LETS NOT FORGET – WE ARE A NATION OF NEIGHBORHOODS

In his 1835 paper on Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine into associations is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all others."
Robert Putnam, a sociologist at Harvard University lists three kinds of assets in every community, Physical Capital, Human Capital and Social Capital. Social Capital is the "resources embedded in social relations among persons and organizations that facilitate cooperation and collaboration in communities."
Economics is the science of making choices and the choices we make have to do with our values. There are three sectors in our economy, a public, a private and a social sector. There is a social sector because there is a set of values different from public and private sector values, the “priceless values” MasterCard talks about in its advertisements. These are the values which make up Putman’s Social Capital. These are the values embedded within the neighborhood associations de Tocqueville defined as the bedrock of our democracy.
The Industrial Age introduced a new system of organizing and educating society into nuclear families and generations of people who would fit into the home-to-work, work-to-home job routine. Large corporations dominated the private sector. Big government took power away from local government. The shift to big-is-better destroyed so much of the neighborhood associational life de Tocqueville admired. When government tried to address social problems with a war on poverty it made the problems worse. Its decision to partner with the corporate sector only exacerbated the problems. It became obvious neighborhood organizations were the missing link in the development puzzle. Public projects and public/private partnerships do not include neighborhoods.
Our inability to include the neighborhood in the problem solving process was never more apparent than it was in the way our nation addressed the 9/11 crisis. The first scenes on our TV screens were of airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers and then into the Pentagon, the two cathedrals of the corporate and government sectors. Our enemies understood the symbolism. What they misunderstood was what de Tocqueville recognized as the power behind the American Democracy. Before the smoke cleared our TV cameras turned to scene after scene of neighbors rushing to help their neighbors. Remember the expressions on their faces. America’s power is not in its towers it is in our ability to join together and form associations to address issues. The terrorists did not understand this. Unfortunately our government didn’t either. When our neighborhoods asked what they could do we were told to go shopping.
Timing is everything. We don’t learn until we get our backsides caught in a deep crack. In 1977 we were just getting over Watergate, a failed war in Viet Nam and riots in neighborhoods. People were looking when we introduced the Neighborhood Assistance Act. NAA is a tax credit to (1) corporations that invest in projects in (2) endangered neighborhoods which had been reviewed and approved by (3) local government. The law requires all three sectors to be involved in solving problems. We designed a simple two-page application which could be submitted any time. Letters of commitment were attached to the proposal. In the beginning all the investments went into neighborhood projects but as time went on the state bureaucracy turned the application into a multi-page and complicated exercise. Now most of the applications come from agencies with professional grant writers.
It’s been thirty years since we introduced NAA. We are again involved in another series of Watergates, another failed war and public protests. It is time to revisit NAA and enact similar laws. We need to redefine America in the way de Tocqueville saw our country in 1835, as a nation of neighborhood associations.