Seth D. Kaplan gained an international reputation early in his career as an expert in fixing fragile states — lawless places around the globe with deeply flawed political, economic, and legal structures. The United States is not a fragile state in that sense. But it is a fragile society in which too many areas (rich and poor alike) are suffering from anomie and decay, the symptoms of which include family disintegration, rising rates of loneliness and depression, the opioid crisis, and deaths of despair. In his new book Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time, Kaplan applies lessons learned from his work overseas to revitalizing American society at the local level.
While American popular culture valorizes the lone hero, Kaplan emphasizes that our country’s success has not been rooted in rugged individualism and self-interest but instead has been “the product of cooperation, collective action, and dense social bonds embedded within robust structures.” In his book, Kaplan suggests that by rebuilding and renewing local institutions — and the social ties that hold them together — we can restore neighborhoods as places where families and communities can thrive.
In this podcast discussion, Kaplan delves into the real-life examples of individuals and organizations he encountered throughout his research that succeeded in hyperlocal renewal by focusing their efforts on supporting communities, schools, families, churches, and physical habitats. He talks about former lawyer Dreama Gentry, whose organization works with leaders and educators in rural Appalachia to instill students with local pride as well as education and job skills, and pastor Chris Lambert’s gradual realization, during his effort to create a community hub in Detroit, that the hard work of building social trust had to come before the provision of good works. Kaplan’s analysis explains why so many American neighborhoods are in trouble even amid material affluence and points out how Americans can reunite and repair their fragile society.
Transcript
Seth D. Kaplan: The physical is very connected to the institutional, and what we’ve seen most of all in our country, the problem we have to address, is this de-institutionalization — and that’s about relationships. So everything needs to be geared toward strengthening those relationships, in my opinion.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m pleased to be joined today by Seth D. Kaplan. He’s a professorial lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, a senior advisor at the Institute for Integrated Transitions, and has been a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange. He’s a leading expert on preventing conflict in fragile states and has served as a consultant to a wide variety of multilateral institutions including the World Bank, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as developing country governments and NGOs. And he is the author of numerous books including, most recently, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time, which will be published on October 17th. Welcome, Seth.
Seth D. Kaplan: Thank you so much, Geoff. It’s a great pleasure to be here with you.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s a pleasure to have you here as well. I happen to know that you are a New York Mets fan, and we are speaking not too long after the team was eliminated from the Major League Baseball playoffs despite carrying the league’s highest payroll. So condolences and better luck next year.
Seth D. Kaplan: Thank you. I’m a Mets fan, so I’m used to it.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s the way Red Sox fans used to be. Seth, you’ve spent decades in the foreign affairs space working for multinationals and managing projects in developing countries. What made you decide to turn your focus to U.S. domestic affairs?
Seth D. Kaplan: Very simple. 2015, 2016, I’m walking around Washington meeting lots of people. Everybody knows me as “the fragile states person,” someone who works on Africa, Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, and so on and so forth. And they start asking me — and it happens not once, it happens many times — “Is America a fragile state?” And as a person who just came back from, let’s say, Sri Lanka or from Nigeria or from someplace in the Middle East, and here I’m in this very wealthy country with hundreds of years, literally hundreds of years, of democratic governance and dynamic economy and dynamic companies and a huge amount of nonprofits and millions of people wanting to come here — the question didn’t quite seem right. So I said, “This is something that I have to learn about.” I thought the answer was “No, we’re not a fragile state, but I need to learn more.” And that’s when I started my exploration with the book — my answer to that question.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you do make that distinction that America is not a fragile state in the sense that Sri Lanka or Nigeria or Colombia are fragile states. But you do seem to regard America as a fragile society characterized by “material affluence but social poverty.” You write that “The social decay we are experiencing in neighborhoods across America is unlike anything I have seen elsewhere, in even the poorest places.” Can you explain a little more what you mean by social poverty?
Seth D. Kaplan: Generally, when we talk about the problems of societies or the problems of places, we get fixated on the material: how wealthy is a place, how poor is a place. We tend to disregard or undervalue the role of relationships and social dynamics. And in my work, I work on lots of countries — I’ve worked on thirty, forty countries in some form or another. And for me, always the single most important determinant of how well a country is doing (or will be doing) is the nature of the relationships: the health of that society, the health of its social dynamics, the strength of its social institutions — that’s different than the government institutions. It’s what’s going on in society.
