A Shared History

What makes a human settlement into a community? A suburb of culturally diverse homeowners may be a community but mostly they are not. In any population of approximately 5,000 people who live in a set of suburban subdivisions may attend as many as 50 different churches, buy groceries at a dozen different supermarkets, bank at a dozen different banks and have children who attend a myriad of public and private schools. Each new arrival came from a unique origin and settled there for the wide open yards and greater distances between front doors. In those residential land uses, people come and go isolated in their automobiles and may not know the names of the families even as close as two doors away. They all share a physical location but they do not have a shared history.

Swissvale, Pennsylvania is a small urban center now incorporated as part of the City of Pittsburgh. It was originally settled by Germans and Scandinavians who arrived from Europe to work in the steel mills on the Monongahela River Valley far below the bluffs where the streets of houses were built. So common was the employment in the valley and residence on the hillsides that several electric streetcar companies laid tracks through the neighborhoods and pointed them straight at the mills. It seems that everyone went to the mills each day to earn a living. They all spoke the language. They all had something in common: Emigration and working in the mills.

The next town over is Braddock. It was home to a large population of Polish immigrants. Their churches and fraternal association buildings still give testament to their former dominance of the area. The level of homogeneous character has since diminished considerably after the exit of steel making in the valley. These towns were sustained by the common history of the people who lived there. Today, Braddock is dying while Swissvale still lives. Both towns rely heavily on the pensions and retirement income of the people who still live there. The difference is Swissvale did not see the influx of lesser unskilled people who replaced the original population that left when the mills closed.

Railroad workers, lumberjacks, farmers, miners, steelworkers immigrated here from all over Europe and found work in company towns where they shared a past and the present. Wilkinsburg, another urban area just outside of Pittsburgh's city limits, is the town of churches. There are cross streets in that borough where each corner has a church. Although there might be a common employment in an area, people of diverse cultures did not mix well and formed their own communities. Irish and Chinese men and their families may live adjacent to each other and interact on an economic basis, but they lived apart. Still they share a common situation as cheap labor to a young growing land. And when the railroad was done they all shared the same fate of abandonment.

Today towns and rural areas struggle to find purpose that will keep their dreams alive. If they do not have an income stream on which to levy taxes then they need people to move in and bring with them the incomes and saved capital they have. If the newcomers still spend their money at distant stores then the community is still without revenue to maintain their physical presence and institutional needs. Newcomers don't have that shared history that is essential for "community" to exist. Efforts to gentrify a distressed community suggests that there is a reason to be renewed or that one can be created. Generally, though, there must first be a reason. That reason might be that it is suitable as a bedroom community to a larger urban area, new public transit options are expanded to the area, or that a large employer is locating nearby. In this latter example the jobs would need to be far better paying that a big box retail store or catalog fulfillment warehouse. Failing those requirements, the revitalization efforts will surely fail. They fail primarily due to the lack of a shared history where people will join together and assure the community success.

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Other blog posts that are related in a Series

Community, Reasons to Exist, The Making of Place This is the introductory section

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reason-to-exist Every town, village city and region originally had a reason to exist.

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todays-reasons-to-exist Every community needs a a reason today for its continued existence. Otherwise it will wither and die.

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factors-that-are-missingThe economic system we use today removes critical factors tat allow a community to stay vital.

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a-shared-historyThe people of a community need a shared history to stay cohesive as a community.

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sustainable-community all of the essential factors must remain present for a community to continue its existence.

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sustainable-unemployment As manufacturing and the services industries continue to evolve, human labor and attention is diminished. We need to devise a society where most people do not labor for their living.

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sustainable-consumerism A balance between product durability and its replacement needs to be reached in order for an equilibrium to be reached.

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sustainable-populations The human population cannot continue on its present trajectory without a terrible price to pay in the coming decades and century.

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suburban-sprawl Sprawl is only possible when there is ample buildable land and ample resources available to service those locations.

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complete-streets Our transportation ways are not just for the automobile. People must walk, bike, and use other modes of transport on those public rights of way.

