Big Houses and Small Communities

We no longer live as our grandparents did. Fifty years ago life was more rural and agrarian – a way of living that few of us have experienced. Writers like Wendell Barry emphasize the community life that can sprout from working the land, like an additional harvest, but when we no longer grow our own food or even prepare it, building community becomes more difficult.

While reading a newspaper or watching television, the increasing stress for the typical American is apparent. As our country prepares for a potential decades long never ending war and as we observe the current economic decline, the average person feels fear and anger. Not long ago, we would have met in social groups, maybe over a meal, or in a saloon, and discussed what was happening. But today, the new paradigm seems to be staying home, isolated from others, watching mass media with its very limited view of everything.

Are we really meeting our social needs under this new mode of living? What does it mean that our technology insulates us from meeting with people? Or that TV and syndicated newspapers are our only ways of “knowing” what is going on? ATMs, automated phone systems at large companies, and home entertainment devices such as VCRs and DVD players minimize the number of times we interact with other people in our daily life. What are the social, mental, and emotional effects of this change? Furthermore, how did such a change come about?  

Andrew Barr wrote the book Drink - A Social History of America, published by Carroll & Graf Publishers in 1999. Within it, Barr describes the myriad social implications of drinking alcohol. In the final chapter, entitled "Conclusion: Social Drinking", he answers some of these questions by summarizing the dialectic between housing size and interpersonal relationships. On page 382 he says:

“The decline in public drinking is symptomatic of the general decline of public life in America. At the end of the 1980s the sociologist Ray Oldenburg argued in The Great Good Place that modern American society was suffering for lack of a “third place”, an alternative to the twin worlds of home and work, an informal public meeting place where people could go to escape from the demands of the one and the pressures of the other, where they would find company and conversation, where they could enjoy themselves.

As Oldenburg explained, Americans have substituted the vision of the ideal home for that of the ideal city. By purchasing large homes on large lots in lifeless neighborhoods, people have not so much joined communities as retreated from them. They have rejected the public or shared environment in favor of their private home. ‘They proceed’ says Oldenburg, ‘as though a house can substitute for a community if only it is spacious enough, splendid enough - and suitably isolated from the common horde.’

As a consequence of its retreat to isolated suburban communities accessible only by car, contemporary American society is far from the “convenience culture” of popular conception. If Americans really lived in a convenience culture, Oldenburg argues, they would have the necessities of life close at hand, within walking distance, as in European cities. There are plenty of trivial conveniences in American life such as plastic credit cards, vending-machine coffee and prepackaged frozen dinners. But these are insignificant beside the fundamental problems created by an inconvenient society in which an automobile must be used to perform even the most mundane errands.

Because of their inconvenient culture, Oldenburg continues, Americans are largely denied those means of relieving stress that serve other cultures so effectively, such as sharing a drink in a local meeting place. This source of relief used to exist in America, before Prohibition. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, saloons did a very good job of easing the worries of immigrants and the working class. The destruction of the saloons and the transfer of drinking from the public to the private arena have deprived people of a means of restoring equilibrium through social interaction. Instead, they have developed such solitary consolations as meditation and jogging or have simply devoted their energies to improving the environment of their private sanctuary, in which they seek to isolate themselves from the outside world.”

As pointed out in detail in the book Bowling Alone, that which is termed “social capital”, and that which we more often refer to as “community” has been decreasing in America for the last 30 or 40 years. In the quote above, Oldenberg notes the tendency to believe that “a house can be a substitute for community”. An interesting question would be to ask if the size of houses has been increasing as social capital has been decreasing. In fact, that is exactly the situation. The size of the average house has increased steadily in the period mentioned. And, at the same time, the average family size is decreasing. Statistics show that in 1950 the average home constructed was 950 square feet. In 2002, the average new home constructed was 2300 square feet - with fewer occupants.

Why would Americans want larger houses as their social contacts wane? To some extent this is understandable. We know from our own experience, as well as reports from psychologists, that people who feel lonely and alienated tend to substitute material possessions or consumer items for the lack of love in their lives. The lonelier one is, the larger the house, the larger the car and the more material of all kinds is desired and consumed.

Wendell Berry wrote an essay called The Work of Local Culture, which was published in his book What are People For? He says:

“I was walking one Sunday afternoon several years ago with an older friend. We went by the (decaying) log house that had belonged to his grandparents and great-grandparents. The house stirred my friend’s memory, and he told how the old-time people use to visit each other in the evening, especially in the long evenings of winter. There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as “sitting ‘till bedtime.” After supper, when they weren’t too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other; they popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other stories. They told each other stories, as I knew myself, that they all had heard before. Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories and thus keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were always the children. When the time came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. My friend talked about this, and thought about it, and then he said, “They had everything but money.”

They were poor, as country people have often been but they had each other, they had their local economy in which they helped each other, they had each other’s comfort when they needed it and they had their stories, their history together in that place. To have everything but money is to have much. And most people at the present can only marvel to think of neighbors entertaining themselves for a whole evening without a single imported pleasure and without listening to a single minute of sales talk.

Most of the descendents of those people have now moved away, partly because of the culture and economic failures that I mentioned earlier, and most of them no longer sit in the evenings and talk to anyone. Most of them now sit until bedtime watching TV, submitting every few minutes to a sales talk. The message of both the TV programs and the sales talks is that the watchers should spend whatever is necessary to be like everybody else.

