The neighborhood movement

...It is essential for the development of community that there be some long-term security, that a specific terrain be securely held by the community...

...The prevailing view among economists and historians is that genuine communities are rather a relic of the past...

...in a few years, the more provident among the gentry might want some of those first-ring houses back again, because by then the value of having 300 square feet of land on which to grow a few onions, tomatoes, and yes, even raise a few chickens, will be abundantly clear...

...Self-reliant communities are cost-effective Here are some observations on how investment in self-reliant local communities, can prove to be cost-effective: ? Communities, with reasonable protection against forays by preying capital, can be expected to develop into enclaves of relative social harmony...

...The inner city—close to work, the bright .lights, culture, the goods—is now desirable to the middle class...

...This could be accomplished by resident ownership, cooperative ownership, or community ownership through a community land trust...

...Local communities, and finally homes, will be likely to take over some of the functions of the nursing home and the singles' apartment...

...In fact, it is the policy of most industrialized nations— Soviets and Americans are almost indistinguishable here—to destroy communities in the name of progress, democracy, growth...

...But we cannot hope to reassert the value of community by pitching toward nostalgia or by romanticizing what was...

...second, there is the component of accessibility, which is measured by the availability of transportation and the distance to needed services...

...Brutality in practice, sappiness and nostalgia on the screen...

...What the market dictates is that the poor are supposed to leave...

...The laissez-faire notion of free-market labor is also reflected in Raup's definition of housing, which is clear but tragically incomplete...

...They want to live there...

...If We can expect that in the future, young people will have reason to leave home later in life, and old people will remain home later into life...

...The existence of viable locales that include trade, services, light industry, and even agriculture, all within a distance that can be negotiated on foot, will be seen to bear on such seemingly distant and unrelated problems as the price of oil, acid rain, destruction of the soil, and troop movements in the Middle East...

...This is where the next opportunity to "disin-vest" in housing will be found...

...Strains from the old tribal melodies even find their way into the national symphony...

...Community is a word that has been overworked and exploited, but it remains the best word available to describe something basic about the way human beings traditionally have lived together...

...But they shouldn't get too comfortable there...

...The neighborhood movement is fired primarily by the energy of the marginal middle class and the poor— people who have a tenuous hold on some turf, and who know better than the rich ever will the fundamental value of living in a community of neighbors...

...Sometimes planners and professionals know it this way too, and they know it also through "the literature," through travel, and they may remember it from the ethnic communities of their youth...

...Where are they supposed to go...

...That movement is the gathering of people into small human-scale urban enclaves, with identities, friendships, sidewalks, trade, gossip, and clout...

...In the meantime, we are going to have to challenge the cockeyed notion that "the poor are transient, therefore we move them," and expose the truth that lies behind it: The poor are transient because we move them...

...There is a third component of housing, however, which we cannot neglect...

...For communities to avoid termination, politicians and economists must be made to understand that communities have strictly economic benefits...

...Things have changed...

...For many of these inner-city residents, forces are already in motion that could destroy their community and displace them from their homes...

...Today, we are told, the poor are expected to move to the first-ring suburbs...

...it enters one's dreams, even the dreams of those who are born, live, and die without it...

...11 Localized energy production, long pronounced "goofy" by most energy planners, may turn out to be feasible when undertaken within the confines of a stable community...

...Housing, he says, has two components: First, it is a space around one's head, a cubic footage...

...Even the street department could save money...

...This has been aptly named "the neighborhood movement...

...In order to meet the challenge of the 1980s, we will have to explain the obvious: that the creation of working communities is efficient as well as humane...

...Communities will be encouraged or left alone when they get this message into the political arena: It will cost you more to move us than to let us stay...

...Raup, in his informal remarks, seemed to equate the poor with "labor," defined in a particular, almost archaic way, where labor is abstracted into a "sector," and that sector is assumed to be rootless, mobile, and ready to go wherever the jobs and cheap housing are...

...The neighborhood movement Rent control can help preserve communities David Hubenstein Rent control is often thought of as a means of preventing excess profits, but this definition is incomplete and misleading because it implies that rent control is primarily a punitive measure directed against landlords and speculators...

...In effect, inner-city residents were the short-term beneficiaries as the investors in inner-city housing allowed their property, their "capital stock," to deteriorate...

...The idea of community is at the core of the neighborhood movement...

...The neighborhood movement is a conscious attempt to build and preserve communities in the city...

...Books and music are written...

...11 With the physical breakdown of our means of handling waste—human, solid, chemical, and otherwise—it may well be that the most cost-efficient method of dealing with most of the problem is by local, community-based processing centers...

...Rent control can serve as a tool for a broader movement which has taken shape in recent years...

...Then it will be time for the poor to pack up again and head back to the city, a city which, as the enlightened gentry will know from available studies, will be too polluted a place to raise kids or chickens...

...If When the total cost of bedroom communities, highway shopping centers, and other manifestations of automobile-based planning get added up, other inherent efficiencies of local communities will become visible...

...The scenario that Raup sketched goes something like this: For many years, in center-city housing, we witnessed the "exhaustion of capital, through lack of maintenance...

...If Vital communities, when their energy is not totally used up in self-defense, are often better at solving social and economic problems than either government agencies or expensive experts...

...He expressed the view that one of the major problems with rent control is that it prevents displacement...

...the church understands it...

...Its effect, he said, has typically been to "freeze the labor force into outmoded patterns...

...that, ultimately, by investing in communities, the taxpayer will save a buck...

...They impede progress and discourage mobility, consumption, initiative, and development...

...In Minneapolis's West Bank a large multistate food co-op system was born out of a "people's pantry" set up on a back porch by neighborhood people to serve neighborhood people...

...As an example, he recalled the case of certain industrial towns in England where the unemployed workers remained after industry departed...

...I believe one can assume that Raup's working definition of the poor is an accepted definition in the kind of neo-laissez-faire economics so popular today...

...This article appeared in somewhat different form in The Minneapolis Star...

...There is another angle: Rent control is also a method of preserving neighborhood communities by preventing displacement, which is a "natural" result of large rent increases...

...There are different ways of understanding community...

...Raup is a well-informed and highly respected interpreter of demographic and economic trends, a scholar whose ideas are taken seriously in the business world, the state legislature, and the media, as well as by the university...

...usually come from landlords, investors, and real estate people...

...A few years later, the poor could get another march order from "the market," this time, perhaps, in the form of an offer they can't afford to pass up—for cheap housing and some great job opportunities in mining on the moon...

...To the first- and second-ring suburbs...

...First-hand experience of community has become increasingly rare in the industrialized West (and East), but it is still common among ethnic groups in the city, in certain enclaves, among the poor when they are not totally beaten, and among various groups of people who have fallen into it or gotten it together for themselves...

...There they sat, drawing unemployment and compensation and living in their rent-controlled apartments, which were so cheap they couldn't afford to leave...

...That is the element of community...

...But some arguments against rent control were presented by University of Minnesota agricultural economist Philip Raup, when he spoke at a small gathering—a sort of low-key debate—sponsored by the Coalition for Affordable Housing in Minneapolis...

...Arguments against rent control David Rubenstein is a Minneapolis writer, metal worker, and community activist...

...Rent control should be a stopgap measure to help stop displacement and community destruction until further action can be taken to put housing under control of the resident community...

...This tends to diminish the need for such expensive services as police, fire department, ambulance, and coroner...

...Children understand it...

...Older neighborhoods usually produce at least one coot who likes to chop the ice off the storm sewer every spring...

...No sooner is this work done than the cultural apparatus begins to romanticize what has been destroyed...