So when I look at America, I do see great material wealth. There is poverty. There are places — whether it’s in urban areas, suburban areas, rural areas — where we do have poverty, and I don’t mean by any means mean to say that that is not important. But there’s something different from the material poverty, which is the social poverty. The social poverty lies behind some of the problems that poor places, materially poor places, have. But being a different dynamic, it also is connected to the “deaths of despair” that we’re experiencing, the loneliness, the disconnection, the mistrust. And externally that feeds into our politics and it feeds into our incredibly atrocious lifespan health indicators. And so it’s more than material, and it’s affecting many people that are not poor.
Geoff Kabaservice: I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but it does seem to me from reading your book that you do feel that America’s hyper-individualism, its sense of celebrating self-sufficiency in all things, lies at the root of some of these dysfunctions.
Seth D. Kaplan: I would say yes. If you look across the developed world and you contrast the different countries, clearly the countries that are more individualistic are having more what we might call “rich man problems.” You see it to some extent in Scandinavia, but you see it mostly in Anglo-Saxon English-speaking countries, with the U.S. as the outlier of all those places. So clearly, something cultural is behind this.
But I would also say there’s something about how we’ve built our country that is isolating, that exacerbates these tendencies. Just think of the physical landscape. Historically, for thousands of years or for all of human history, people have been living in relatively place-based, bounded communities, neighborhoods with what I would call overlapping institutions. And that was certainly the historical pattern of how we built the landscape. And then after World War II, we have a new model of development built around roads, built around just single-family housing, and so we have a physical dimension that’s isolating.
We also have an institutional dimension that’s isolating. Where we used to have a lot of place-based institutions, today most places are not actually our places. They’re placeless. There’s no center, there’s no identity, there’s no local institutions. Your kids, if you have kids, they may not go to a local school. If you attend church, you may not attend a local church. If you are involved in civic organizations, they likely are not place-based. So what happens is you may live in a place and you may have no connection (or practically no connection) with any of your neighbors. That is a completely different way of living than anyone has ever lived in human history. And a lot of that is self-created, and it’s different than the cultural element. So I would say we’ve created structures — physically, institutionally — which have caused many of these problems.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you refer to the way that America was built, and I agree with you in terms of the built environment. But a lot of people feel that America was built culturally on this kind of rugged individualism and pioneering spirit and self-sufficiency. And that actually strikes you as a myth, if I read your book correctly.
Seth D. Kaplan: Clearly, this is a very individualistic country. I would not deny that. If you study the data from cultural psychology — and I have a previous book in which I have a whole chapter on cultural psychology, a book on culture and human rights, and I delve into it — people would say Westerners are WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democracies. And if you read the literature, the United States is the weird of the WEIRD, the weirdest of them all. So clearly there’s plenty of data that says the way we think is incredibly individualistic, the way we act is incredibly individualistic. I totally agree with that.
However, if you look at what has been successful in our history… Think of the West, the people who went and settled the West. We tend to have this image that the settlers were individuals who went into the West. Almost the cultural image almost seems like there was one person on one horse that went into the wilderness, and somehow they built towns and roads and the whole states, and they built a country as individuals. And that clearly is not only not true, it’s impossible.
And if you look at some histories of the West, people traveled in groups, partly for reasons of security, but they also had to cooperate. They stopped in places, they had to build towns, they had to build institutions of government, they had to build institutions to protect them. They had to build courts, they had to have mayors. And so even though it was, as we would remember it, “the Wild West,” the places that succeeded were the places in which that wildness and lack of government actually lubricated cooperation, incubated lots of institutions, and people developed mechanisms to govern themselves, solve their problems, and succeed. And that wasn’t individuals doing that. That was people cooperating and developing new methods, or borrowing methods they knew from elsewhere. And that’s how they survived, flourished, and eventually built states that became part of the Union.
