Social capital investment good for democracy

By Dale Bryant

Ten years ago, I wrote a story about an area of run-down apartments, just off Blossom Hill Road and Almaden Expressway, that had become a Project Crackdown neighborhood. With that designation, the city of San Jose pulled out all the stops to put the "unwelcome" mat out to gangs and drug dealers who were openly selling their wares on the sidewalks and dark alleys.

While increased police presence and code enforcement were key elements of the crackdown strategy, the vital glue that held the effort together was something much more simple--parties.

A gathering of neighbors for cookies and games with the kids or a barbecue built around hamburgers and hot dogs might not seem like such a big deal. But in that low-income neighborhood of absentee landlords and high tenant turnover, just getting a smile from a neighbor was a big deal. Actually bringing neighbors together to socialize was a huge step toward taking back the neighborhood.

City staff leading the Project Crackdown effort told me that drug dealers and gangs are attracted to neighborhoods where they think people don't care. When neighbors come together and get to know each other, they feel safer. And they learn from each other how they can make things happen to improve the neighborhood.

The woman who took on the leadership role in that effort 10 years ago told me, "I've seen a big improvement since this program started a year ago. And if what it takes to keep it working is having lots of parties, then we'll have parties. We want gang members to know we aren't afraid."

What those residents were learning is that life is better when people have a sense of community.

That's pretty much the message of Robert D. Putnam's book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000). Recently, Putnam followed up his book with the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, funded by a number of community foundations, including the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley.

Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard University, argues that the more connected people are to each other, the better the community functions--especially in a democratic society. He backs his theory with massive research that makes a strong case that, in the second half of the 20th century, people in our society have become less and less connected to each other and, thus, to their communities. The result is that people don't trust each other as much, or help each other as much; they don't come together to solve problems; they don't vote or participate in the democratic process as much.

From church attendance to club membership to, well, bowling leagues, people just don't connect with each other the way they used to--and Putnam maintains that this poses grave dangers to our democratic society. There are lots of reasons why people have less civic engagement than they once had, and we can all list them easily--long commutes, long work hours, high mobility, women in the work force and the lure of television, to name some of the most obvious.

One thing that caught my eye was this: " ... newspaper readership is a mark of substantial civic engagement." The more people join clubs and participate in community activities, the more likely they are to read newspapers, and the more likely they are to do all these things, the more likely they are to vote.

It seems to me that for community newspapers, there is much to ponder in Putnam's research and in the findings of the recently released Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey.

What is our role in each of the communities we serve? And can we improve the social capital within our individual circulation areas if we do our job well? We all live in the sprawling Silicon Valley, where life in the fast lane refers to just about everything in our lives, except the roads and highways we drive in excruciatingly slow commutes.

It's always been our belief that within that larger community, people welcome the refuge of their smaller communities--the place where they do their grocery shopping and send their kids to school, or take a class at the recreation department. We might report on a consultant's recommendation to eliminate the community room of the local library, and, if that doesn't sit well with readers, we hope they'll share their feelings in our opinion pages.

Our opinion pages are meant to be community forums for the exchange of ideas, primarily about what's going on in individual communities. Letters and commentaries from our readers can engage others in local issues, thus giving these issues a good airing--not to mention battling the national trend toward civic disengagement.

We don't discount the importance of state and national politics, but we also know that it's much easier for people to make their voices heard at the local level. Frankly, we think a lot of people feel more passionate about the installation of a traffic light at the corner of a busy street in their neighborhood, or the renovation of a neighborhood park, than they do about the national debate on a tax cut.

We've always thought our papers play a vital role in our democratic way of life. Now we have a little more evidence to support our belief.

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Dale Bryant is the executive editor of Silicon Valley Community Newspapers. The Saratoga News is part of the SVCN family.

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