Community Is Important. But “The Community” Is an Illusion.

(Source: Flickr, with edits.)

It’s getting to be local election campaign season here in Sarasota, Florida, again, and as always, I find myself deeply distrustful when the candidates start talking about how they’re going to listen to the community and stand up for the community.

This kind of language is omnipresent in local politics. Where I am, one candidate wants “to restore … decision-making for all residents and businesses, not just the special few.” Another says, “It is essential that the citizens and that the neighborhood leaders have … a meaningful voice at the table.” A third wants to “help you preserve your neighborhood’s character.” One candidate’s campaign website forcefully rails against “behind-the-scenes special interests” opposed to the interests of “citizens.”

This talk is omnipresent because it’s politically effective messaging. You, the noble and authentic community, are in a pitched battle with (often unspecified) outsiders, who are not of the community. This establishes an in-group and an out-group and, in doing so, plays on some pretty basic moral instincts toward loyalty and reciprocity. It also feels consistent with the basic logic of democracy: that the people ought to be in control of the government. It’s hard to argue with the sentiments in the previous paragraph at face value.

The problem is when those sentiments are not really meant at face value, but as an implicit signal that the speaker favors the policy preferences of a specific subset of residents. Here where I live, for example, this kind of “restore power to the community” or “help our neighborhoods” talk is almost always a shibboleth for a specific change-averse politics, ranging from skeptical to outright hostile toward development, embraced by most of the city’s influential neighborhood associations. Essentially, this is the “homevoter” bloc famously described by economist William Fischel: politically active, relatively well-to-do homeowners whose chief interest in local government is the preservation of their property values and existing neighborhood character.

In my experience, homevoters everywhere are quite forthright about defining themselves as “the community” and conflating their interests with the general interest. As far as my home of Sarasota is concerned, if you’re in the sizable minority of residents here who rent their homes, in a county that experienced a staggering 47% rent growth from February 2021 to February 2022, there is at least one way in which your interests might diverge substantially from that group of voters.

It’s not always homevoters—the mantle of “the community” can be claimed by other interest groups for other reasons, too. I’ve seen nonprofit organizations claim to be the definitive voice of “the community” in a neighborhood. I’ve seen local business elites do it. In both cases, I’ve seen politicians embrace and echo those claims.

Describing yourself as an advocate for “the community,” “the neighborhood,” or “the residents” is a way of leaving a lot unspoken about exactly whom and what you support. I don’t think all politicians who talk this way are being disingenuous, and I don’t think it necessarily means their policy proposals are bad. But there’s something fundamentally untrue about the rhetoric.

Community is important. But “the community” as a singular entity does not exist. I briefly discussed this notion in a previous piece about the faulty promise of “local control” over development. I want to elaborate here on what I mean.

The Myth of Community Consensus

You should be wary of anyone who claims to speak for “the community” or “the public,” especially when it’s in lieu of more directly telling you who will benefit from the actions they support.

This starts with, but goes beyond, the simple observation that the vocal subset of citizens who attend public hearings, submit public comments, vote and run for local office are almost always unrepresentative of a community’s diversity. That’s a huge problem in itself, and it’s exacerbated by political processes that are—often deliberately—inaccessible to many citizens. (Think public hearings on important local issues held at 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. Or opinion surveys full of technical and legalistic jargon.)

But the problem goes deeper than that. Let’s say that you do come up with a group of participants in a local political process that is proportionally representative on a number of axes—gender, race, age, religion, sexual orientation, income, education, homeowner versus renter, etc. And let’s say that group arrives at a decision. Is that decision “the voice of the community” or will it still create winners and losers within the community? Obviously the latter.

So many of our planning processes are designed to pursue an elusive, ultimately false notion of consensus—to identify the will of the community. But as the work of sociologist Jeremy Levine and others points out, there is no such thing as community consensus. Remarkable heterogeneity of opinions and interests exists within geographic communities, notwithstanding the presence of loud advocates and constituencies.

(Source: Unsplash.)

“The community” does not exist, because each of us belongs to a huge number of overlapping communities. Many don’t share common geographic boundaries, or any real geographic definition at all. These may be determined by issues of concern (for example, wilderness preservation, or aging in place), by occupation, vocation, or avocation (mountain biking enthusiasts, local restaurant owners, local service-industry workers), and by communities of affinity such as membership in a religious or ethnic group.

We as individuals may have conflicting interests arising from our membership in different communities at the same time. Most of the communities to which we belong do not map onto any political body, nor do they have clear-cut representation on the decisions that most affect them. But these communities are all valuable and important. When I say, “the community does not exist,” I do not mean in any way that each of us is an island.

Instead, I mean that each of us is a tree in a forest. When the forest thrives, it’s not because the organisms within it share some common idea of the best interest of the forest as a whole. Or because a majority or plurality of them do. But it’s also not because each organism is in ruthless competition with the others for survival and resources—biologists long ago disproved that idea. The natural world is full of symbiotic and cooperative relationships (there is evidence, for example, that trees warn each other of danger). The members of various forest communities are connected in ways that are overlapping and interlocking and contradictory. And it is that fact, not some sort of unified purpose, that is the strength of the forest as a whole.

This changes what it means to empower the community in a place. As I’ve argued before, giving everyone a vote or a veto does not necessarily translate to meaningful agency for people in a place. Nor is the key simply to elect officials who will stand up to special interests—because in fact, every interest group is special. There is no general interest. There is no meaningful sense in which the people, through the democratic process, produce a “will” which politicians can enact.

And that means political leaders ought to err on the side of recognizing which decisions shouldn’t be made at City Hall. A strong town ought to be a place with a robust and complex civil society. It’s a place with a lot of entrepreneurship and activism alike. It’s a place where the communities—plural—that are present are broadly empowered to take bottom-up action. This means that they have meaningful agency and freedom to go start new things; it also means that access to resources is broadly distributed; and it also means that no one individual or institution exercises outsized power or control.

My plea to elected officials is this: Listen to a large number of voices, and recognize the competing interests among those you represent. When those interests come into conflict, tell us what you want to do and why you think it’s right. Tell us who will benefit. Tell us why the pros outweigh the cons. Don’t insult our intelligence.

Don’t claim to be speaking for your constituents as a united body, but do seek to listen to a wide range of voices and then balance the concerns you hear appropriately.

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