Geoff Kabaservice: You referred earlier to “deaths of despair,” and that’s a phrase that to some extent is associated with the research of Angus Deaton and Anne Case who wrote a book by that name. You and I are talking, gosh, just a few days after the publication of a Brookings Papers on Economic Affairs conference paper by Deaton and Case which shows that there’s a gap in life expectancies between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans which is up to, I think, eight years at this point. And to some extent… You and I are in the D.C. area, and we see even more radical disparities of this kind. Somewhat to the north of me is Friendship Heights, where people can live to be 96 years old, and then to the south is Anacostia’s Barry Farms, where the difference in life expectancy is almost — actually it’s over 30 years. So I guess the question to get into your book is why do neighborhoods matter so much in terms of outcomes in an increasingly unequal America?
Seth D. Kaplan: First, there’s plenty of data. The gap is as much as 40 years between different places in the United States. Some people are living past their nineties, some people are not making it to their sixties. You gave an example in the D.C. area. I was on a call recently with people in Kansas City. They talked about two neighboring counties: a 20-year gap. We see these gaps everywhere. They’re all over the country. So there’s plenty of data that this is true. There’s data on social mobility, there’s data on social capital.
I think the argument is that people in those places where they’re living long, there is a material element. But I think the single most important element is the nature of relationships. They’re embedded in strong relationships. They’re embedded in strong networks. When we move from a place-based to a network-based society — and we are a network-based society — there’s a lot of people who are left behind from their networks. There’s a lot of people who are in no networks, that are isolated. So clearly there’s some of that.
You referred to the gap based upon education. There’s a class element here. There’s also a racial element, which we’re not talking about. Some of the race and class features overlap. But if you talk about class, we used to live in mixed-income, mixed-politics neighborhoods. We didn’t live in mixed racial neighborhoods; that’s always been a problem for the United States. But if you go back even sixty, seventy years — two generations ago — classes mixed. You have this great gap in lifespans because the poor are congregated in certain neighborhoods, the rich are congregated in other neighborhoods, and then there’s a material aspect there.
But for me, always the wellbeing of people — yes, the material matters, but if you’re in strong marriages, if you’re a strong network of support, if you have strong network that you’re able to get access to things that you need when you need them, and you have psychological support and you’re not exposed to trauma in a way that is debilitating… I think the class element, plus some material element, plus this issue of the nature of social dynamics… Some of these neighborhoods are literally unsafe — unsafe for kids, never mind adults. You won’t see that in Friendship Heights. You likely will see that in some areas with a high level of concentrated poverty, lack of opportunity. But insecurity is based upon the nature of how people treat each other.
So clearly there are many factors, but I’m personally very interested in the social factor. And the class element feeds right into the nature of what types of people you are meeting every day and how does that affect institutions and norms, and then how does that affect the wellbeing of people? And I think that the outcome we see most clearly is the difference in lifespan.
Geoff Kabaservice: I do want to underscore a point you just made, which is that when you’re talking about fragile neighborhoods, that is not a synonym for poverty.
Seth D. Kaplan: No, it’s not. Definitely not. Because I think materially well-off neighborhoods can be socially poor as well. Definitely.
Geoff Kabaservice: And the reverse is true. We both share an admiration for sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book Heat Wave…
Seth D. Kaplan: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: …which is about the 1995 heat wave in Chicago and his finding that the neighborhood of North Lawndale saw more than six times as many fatalities as the neighboring South Lawndale, even though the two places were both minority neighborhoods that were socioeconomically quite similar.
Seth D. Kaplan: Yes. They were, basically, equally poor. But the neighborhood that had many fewer deaths from the heat wave had a lot more commercial activity on the street, had a lot more interaction between individuals, and had more extensive family networks. And therefore when the heat wave happened, people checked in on each other. And the other neighborhood, basically, was very isolating and people did not check on each other. And this was what you might call a natural experiment.
There are other examples of that. The tsunami… I don’t think I note this in the book, but you can surely look it up and it might be footnoted somewhere. When the tsunami hit Japan, which I believe is almost ten years ago — maybe you can remember the date, but it’s roughly ten years ago — that was a natural experiment on the northeastern coast of Honshu Island. Japan has four main islands, and Honshu Island, the northeastern coast. There were great differences in outcomes based upon the social connectiveness, social cohesion of individual towns. In towns with strong social dynamics, people made sure that others knew about the looming threat and got them out. You think of Japan as very socially cohesive, but clearly there was a great differences in towns. Towns where people just worried about themselves had many more deaths. There’s even an example of a specific school — don’t ask me to name the town, but there’s a school where something about the leadership in the town, they basically ended up leaving the children in the school. And they basically all died because they were not evacuated.