What can be done about this? Could changing this dynamic decrease some of that very real unhappiness in America today? If so, how is it to be done?

The answer may be found in what social visionaries like E. F. Schumacker, Ralph Barsodi and others have been saying for decades about decentralizing our physical environment. Like the Europeans in Barr’s book, we need things close, within walking distance. But for Americans, the journey to decentralization will be a difficult one, as we will want to take our creature comforts and entertainment with us.

We believe we need them and also, that we have a right to them. One of the main problems in implementing this solution is a limitation of our society’s imagination. It is hard for us to see a vision that does not include what we currently have as well as the things we don’t have, but want. Thus we might be lonely and want company (or community), but we want to add community to all the things we have and to not give anything up.

An American might say, “I feel lonely and alienated from other people and I want to add community to my life”. This person’s life currently includes a 2300 square foot house, two working parents with great jobs 30 minutes to 2 hours away, two SUVs or vans, and ideal children who they sometimes spend a little “quality time” with (if they all aren’t watching TV.)

It is very difficult to convince such a person that the possession of material goods and social status symbols are not only poor substitutes for community, but can actually be barriers to establishing it. What they are missing is the spirit of community, of fellowship, the ability to truly be close to other people. In fact, some of their values and qualities may be antithetical to living in community.

Therefore, when considering the possibility of “decentralizing” our urban areas, what we call “lifestyle” must be considered. But there are problems:

-          It’s difficult to imagine another way to live, a non consuming way.

-          It’s difficult giving up creature comforts and entertainment habits

-          It’s difficult believing that we could be happy without TV, VCR, Internet, electronic baby sitters, etc.

-          It’s difficult taking less pay, even to live at a slower pace and spend more time at home.

We believe we need:

-          1 room for each child

-     a dining room for formal meals

-     a kitchen table, where we can have relaxed meals

-          a family room

-     a living room (rarely used)

-     a multi car garage (some counties codes prohibit building without a garage)  

In short, bigger, better and more money is the status we are taught through the media in the US.

There was a time in China when women’s feet were bound so they couldn’t work and in Europe when women’s waists were bound in corsets so tightly they had difficulty breathing. Both of these were symbols of the wealth and status of the husband. For the sake of status people make choices that damage them, choices that are not well thought out. We are led by the media and by big business to consume, which in turn drives us to make more money and go more into debt. Most people unconsciously accept this, even though it binds them in ever tighter and tighter strictures of work, debt and aloneness, believing they need to acquire things, even though doing so separates them from closeness and a sense of belonging to any real community.

A materialistic life style is incompatible with the goal of building community. It is sometimes easier to participate in true community if one does not have a wealthy lifestyle. The quote from Wendell Barry earlier in this essay reminds us that they had “everything but money”. Granted, being poor doesn’t necessarily lead to a true sense of community with others. I am reminded of the beatitude from the New Testament that says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. In a strong small community, “heaven is other people” or one might say, the kingdom of heaven is the community that we are seeking - a way of living in shared fellowship with others, where we give and receive and feel safe and supported.

To replicate the cities as they exist now, in a decentralizing process, would be undesirable, as they represent the antithesis of what we are attempting to create. At a minimum, we must dispose of our large houses and large cars. The resulting physical community, with smaller and fewer cars and smaller homes, is immediately a more intimate, accessible place. Distances are much shorter, so one can walk or bicycle to the grocery store, the dentist, the bank, and school. This results in an increased level of social contact, meeting other people who are also walking to the same places. Since houses are smaller and cars are not used as much in a small town, green space is no longer at a premium. There is more for children to do, in terms of open space for recreation, but also less danger to children from automobile traffic. As children walk though the community they, like adults, will wander more, meeting new people. As a sense of community is engendered, more people know the children and thus watch out for them. Our greatest reasonable fear, that our child might be killed by a car, and statistically, our greatest unreasonable fear, that they will be kidnapped or harmed by a stranger, have just been eliminated. So children wander, parents meet and converse, and a sense of community grows.

With fewer and smaller cars and smaller houses, the need to earn money is reduced. The result is more free time, something Americans say they crave. With a lessening of financial and work pressures, dependence on TV and its soporific effect may decline. This could result in even more free time - time that could lead to more socializing and more pleasure from those social encounters, and an ever-deepening sense of community.

So, how do we get started? Do we picket or agitate or discuss all this with our friends? If not this, how do we begin the paradigm shift?

Our intention is not to convince and convert to our view but to propose a model for a new way of living that does not require large amounts of money and which fits our natural tendencies as social beings. America has seen three decades of increasingly materialistic, even extravagant, living. Shopping and consuming have come to be seen as a right, as well as a pleasure. In such an environment, it may be difficult to convince others of the merit of exchanging consumerism for community. However, the handwriting is on the wall. It is a fact that the lifestyle we have been leading has been funded by raw material resources that are finite.

We at Community Service believe that this paradigm shift will be necessary in the decades ahead and that we will need plans for decentralization this century. Community Service is dedicated to this. We feel that one of our jobs is to plan and create a positive vision for its outcome.