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A Sustainable Community

The work that I do to earn the money to pay my bills and fund my retirement has taken a left turn into a different province. The work that I have been doing is so tightly related to the whole picture of American life that this new direction will circle back on all that has been accomplished by the company and people who work there. The new word is Sustainable.

Individual people have a sense of what sustainability is while businesses and power brokers do not. Built into the human psyche is that biological imperative to procreate. Each person feels a need to pass on his or her genes, ideals, morals and wealth to a next generation. Fathers want sons to carry forth the surname. Fathers start businesses with their name and add "Son" or "Sons" to it in the hopes of sustaining the hard won successes of the father. Boards of Directors will adopt and abandon any name which suits its goals to sell goods and services to make the profit it needs to satisfy the investors. Corporate businesses will hire and dispose any employee who they feel benefits the bottom line. For businesses the world is composed of lines that have a beginning and an end. They prefer it that way.

Consider the timber logging industry. They get legal access to a stand of trees, cut them all down and move along to a new stand of trees leaving the clear cut slopes to fend for themselves. It's a beginning, a middle and an end. No feeling of responsibility remains after the last tree is cut. After all there are more acres of trees to conquer.

Coal mining operations are the same. Dig coal, pile the tailings and move on. They sell the coal, bury the dead and discharge the injured. Coal matters. People don't. Coal is wealth. People are liabilities and expense. As long as there is a vein of coal to dig the mining companies can proceed in straight line along the seam. As long as there is another miner, old miners are put aside like a rusty drag line bucket.

We allowed industries to turn greenfields into brownfields and pull up stakes leaving the land to sit vacant and poisoned. Beverage containers typically track a linear path from manufacture to a landfill serving one portion to a customer.

These paradigms of consumption work only as long as there is an ample supply of materials and energy to make things and ample space to dump the trash afterward. This model of sustainability is depends on the idea of infinite supply and cheap processing. It depends on a society willing to allow a business to ignore the negative side of production – the waste products.

Through a much maligned Federal oversight and regulation, many industries have been required to restore their wastelands to pre-operations conditions. They have been required to do a better job of not mucking up the environment in the first place. Businesses respond reluctantly when they respond at all. They cite the increased cost of their goods and services to the consuming public as the reason to be allowed to pollute the air, water and land. Businesses are willing to pick up and move when they have fouled their sites. Settlements of people are not so inclined or mobile. They end up tolerating the non-sustainable practices of businesses.

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Other blog posts that are related in a Series

todays-reasons-to-exist
shared-history
reason-to-exist
factors-that-are-missing
sustainable-community

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Sustainable Consumerism

The global economy has been sinking into a quagmire allegedly created by the magnitude of crappy mortgages that turned into foreclosures in the seminal year of 2008. Everything seemed to be going along reasonably well until something happened. People went to work and earned their paychecks. Mothers shopped for groceries and toted the children from one after school activity to another. Consumers bought new cars, flatscreen TVs, cell-phones and iStuff. Cable and satellite content delivery utilities put every conceivable sports event on screens in millions of American homes. Beer and a multitude of fried potato and corn products ran aplenty. Tens of millions of Americans earned a paycheck, received a pension payment, got a public assistance check of one kind or another, and dutifully spent all of it on the consumables, commodities and utilities and medical bills. All seemed right with the world.

But lurking just beneath the surface was a condition so insidious that it would bring down the global economy in a way that the most diabolical arch-villain criminal mind could not even imagine. On top of that, it was not especially dastardly in its character. One could not point to the evil doers and single them out for punishment.

The unsustainable geometry was that there isn't enough income in this country to buy all the stuff that needs to be bought in order to keep everyone employed. The situation becomes even worse as more and ore jobs migrate to less developed countries to allow their people to earn the living that they need. They can make the products but not afford to buy them. Therefore, they are not the consumers that we are.

In order to pay for all that stuff, we needed to borrow against our most valuable assets: our houses. As our real buying power from earnings fell over the last decade or so, we supplemented it with the easy credit that the financial sector was so eager to provide at 6% to 18.99% compounded interest. The system had no option other than to implode. It could not be sustained nor could it expand indefinitely.