points and organizations examined in the middle part of the book.—Seth D. Kaplan
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In neighborhoods across our country, weakening social bonds have left our communities much more fragile than they should be. We need a call to action—but not any action will do. Americans are enterprising people. We want to help those most affected by social disintegration and breakdown, but despite the best of intentions, too many initiatives actually end up weakening local social systems—undermining local institutions and norms, concentrating economic disadvantage in certain areas, and encouraging businesses, investors, the talented, and the young to flee, making recovery more difficult, and anyone left behind worse off.
What is needed is not more top-down action, but sideways action, neighborhood by neighborhood across the nation. What does this entail? How does it differ from other approaches?
Every neighborhood has its own needs. Whereas better housing, safer streets, and better management of the local schools are required in one place, in another, it may be the strengthening of community institutions, platforms for civic engagement, and social support networks.
Moreover, we cannot assume that what works in one place will work the same way in another. Every neighborhood requires us to imitate, reinvent, adapt, and apply the methods used elsewhere in new and unique ways—ways that build on local strengths and become embedded in local practices. And yet the principles underlying all these efforts are strikingly similar. Whether our focus is on poverty-stricken counties in rural Appalachia, densely packed urban neighborhoods plagued by gun violence and crime, or middle-class suburbs where rates of addiction or suicide are on the rise, our efforts must be place-based, be relationship-focused, encourage social innovation, and spur markets to work constructively for neighborhoods that have been left behind—while remaining realistic about the structural obstacles that stand in the way of change. Here are key operational lessons that social repairers, social and political leaders, and anyone else with a stake in the health of the social ecosystem around them should keep in mind.
Lesson One: Focus on kids—especially boys—because of the high return on investment.
With kids, relatively small initiatives implemented today can have a huge impact—on both the individual and the place they live in—over time. The more supported kids—especially boys—are in their household, on their block, and in their neighborhood, the more likely they are to be a positive force in their own families and communities later on. But the reverse is just as true. Today’s kids become tomorrow’s adults. And social patterns, both good and bad, are transmitted across generations. Sociologists Patrick Sharkey and Felix Elwert have even found evidence that the impact of neighborhood environment on a parent’s educational attainment, occupational choices, income, marriage partner, and mental health can have a substantial impact on their child’s cognitive development. Boys are especially vulnerable to unsupportive social habitats, consistently faring worse than girls who grow up in similarly unstable families and
neighborhoods. Raj Chetty describes how in “areas with more concentrated poverty—take the city of Baltimore, for example—we find very poor outcomes for boys in particular, relative to girls, and we think that that has to do with crime, and getting involved in gangs, and so forth—things that girls are less likely to do.” There is evidence to suggest that mere exposure to these influences can be quite damaging for boys.
But it’s not just boys who grow up in poverty who are at risk. Although a significant minority of men continue to reach the highest echelons of achievement in education and labor markets, men are, on average, moving in the opposite direction. Over the last three decades in the US, levels of skills acquisition, employment rates, occupational stature, and real wage levels for men in the labor market have been on the decline. As economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman explain, “a vicious cycle” may be emerging, “with the poor economic prospects of less-educated males creating differentially large disadvantages for their sons,” and potentially perpetuating the gender gap in the next generation.
Stopping this cycle in its tracks requires prioritizing boys in educational and community programming and investing a lot more in boys’ clubs, after-school sports and activities, and mentorship—ideally pairing at-risk boys with male mentors who can fill the void left by absent role models and are willing to make long-term commitments. Such programming needs to be comprehensive, be consistent, and provide boys with both emotional and practical support well into young adulthood.
More broadly, we need to ensure that young people experience the joys of in-person social life. When summer camps and neighborhood after-school activities practice warm, welcoming engagement, it encourages stickier, longer-lasting commitments. Student government and clubs offering opportunities for serving the school and neighborhoods can impart the practice of stewardship, compromise, and interpersonal responsibility. Limiting social media access until children are at least 16 would help.
Lesson Two: Simultaneously target as many drivers of neighborhood health as you can.
We should always start any social repair effort by engaging deeply with the social system in place. We need to understand how it works in order to identify entry points for change—think of these entry points as levers that can be pulled to make larger shifts occur. Then, we should develop a strategy that simultaneously pulls as many levers as possible.