And so there are several of these natural experiments on the importance of social connectiveness when there’s an emergency or a threat. But I would say it’s equally important day in, day out, for how people support each other. And I could surely give examples from my neighborhood, which is flourishing and has great social dynamics.
Geoff Kabaservice: We will get to your neighborhood. But I wanted to ask a question about your politics. Because we’re talking now at a moment when there are many decades of both left and right approaches to strengthening neighborhoods, and you’re critical of both of them. At one point you write in your book, “Whereas the left’s profligate spending on social programs and emphasis on individual autonomy weaken the social structures and norms that used to support healthy neighborhoods, the right’s emphasis on market conditions above all else is simply a different flavor of individualism, the same mentality that has wreaked havoc on our social fabric.” So where do you locate yourself politically, at least when it comes to the question of neighborhoods and how to support them?
Seth D. Kaplan: I can say very clearly because I’ve been working on this book for many years, and now I’ve been talking to people about the book launch for many months… What’s very interesting is how bipartisan the interest is in this topic. The left and right come at this topic from different angles. It’s amazing how many people worry about place-based inequality on the left. There’s a lot of those people. And it’s clear on the right, there’s a lot of people that worry about institutions and are very sympathetic to the idea that there’s a place-based element to the nature of how social institutions are affecting people. I have people on both sides: you could call it AEI and Brookings. Yes, one is on the right and one is on the left, but there’s people at both institutions that are sympathetic.
And clearly I’m speaking to very progressive organizations and I’m speaking to very conservative organizations. It is true that I’m changing my talk a little bit because they have different areas of interest. But it’s quite impressive, I think, how much of a consensus there is that we need to do better at the place-based, neighborhood-based dynamics that are impacting the average American on a day-to-day basis.
In terms of myself, I would always say that I’m a bit of a Burkean — Edmund Burke — in terms of how I look at things. I’m also very much an institutionalist, given that I work in a lot of countries. The first and foremost thing that I worry about in those countries is: How are institutions doing? For me, it’s how relationships affect institutions, affect everything else. But certainly it’s hard to look at any country in the world and not start off with using an institutional lens. And when I go to neighborhoods, I have a very institutional lens.
But I would also say that I have found myself throughout my life to always be the person — whether it’s the right or the left or, for that matter, the vital center — where I’m always agreeing with some things and disagreeing with other things and having a very hard time agreeing with enough of what is being said for anyone to accept me as one of their own. I constantly feel like I’m sort of there but not really there.
So I’m not sure how to quite answer your question, because I’m the kind of person that will switch who I’m voting for from election to election. And I’m surely the kind of person that, while I might feel somewhat comfortable on the right at times, I work with a lot of people on the left and I’m somewhat comfortable with a lot of their ideas. And on both sides I can certainly disagree with a lot of things. I wish I had a simple answer for you, but most of my life has been defined as the minority, whatever that might mean.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, that’s a marvelously moderate minoritarian answer, so I approve. So you’d mentioned earlier that you live in Kemp Mill, Maryland, which is a part of Silver Spring, I believe, and a tight-knit Jewish enclave. But you have contrasted that in the book with the circumstances under which you grew up, which you said was a place where you struggled and you did not find community or belonging there in the way that you have now. So can you tell me about this personal trajectory from where you grew up and how you got to be where you are now?
Seth D. Kaplan: I grew up in a home… Both my parents were born in the United States, and yet at the first few years of my life I had an enormous struggle being understood in English. My mother reminds me over and over again… She always gives the story that as a child I would be speaking and she could not understand me. And then when I got a little older, I had stuttering. I was the child who was bullied. I was the child who socially didn’t fit in. I was the child who, even after seventh grade — we switched public schools; my school system was two towns, so I switched from one town to the other — I had years of struggling, not because I wasn’t smart but because I had trouble catching up with the norms or acting the normative way. And I think that gave me, one, a great appreciation for the importance of relationships. Two, it forced me to study. It forced me to stand aside and watch how people interact and think hard: What is going on here and why does it matter and what does that mean?
