You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

Yesterday I wrote about Robert Putnam's research on how mobility (moving a lot) affects civic engagement. He concluded that high mobility tends to decrease participation in community. Well, if that's true, a blurb from the New York Times in the Star Tribune today was good news for civic engagement: "Americans Stayed Put Last Year." According to the report, "fewer Americans moved in 2008 than in any year since 1962."

"It does show that the U.S. population ... seems to have been stopped dead in its tracks," said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.

The housing crisis and recession have changed how much we move. Maybe it will also change how much we volunteer.

Social Capital -- Money in the Bank?

How to build social capital is captured in a list that I recently received in my email inbox. It is titled "150 Things You Can Do to Build Social Capital" and originated from Better Together, an initiative of the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. I thought of it today as I read in The Pioneer about Jon Staff, a junior majoring in government at Harvard University.

Staff, a 2006 graduate of Bemidji High School, is researching social capital and community engagement in Bemidji, Cass Lake, Red lake, White Earth and the surrounding areas. You are invited to participate in his survey online at www.northlandsurvey.com .

The value of social capital and what it adds to the quality of life of a community has been debated since Harvard University's Robert Putnam (and Jon Staff's professor) released his book Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community in 2000. In the book Putnam reveals how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures -- whether they be PTA, church, or political parties -- have disintegrated. He cites many reasons for the decline in social capital, but generally identified four social characteristics that contributed to its decline:

• pressures of time and money
• mobility and sprawl
• television
• generational differences

As a planner, the challenges of mobility and sprawl and how they impact civic engagement interest me most. Here are some "sound bites" from Putnam's research (remember that this information comes from research that was done in the late 1990s).

1. Nearly one in five of us move each year. Residential stability is strongly associated with civic engagement. New arrivals in a community are less likely to vote, belong to civic organizations, or have a supportive network of friends and neighbors. Homeowners are substantially more likely to be involved in community affairs than are renters.
2. Place matters more than mobility. A resident of a major metro area, either central city or suburb, is significantly less likely to attend public meetings, volunteer, attend club meetings, work on community projects, visit friends.
3. Homogeneity in communities: suburbs, gated communities--the greater the social homogeneity, the lower the level of political involvement. Homogeneity reduces local conflicts that engage and draw citizenry into the public realm.

Have rural areas experienced a decrease in social capital and civic engagement? I think Bemidji and northern Minnesota in general, seem to have money in the bank when it comes to social capital.

We may have been affected by the changing social characteristics that Putnam described, but I think there has been an increase in activism and participation in community organizations in Bemidji over the last 5-7 years. Maybe we will know when Jon Staff completes his research.