The levers we have at our disposal fall into two broad categories: the institutions (marriage, family, community, school, business) that determine how healthy or strong a neighborhood is, and the underlying structural factors (housing infrastructure, regional economy, transportation networks, broad cultural forces). The strength of the institutions is what determines how healthy a neighborhood is, but it’s the structural factors that determine what kinds of institutions are likely to take root and grow in the first place. For example, if the broader culture emphasizes autonomy and freedom from all constraints, it will be harder to build institutions that rely on individual contributions to help everyone in the community flourish. Similarly, if the regional economy is weak, businesses, nonprofits, and informal social ties may suffer, yielding fewer employment opportunities for residents, less money for libraries and parks, and less generosity toward neighbors.
Both the institutions and the structural factors are important, but they require different strategies—with different time horizons. While fissures in the institutions (and institutional norms) can be mended in the short to medium term, cracks in the structural landscape are more structural in nature and take longer to repair. And while even small and scrappy social repairers can make a substantial impact on the former, improving the latter often requires a slew of partnerships with deeper-pocketed organizations, government agencies, or moneyed donors.
Of course, any strategy will depend on the resources and assets available. If there are limited resources and few assets to build on in the neighborhood, work must be very targeted. If partnerships develop or budgets expand, so can the scope of the efforts. And if the neighborhood has several key assets to start with, access to a lot of human, social, political, financial, or built capital, and/or the potential for many partnerships, it may be possible to invest in a series of complementary initiatives that can produce significant systemic change. However, in every case, it is important to advance in ways that allow experimentation and learning such that resources are effectively used.
Lesson Three: Establish early-warning systems and make ample use of the right kind of data.
Early detection is an essential component of prevention. Just as international peace organizations use of a variety of early-warning assessments and indicators to head off violent conflict before it occurs, those working to prevent rather than respond to social breakdown can establish a set of early-warning systems to identify neighborhoods heading for trouble before things deteriorate too far. This is especially important in “middle neighborhoods”—places that have been stable in the past, but that are now facing myriad challenges and wavering between growth and decline. Consider how Communio uses data to help churches identify problematic trends in their neighborhoods—and customize programming accordingly. Or how Thread developed an app to monitor the quality of relationships in its families and spot problems before they would be obvious otherwise. Or how PFE harnesses its close relationships with teachers to identify students in need of help. In general, it’s the people on the ground—such as teachers, religious leaders, and engaged members of the community—who can best spot emerging risks. They have the relationships and the access to firsthand information that may not be quantifiable—a change in a child’s appearance, family situation, or performance in school, for example—and that others lack. They may also spot trends in a neighborhood long before those trends show up in hard data. This allows them to design preventive solutions that work upstream from problems, reducing the chance that those problems will appear. For early-warning systems to be effective, as these examples show, social repairers must access and prioritize the use of the right kind of information—on the nature of relationships, social norms, family dynamics, and quality and quantity of local institutions—rather than focusing too much on economic data. In the run-up to the Arab Spring, international actors saw positive macroeconomic indicators coming out of the Middle East and believed the region was on the right trajectory, ignoring the rising dissatisfaction among the population that was a better indicator of where countries were heading. In the same way, we often look at larger economic trends and national or city-level data to gauge the well-being of people, while overlooking how much individual well-being depends on the health of the social ecosystem in which one lives.
Further, social repairers need to gather this data at the right scale—neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block (or subsets of neighborhoods), and social group and by social group (race, ethnicity). Assembling a scorecard of neighborhood indicators from a combination of publicly available data; conversations with organizations, block leaders, and teachers; and surveys for each locale can enable community leaders and organizations to accurately assess their community’s situation, provided they know how to parse out and interpret this information to help them make right decisions on how to move forward.
Metadata points—such as relative property values and transiency rates, family stability, crime statistics, and school rankings—are especially important markers of neighborhood progress (or regression). Others include measures of collective efficacy, demographic shifts, and cycles of investment in housing, infrastructure, and business. When used well, data will help promote collaboration across organizations and ensure that everyone is thinking in terms of systems and not individuals and focusing on the larger picture rather than on “solving” one or more social problem in siloed manner.
Of course, each social repairer needs to zero in on what data is most relevant to its own work. Communio leverages consumer data. PFE uses truancy numbers, reading logs, and changes in family situation. Thread uses the touch points between volunteers and students. This data also needs to be decentralized and shared with those on the ground, not simply residing on a computer in some distant office where its meaning may be lost or its urgency poorly understood. Regular updates, perhaps facilitated by a neighborhood quarterback or some other coordinating body, would help track trends over time and allow all parties to assess the effectiveness of various initiatives.