And so I had this upbringing where I had this desire for warmth and close relationships, and I had this whole experience of being the third person, shall we say: the outsider watching. And then I had a chance in college to go to Turkey for the summer, which was the life-changing experience in my life. I went for the summer to Turkey and worked in Turkey, and that basically sent me on this trajectory… Turkey was very warm people, very welcoming. If anyone here listening has ever been in Turkey, they know exactly what I’m talking about. And then after I graduated and did a little bit of travel… I mean, I had this period of just wandering the world, with literally a backpack, country to country, reading books — this is pre-internet — always carrying books, always studying, looking at countries. And I ended up in Africa and then I ended up in Japan. And all of those countries made me study: Why is this country doing better than that country? And my natural instinct was, again, to focus on relationships based upon the way I grew up. And when I had a chance at some point to switch from whatever I was working on — I was in business for several years and I lived in lots of countries — the natural question that drove everything I’ve done since is this idea of relationships, society, and why some states do better than others.
But I think it really goes back to my upbringing, my experience, and my desire to be in a place of warmth. And certainly the fact that I became religious, the fact that I focused on fragile states where I always felt very comfortable with the people, the fact that today I’m probably more comfortable with poor people in a certain neighborhood than I am with rich people who are more cold — it all goes back to something about my upbringing, I think, that has made me very attracted to warm people and warm cultures. And it’s just a personal interest and it certainly has guided many of the life decisions that I have made.
Geoff Kabaservice: So my understanding is that you got your undergraduate degrees and a business degree in the United States, but a Ph.D. in Europe?
Seth D. Kaplan: Yes. I actually was a triple major, to be honest, at Carnegie Mellon. It was a triple major: math, econ, business. I started in computers and I said, “This is definitely not for me.” The computer people were 24/7 on computers, and I was a little bit more curious about people than that. So again, it was the choice: Am I going to a route that involves people or a route that doesn’t involve people? So I switched to math, econ, and business. I did have an MBA. I did run a company in China for many years, actually. I lived in Japan, I lived in Africa, I lived in the Middle East, I lived in China. There have been times when I went years not speaking English. And then I had an MBA from Wharton.
And when it came time later — by now I’m over thirty — to get a Ph.D., I very much wanted not to go back to class. I have to say I did well in school, but I was never a very good student in college or my MBA program. I would always find ways to do well on the exams and not show up to classes. I could write a book about how do you excel in school and not go to class. And then the Ph.D… I basically was offered: If you do a book, you don’t have to come to any classes. And you couldn’t do that in the United States. But I went to a top global, top 50 school, and I got a Ph.D. and I didn’t have to go to class. And I did it all virtually except for showing up once a year for many days. And that’s a pretty good arrangement. So I wasn’t going to say no to that.
Geoff Kabaservice: Your Ph.D. was from the University of Utrecht?
Seth D. Kaplan: Yes. It’s partly because of my work on fragile states. It did well in many places. It was a first book on fragile states, and a lot of people knew this book, especially in the field. And I got all into the work on fragile states because I wrote a book, not because I worked anywhere, not because I had a job. I was still doing something related to business when I wrote this book.
But the place that I did the best with that book was the Netherlands. They had a lot of interest in fragile states. They had a minister that made it a priority for the country. At that point in my life, I was going to the Netherlands three or four times a year because people would be asking me to come. And at one of those events, somebody said, “Well, why don’t you consider this?” And I said, “Why not?” So there it was.
I would say most of my life is not a master plan. Most of my life is following the questions or the invitations or the offers and seeing where that takes me. So if anyone out here is considering their career choices, I would definitely say follow the market, follow where interest and what you’re thinking and working on leads you. Most of us want to think we have the answers, but often we have the interests and we have the direction. But where does that direction lead us? It’s sometimes best if we ourselves do not decide.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think that’s good advice. I realize that you work with both the left and the right, that you position yourself somewhere in the vital center. Nonetheless, when we’re talking about cities — particularly “legacy cities,” as they’re called — nostalgia seems like an unavoidable part of how people think about the problems of cities and neighborhoods within those cities. Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is a kind of appeal to an undefined past. And I think you actually cited that Penn State survey which found that in the 2016 Republican primary elections, Trump received the most votes in the counties and states with the lowest levels of social connectedness.
