People + Places = Community

I spent last Saturday morning in a workshop sponsored by the Historic District Commission that emphasized the importance of community to our quality of life.

I spent the afternoon talking with low-income seniors and people with disabilities about how the town could be more livable for them. The issues they brought up had at their core a longing for community.

One of the featured speakers at the HDC’s workshop, Thompson Mayes, wrote the book Why Old Places Matter. Mayes spoke of the need for continuity in a world that is often changing. Continuity provides stability, he said, and he cited studies of people who had been forcibly relocated to places that were safer and newer but found that their sense of community had been harmed.

The people I spoke to at the afternoon gathering told of how the housing vouchers formerly known as Section 8 were becoming all but useless as more and more landlords refused to honor them. In the experience of these folks, landlords could, at any time, change their policy about accepting the housing subsidy and adopt a business model of renting only to tenants at market rate. The renters’ stability was threatened. When they were forced to move, all of them scattered to different parts of the Triangle, wherever they could find housing in their budgets. Their sense of community had been harmed.

At a community meeting Sunday afternoon about proposed changes at a mobile home park in town, the developers’ representative spent much of the time assuaging residents of the mobile homes who were worried that their sense of community would be disrupted. The owner plans to make room for commercial ventures along the street frontage and relocate some of the homes to the side and back edges of the land. It was not known whether all of the homes would be saved.

Mayes also pointed out that beauty contributes to happiness, though developers and council members often treat it as frivolous. While the people on modest fixed incomes expressed gratitude for any affordable place when they faced eviction, they noted that those places were not designed with beauty in mind. Low-income neighborhoods often are very dense, stark and lack green space or nice views out the windows.

Increasingly, characteristics of continuity, beauty and community are available only to those who can pay a good price. Those of us who are policymakers, who decide what gets built where, need to do what we can to extend to low-income residents the same stability, grace and sense of place that financially secure residents take for granted.
— Nancy Oates