Community and Kids

By Benjamin Rhys West, Research Assistant

A city is a noise, a smell. The murmur of the crowds at six and the quiet of the streets twelve hours later. Steinbeck called his beloved Monterey “a stink, a grating noise.” “But seen through other eyes” he describes a transcendent place of warmth and quiet beauty.

In this report we have tried, with numbers, to draw a series of sketches—a picture of a place from a child’s perspective. Not a statistical collection to be evaluated clinically but a snapshot. Does the community have a recycling program? Are the kids learning at grade level? Do mothers have access to health care?

From the pool of information that defines “community life,” we chose four indicators to create a picture of each city. First, the number of children who are living below the poverty line; second, the amount of violent crime in the streets; third, the amount of urban sprawl growing around the city’s edge; and fourth, the quality of the recycling program that reclaims the city’s wastes.

At first glance the last two indicators may seem an odd leap from the gritty urgency of the first two. But one aim of this report is to show the degree to which all these factors, including the population of each city, are connected.

We all know that living in poverty degrades the quality of life for an individual. But poverty also creates additional pressures on the family, the schools, and the wider community. Poverty makes every setback a thousand times more difficult to recover from. When a community is strong the hardships of a few can be lessened by assistance from others. But when those few become the many, the community loses its buffer and each hardship contributes to a communal decay.

The pressures of poverty are often assumed to lead to a higher rate of violent crime. The mechanics of this process are the subject of many arguments, and each argument is filled with many exceptions. But we do know that violent crime has some of the same effects on a community as poverty—it wears down the social fabric. It makes life harder for our children.

Urban sprawl is one effect of attempts to flee from this cycle of violence—to escape the dirt, crowds and crime that plague many urban centers. Yet, as population pressures increase, crime often flows into the suburbs, prompting residents to flee farther—the first ring of suburbs grows as congested as the urban center, with all of the same crime, pollution, and traffic, pushing residents to move even farther out, creating rings of suburbs that stretch hundreds of miles from the original center.

Distance promises bucolic, or at least suburban, splendor, but this distance from the city also creates a distance between individuals and families, leading to further ruptures in the social fabric. Children no longer grow up surrounded by the same neighbors, block parties are becoming a relic of the past, and the ‘corner grocery’ is a five-mile car trip away. The same distance that comforts begins to separate. The dream is lost in both traffic jams and a growing isolation.

Recycling, on the other hand, is one sign of a system that is trying to stand on its own. A well-functioning urban neighborhood reuses well-built structures and supplies, as well as recycling its daily trash. Applying a coat of paint and a new sign, the same brownstone might be a house, a shop, a restaurant, and then a house again. A city that recycles has less trash to dispose of, and even a source of revenue as the recycled materials are sold back to the company that produced the original.

Recycling is a doorway to environmentalism. It is a tiny effort that everyone can make, with enormous benefits for all. Additionally, it allows children to observe and participate in the process. The same child whose chores include taking out the trash can also sort, clean, and deliver the recycling to the curb. A number of cities’ recycling programs cater to children with kid-specific instruction books, cartoon characters, and encouraging community programs.

What do these indicators show us? Poverty as a root cause, crime as a consequence of this poverty, sprawl as a panicked and ineffectual response to this crime, and recycling as an example of an effort to reverse this downward spiral. Turning the spiral back on itself—trash back into products, sprawl back into cities, underperforming children back into active learners—can perhaps put an end to the cycle of decline in many U.S. cities.