But nonetheless, let me just ask this general question: How do you feel about American society in the ‘50s and ‘60s? Were things working better then in these kinds of cities and neighborhoods than they are now? And was that just something which was a product of a particular cultural moment, or is there some way, in your opinion, that we can get back to the good parts about those times without all of the bad parts that’ll obviously come to listeners’ minds.
Seth D. Kaplan: First, it’s clear we’re not going back. We’re only going forward, and we have to come up with ideas that take us from where we are to where we might be a better country. That’s the big question before us. It’s not about going back. We certainly can’t. I’m in the peace-building field, basically. My day job is to try to prevent war, and certainly one huge element of that is comparative politics. You look at a lot of countries and you try to learn from things that worked in one place or worked in another place, and draw lessons.
So in the same way in the United States, I think it’s really important to look across places. And I think it’s really important to look across time periods and see what we can learn from our past. I’m often very surprised that people in America don’t look across countries very well. They don’t look across places very well. They don’t look across time periods very well. I’m not really sure why that is. It seems like many of our debates and arguments are somewhat isolated from other types of experiences that might be fruitful for us to engage with.
So in terms of your specific question, there certainly are some things that we should learn from the past. I don’t think it’s particularly that time period. If you read Bob Putnam’s work, he talks about the peak of the “we” society versus the “I” society. And I would say the thickness of social engagement, social connectiveness — I think he puts it at 1964 as the peak, roughly; and so the ‘50s, early ‘60s. And then we’ve been, the way he would look at it, all downhill from there in terms of the social dynamics.
And so I would say there’s some things we can learn from that time period. One thing — and clearly it’s a core element about my book — is the idea that we rethink our physical and institutional landscape such that it is more around bounded neighborhoods. These are not neighborhoods that would be disconnected from others, but that have an identity, that have a center, that have places to meet, institutions to engage, might have a layer of government, and so on and so forth. And we could come up with a list.
I do come up with a list of ten elements that make up a successful neighborhood. And I think the more we think of our landscape like that, and we encourage people to be engaged in their physical neighborhoods, the more we will be able to deal with many of the problems we’re dealing with. I mean, that’s from a perspective of isolation. It’s also a perspective of the poverty and the inequality across place.
If we made it a national goal that every American should live in a flourishing neighborhood, and we had some minimal definition of what that meant in terms of amenities, in terms of institutions, in terms of the physical requirements, opportunity, parks, transportation, local institutions, local businesses… If we had that as a goal that everybody lives in a flourishing neighborhood, I think we would address so many of our social problems from inequality to deaths of despair, problems of mobility, problems of mistrust, problems of polarization. We see these as separate. For me, they’re all connected and they’re all downstream from what is happening in our daily lives at the neighborhood level.
Geoff Kabaservice: I too am very impressed by that book by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing. But a lot of the book is, frankly, the downswing.
Seth D. Kaplan: The downswing. Yes, and there’s not a good takeaways. What do we do about it? That’s the problem. He’s great at diagnosis. I love his work, but it’s very hard. There’s fifty, sixty, a hundred books on what’s wrong with America, and his books are the best and the most prominent. The challenge is: What do we do about it? There’s not a lot of solutions. I’ve tried to fill the gap of solutions. That’s really what I think we’re missing here.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I think it does fill a gap, your book, Seth. Because one of the bad ideas of the 1960s, I think we can say in retrospect — maybe I’m speaking as a Republican here, so people can disagree with me — but I think urban renewal turned out to be a bad idea: this idea that cities had to rebuild themselves around the automobile and that this meant really leveling failed neighborhoods, as planners saw it at that point. Whereas, in fact, cities really needed to maintain their urban character, the density, the diversity of buildings and people, the mixture of uses and activities in order to thrive.
