Neighborhoods are one of the most important human support structures, argues Seth D. Kaplan. Yet modern politics, economics, and social habits all seem aligned to undermine them. Discussing his recent book, Fragile Neighborhoods, Kaplan explains why neighborhoods are irreplaceable sources of human community, and why they are often in such bad shape today. “No government or philanthropic program can replace the benefits that the day-in-day-out love of parents and the continuous support of the community provide. Social services may address material needs, and they may help mitigate specific problems after the fact, but they’re rarely equipped to provide the care, nurturing, and targeted discipline that a supportive family and community deliver.”

Related Links

Fragile Neighborhoods by Seth D. Kaplan
Seth D. Kaplan’s website

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. With me today is my guest, Dr. Sty Kaplan. He’s a leading expert on fragile states and a professional lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, senior Advisor for the Institute for Integrated Transitions and consultant to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, US State Department, US Agency for International Development, and the OECD, as well as developing country governments and NGOs. And today we’re going to be talking about his recent book, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time. Dr. Kaplan, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Seth Kaplan:

I’m grateful to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

James Patterson:

Yes. So I was introduced to your work at a panel back at the Ciceronian Society in March, and I found the book absolutely fascinating and very much speaks to my own experiences. I live in a very intentional Catholic community here in Ave Maria, and some of the things that you describe as missing in many communities are very much front and center here. And so the explanation of the contrast really helped me appreciate the differences you experience in these kinds of communities. So let’s start off with a narrative, and I want you to tell me, because the book really takes this narrative on in a very detailed but also fair way. So let’s say you’re a young woman who grows up in a religiously repressive Idaho town of 5,000 people. She is smart, academically successful, and at odds with the norms of her fellow townspeople. After graduating from high school, she attends a prestigious college far from home and meets people like herself, and graduates only to move to New York and work in a large corporation that shares her values and rejects those of her town. Meanwhile, she does everything she can to never return to the place where she grew up. Is this a happy story, or is this a sad story?

Seth Kaplan:

First, I would say it’s not great to think in terms of binaries.

James Patterson:

Yes,

Seth Kaplan:

She gained something and she lost something, and we need to think about, I would say in general, our debates are good and bad, and so I’m good, you’re bad, or however we want to frame things. It’s always binaries, but the world is complicated, and so she got more opportunity. She got to do things she might not have been able to do otherwise. She got certain freedoms she might’ve ended up materially better off. Again, New York, possibly not because New York is crowded and things are expensive and probably where she came from, she could have had a big house. So it’s not clear she gained materially, but she certainly gained in terms of a certain amount of freedom, an opportunity she might not have had. And she might’ve met people that she had closer, let’s say relationship with. But you have to also think what she lost. And I think that’s a lot of what we as a country have done.

That’s almost what you gave us a metaphor I think, I wouldn’t say for the whole country, but for a part of the country, we lost this type of security blanket we might’ve had of people. If she does well in her career and she gets into the right networks and she gets the right her own personal support system and she goes step by step throughout her career with the right people around her, she could do great. There’s going to be people like her who made those choices and maybe don’t thrive as well end up without the friendships or the social support. What she lost was a support network, I might call it a security blanket that would protect her when she was down that would provide her with immediate institutions and relationships that would include everyone in that place. And she might’ve lost a sense of community.

She might recreate it on a small scale. I would call that not quite a community, but she might have lost. She has a sense of meaning and purpose for herself, but a lot of people will take the path she might’ve that she took, they might’ve ended up with less meaning, less relationships. So I would just say there’s pluses and minuses and you’re presenting sort of again, a metaphor for how much of the country has evolved. And I think what that picture misses, it misses the people who didn’t end up well from taking the same choices.

James Patterson:

I think that, yeah, that was the impression that I got from finishing this book was that story is one that we often tell, but the ending is not always a happy one, but it’s also not unambiguously a bad one that there’s a lot of people who suffer quietly or experience trade-offs they didn’t anticipate. Right. They did not all end up Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City.

Seth Kaplan:

I mean for me, you’ve lost again. Again, we’re a diverse country. There’s a portion of people in which you can say good plus good. They’ve ended up much better. There’s a set of people in which the result is much more mixed. They’ve lost something important and they’ve traded for something else. And then there’s a group of people I think, which maybe they have some gains, but the losses you might say clearly outweigh the gains. And so I think it’s a much more mixed picture than we want to tell ourselves.

James Patterson:

So this gets us into the book itself, which helps broaden that picture and provide more detail than I think some of the more conventional narratives we tell ourselves or people tell each other. But let’s start with the basics here. What is a neighborhood and what roles does the neighborhood play in structuring American life?

Seth Kaplan:

Well, again, there’s no fixed definition. A neighborhood has to be like this, but I roughly think of it as five to 8,000 people. Again, it could be 2000, it could be maybe 10,000. It’s not 25, 50,000. So there’s a certain human scale, it’s walkable, an ideal neighborhood. And I have to say there’s parts of America that are built up with house, house, house, house, house. And there’s no, they’re not really neighborhoods, but an ideal neighborhood, has a sense of identity, has a sense of beginning and end, has a center, has a lot of place, unique institutions. I live in a real neighborhood, so we’re surrounded on three sides by green areas. There’s only three roads that come in, one in three different directions that take us in and out of the community. We have a center, not a beautiful, I wish it was beautiful, like small commercial district, like a parking lot with a bunch of stores.

So we have the restaurant, everybody goes to the supermarket that we sort of don’t want to go to, but often end up at our own drug store, that type of, we have a dry cleaner, a barbershop, and we have lots. And so a good neighborhood has lots of institutions and activities happening in the place and you know, belong to this place. You have a feeling of community around the place. And I would say you could live in a part of America, house, house, house, no center, no beginning end, nothing that brings you together. And our neighborhood, I mean most of the kids go to one of several schools. So my daughter, my oldest is in seventh grade and probably about three-quarters of her classmates, she can walk to their home from our house 20 minutes, sometimes it’s 25, it’s a little bit longer. Closest starts literally I’m here, I go out at my front door and there’s two houses within one across the street and one, two houses down.

Those aren’t her friends to be honest, but there’s a two other classmates within literally a stone’s throw of my front door and then she’s out a couple of best friends within three blocks. And then you go a little further, but a neighborhood has those things. The neighborhood’s imported because it’s uplifting you, that network effect, you need something. My wife goes away because her mother’s ill, I need help. And I got four neighbors, two mornings, two afternoons helping me take care of my kids, get them where they have to go. If I personally don’t need it, someone needs help with the job, there’s a neighbor’s going to help me. I need someone again, got to go pick up something, can someone, I mean if you live in a good neighb