The more I interact with the citizens of Cambridge, the more deeply aware I become of the strong desire to create something called “community” within our city. It a prescription that sounds vague and indefinable, but actually, I think it is something very specific though not cleanly shaped. It is the way in which people come together and share and laugh and support each other and share a moment. It’s about catching up, and trading stories as much as it is about dealing with a specific problem. It’s about developing a shared sense of who we are. The purpose of community is to brighten daily life.
Neighborhoods are beginning to explore aspects of this. The Agassiz neighborhood has looked at the concept of community “aging in place”, where people can live well into their senior years with local support network that provides them with needed services. Cambridgeport has begun an exploration of tackling global warming at the neighborhood level.
Yet, typically neighborhoods join together when problems arise: there has been a rash of crime locally; a developer is trying to build a new large project nearby; the city has not responded to our repeated calls for additional trash pick up. You can picture the situation. Less often, neighbors get together simply to spend time together. There may be a block party, or a yard sale, but usually that is only once a year.
The idea that we might come together and re-knit some fabric between our busy lives appeals to many, even though it feels like a distant possibility in their routines. It’s a hope that might be fulfilled if we only had more time.
For one, it requires a physical locale, a place that is public and communal and easily accessible. Community does develop locally, in coffee shops, for example. Have you ever found yourself saying “Meet me at …”? But these places are private businesses with a demographically self-selecting clientele. How many elderly do you see ordering a triple soy latte? How many people of color?
Many of us would relish the opportunity to find ways to get to know our neighbors outside the context of some problem that needs to be solved. Could community centers fill a need – to get people out of their houses for something that is recreational as opposed to confrontational? The answer to that is undoubtedly yes.
These thoughts come in the context of something I heard recently. Councillor Craig Kelley was decrying the lack of public participation in the policy making process. He said, as he has said on many other occasions, that it is very difficult for elected officials to make policy choices in the vacuum left by an apparently indifferent electorate. Record low voter turnouts in recent elections reinforce this mood.
He noted somewhat sardonically that the Ken Reeves Travel Flap generated more email to his office than a recent proposed revision of the personal property tax rate though the scale of these two public expenditures was in no way comparable – a property tax rate revision would have had much greater long term impact both on pocketbooks and on the fiscal health of the city. Mayor Reeves, who spent his annual travel budget in the first six months, and then came back to ask for more, handled the situation badly. But Kelley opines that Reeves is committed to tackling a very difficult challenge – the performance gap between students of color (predominantly African-American) and white students in Cambridge public schools – a worthy challenge.
Underlying the public’s frustrated emails, of course, is their sense of an absence of accountability. The image of a public servant traveling far and wide on the public dime only furthers existing public skepticism, which expresses itself as apathy interrupted by spasms of disgust.
A better measure of Reeves’s expenditures will be what he has learned on his sojourns and the proposals they generate to address the problems of the city. Kelley is right: the city is facing down a real problem in the achievement gap, and that challenge defines our city’s future to a large degree. I am reminded of this whenever I converse with my neighbor Victoria Harris. Like many parents with children in the public schools, she is committed to supporting the schools that educate her children, and the larger sense of community which those schools help foster. But she watches like a hawk, since she knows that every adult decision can have a lifetime of impacts.