And I was reminded in reading of your book of a conversation I had with a guy called John McClaughry, who had been a Republican activist in moderate Republican circles. He worked for Senator Charles Percy in the late 1960s in Illinois. He later worked in the Nixon and I think the Reagan administrations. But the thing that John McClaughry was quite interested in the 1960s was whether the Republican Party could coalesce around alternatives to urban renewal theory, if you want to put it that way.
And he came across this example in St. Louis of these neighborhoods in the shadow of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex, where people were trying to work toward a different model. And there was an organization called the Bicentennial Civic Improvement Corporation of St. Louis, which had the idea that residents would work with local institutions — including the Catholic Church, the gas companies — to try to renew their neighborhoods. And you’d have public and private programs combined with local leadership to create jobs, to offer job training, to improve public education and municipal services, to encourage mutual self-help efforts.
And one of those efforts was that instead of bulldozing neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal, and building low-income housing using big contractors, you would actually use small-scale, minority-owned contractors to rehabilitate the existing housing stock, much of which was actually quite attractive: brick buildings and very distinctive neighborhoods. And the goal that they were working toward was a critical mass of homeownership by neighborhood residents. And it seemed to me that there was a sort of road not taken. But gradually, decades later, some of what you’re describing in terms of neighborhood renewal is actually following some of those same lessons.
Seth D. Kaplan: First, I would say that new urbanism is roughly, I think it’s about thirty… Someone could date it for me, but they’re in their thirty-something year of the Congress for the New Urbanism. And separately there’s a field called placemaking, which goes back to the ‘70s. So there is, roughly in reaction to what you described…First there was Jane Jacobs, then there was placemaking, then there was New Urbanism. These are all movements that are reflecting a natural human desire to have a physical landscape that is nurturing relationships.
I went to the Congress for the New Urbanism annual conference this year. I also went to the Strong Towns National Gathering, which is sort of a spinoff of this event. I went to both in Charlotte, North Carolina. I think these people would generally agree with everything you just said and would say that we have caused many of our problems by how we built the physical landscape.
Where I would go further than them is that they have a vision of what the physical landscape looks like. Strong Towns… I just love everything they do, Chuck Marohn, and even the way they operate. They’re catalyzing so much movement on the ground to encourage change. They have a very good vision of the fiscal — because many of our cities and parts of the country are simply fiscally unsustainable in the way they’ve designed the physical landscape. So they have a fiscal and they have a physical vision of how the future should be.
Their social vision is very incomplete. They may talk about neighborhoods, but they don’t really, I think, fully understand what it means for neighborhoods to have an identity, have a center, have some sort of beginning and end so they’re somewhat bounded — not disconnected but bounded in a way that nurtures ties. They don’t really think about the role of institutions and how they would encourage greater social connectiveness, social cohesion.
So I would say everything they do, I love. I’ve reached out to them, they have great interest in my work. But I would say they need to go further and think harder about how they connect what they’re doing to what it means in terms of building social ties, building social institutions. I know that’s not their main focus, but I do believe that the more the physical is connected to the institutional is connected to the nature of relationships and norms in a place, the more successful all this activity and the movements will be in encouraging human flourishing.
Geoff Kabaservice:So the heart of your book is a profile of five different efforts to strengthen the institutions that really do have the greatest impact on our social wellbeing: marriage, family, the community, church, and school. It seems that some of these examples, at least, emerged from a monthly discussion on social capital that you co-hosted for four years along with the writer Anne Snyder, her husband David Brooks (also a writer of a certain repute), and Independent Sector president Dan Cardinali. Can you tell me something about how that group came together and how you did find these examples of efforts to build social capital?
Seth D. Kaplan: Well, first let me give a lot of credit to Anne Snyder, because Anne and I basically started the group and we asked the other two people to join. Anne and I did most of the work. Anne has a great sense of people, a great sense of the kind of work people do, the individuals as individuals. So she deserves a lot of credit for the work that we did. I chose the five profiles in my book. Partly it was incubated by that group. At least one — the Detroit example, Life Remodeled — is straight from Anne. A couple of the others are from the group or some connection to the group. But in the final way I organized the book, I chose those five partly from that experience from the group, but also significantly from the kind of data I saw. I was, in parallel to researching organizations, running this “Social Capital Luncheon,” we called it. We ran it for four years in person in Washington and then virtual. The virtual aspect was very helpful because it allowed us to bring in a lot of these organizations from across the country.
