Book Review: Professors Argue in Favor of Weak Ties in "The Changing American Neighborhood"

 

I enjoy books on neighborhoods and "The Changing American Neighborhood" by Todd Sawnstrom and Alan Mallach is not an exception. Although this book is a different category from some, it reads more like a textbook. In fact it would be a good resource in a class. It focuses on the urban story and the impact of affluence on our neighborhoods. I don't think that is the only impact that has brought us to our current neighboring situation but it is a large theme of this book. And I think the authors do have some important insights to share. 

A romanticism still exists around the old, ethnic neighborhood, where children traveled in packs as they played in city streets and there was always a set of eyes looking out for their well-being.

Everyone knew everyone else, they conversed regularly with each other from their front stoops, and they often celebrated life’s big events together.

“Those kinds of thicker relationships in neighborhoods that we are kind of nostalgic about – that we sometimes want to go back to – are no longer common,” writes Todd Swanstrom. “Air conditioning, handheld devices, the internet, and a bunch of other things have made that kind of neighborhood passé. It just doesn’t exist.”

Swanstrom says there would also be issues if it did because those neighborhoods of the 1950s and 1960s were highly racialized and gendered, with women relegated almost exclusively to the role of homemaker. The connections people feel today to the people who live next door or across the street might not compare to those experienced in earlier generations. But Swanstrom argues in a new book that modern neighborhoods still provide important associations for the people who live there.

“The social ties in neighborhoods are what we call weak ties – that is to say they’re kind of transitory, they’re kind of superficial,” Swanstrom writes. “You get to know people, but you’re not tight buddies with them. You don’t go to their baptisms and their bar mitzvahs. You don’t hang out on the porch with your neighbors, but you do get to know them. There develops a certain kind of tolerance and respect for people, and these modern weak neighborhood ties are actually very important because they provide connections across economic and religious and ethnic differences that divide Americans.”

Swanstrom co-authored the book with Alan Mallach, senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress, a national nonprofit dedicated to comprehensively tackling vacant properties by providing guidance, free educational resources and leadership programming to assist policymakers, practitioners and community members working to return properties to productive use.

The two met at a meeting hosted by the center and connected over their extensive experience in community development, having each worked with local governments and community organizations to develop policies and strategies for strengthening cities and neighborhoods.

“We began to have discussions and decided that we felt the existing research in neighborhood change was not very valuable to those on the ground who are trying to do the work,” Swanstrom wrote. “We thought we could do better, so we decided to collaborate. We started out thinking about an edited book, and then our editor at Cornell University Press kept pressing us and saying that he thought we had something we wanted to say, so we ended up changing from an edited book to a co-authored book.”

They aim to balance the conversation in scholarly circles by discussing the issues of housing deterioration, disinvestment and decline alongside reinvestment and gentrification, which too often dominate policy debate.

Swanstrom believes there’s a tendency to view housing deterioration as a prelude to gentrification, but it can more often lead to housing vacancy and abandonment in many cities as Americans continue to move farther and farther from urban centers into more affluent outer suburbs.

“We’re in an age, we argue in the book, of simultaneous deurbanization and reurbanization with deurbanization – that is to say, outward movement and the draining of older urban neighborhoods – still the dominant trend,” Swanstrom said, “especially across the Midwest and the heartland like in cities such as St. Louis, Cleveland, and Detroit.”

The book is also critical of existing research, which often relies on quantitative studies isolating a single variable and uses that variable to predict neighborhood change. That includes attitudes about race, which might influence migration patterns, but race doesn’t act in isolation.

Swanstrom and Mallach similarly push back against the idea that neighborhoods sit helplessly at the mercy of global economic forces, which might lead to closing factories and the loss of jobs.

There are objective circumstances that impact a neighborhood’s ability to stabilize and revitalize itself, including the quality of the housing stock, its proximity to jobs, the quality of its schools and ease of transit. But people’s perceptions also play a critical role.

Swanstrom pointed to attitudes about race as one example. If the people in a neighborhood view racial diversity is an important characteristic of their neighborhood, he suggests it will remain racially diverse. But if people see racial integration as something that will lead to a tipping point where nearly all white residents flee, that will be its destiny.

The book is meant to serve practitioners working on the ground in community development and remind them that each situation comes with its own challenges and requires its own solutions.

Written by David L. Burton

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