In parallel to that, I was doing research, and I published a white paper about a year ago for Mercatus, which brought together all this research. The research clearly shows, from Raj Chetty or from other people, what are the factors that make successful neighborhoods. So if you look at that, my choices are somewhat parallel to the factors that matter. I summarized them, I believe, at the end of my Chapter Three. But there’s a much bigger body of research. This book is a trade book, and there’s a much bigger body of research that can be found in the Mercatus paper where I went into this information in more detail.
Those five are marriage — and I think there’s a lot of data on marriage in terms of how marriage connects to the success of neighborhoods as well as the success of children and adults. I have something on family — and family is a bit different than marriage in that I’m thinking more family structure. I’m also thinking inter-family dynamics. Inter-family dynamics are hugely important in any neighborhood but receive almost no attention in any — there’s a few nonprofits that work on it, but almost no attention in policy or intellectual circles. One is actually building community institutions — that’s in Detroit. One is focused on how the schools can affect social context — that was Eastern Kentucky. One was an organization that shaped the physical landscape, whether it’s housing or commercial or transportation. They also work on schools and other things. But it’s basically thinking about how the physical landscape and the structural factors will affect everything else. For me, those are the five most important entry points for change in any neighborhood.
Geoff Kabaservice: So let’s talk about some of those examples. You had mentioned, first of all, Life Remodeled, which I believe is centered around the Dexter-Linwood neighborhood of Detroit. Tell me something more about that.
Seth D. Kaplan: Life Remodeled is an organization that started off, basically, with a pastor in a church who wanted to take his faith out of the church and help people. He did some things for some homes and some streets. And it did so well — he got so many volunteers, and they were eager to help — that he eventually built it into an organization that was doing an annual six-day campaign to help houses, help streets clean up, beautify, improve people’s heating or air conditioning or do repairs. Then he started renovating schools, and he developed a partnership with the school system. He was just going strength to strength. Then he received an offer: “Why don’t you take one of our school buildings that we’re basically going to have to give up using” — because of the great collapse in student numbers, they were going to consolidate two schools into one. He got this absolutely beautiful building built in the 1920s, a huge, huge building. He was given the chance to make this into a neighborhood hub.
That sounded great, but he ran into a lot of trouble. It sounded great, he had great ideas, but then when he went and he presented his ideas to the neighborhood, they basically didn’t trust him. They didn’t know who he was. He had done stuff for them, but it was very transactional. Here he was going to set up shop, take over the most important building in the neighborhood. He basically scared them. This is a Black neighborhood. A white guy comes in, a white guy not even from the general area originally.
So when I look at these profiles, I’m not only looking at the entry points, I’m trying to tell stories about how it was that they developed their models, what problems they ran into. How did they solve their problems? What are the takeaways? Again, the goal here is to be very practical. So in his case, he had to learn how to develop trust at his neighborhood level. He had to learn that it wasn’t just showing up with a good cause, it wasn’t just showing up with good ideas. He had to actually sit down and break bread with people. He had to seek out people who mattered on the streets. He had to spend a lot of time, he had to solicit advice, he had to change his staff so he basically was hiring more locally. He had to create advisory boards. He did a lot of things to basically enmesh, embed himself in the neighborhood. Because he wasn’t from the neighborhood, he needed to become much more from the neighborhood before he could be successful.
In the end, he basically ends up with this incredible hub that brings in thirty-nine organizations. Some of them are doing private business, some of them are healthcare, some of them are afterschool for the kids. The key thing is this neighborhood that was institutionally poor became institutionally rich. Not only that, these institutions, through various things he was doing, he encouraged them to cooperate. He encouraged them to connect with the neighborhood. People who were detached became attached, with mechanisms to encourage people to work together.
A lot of things are going on when you take a neighborhood that’s basically been marginalized, isolated, run down, and you immediately plop in this type of hub with lots of institutions that are very open and engaged with the neighborhood. But of course the process must be right, the sequence must be right, the right things have to be there. This was a great learning process as well as a great result in the end.
Geoff Kabaservice: So as you say, Chris Lambert did eventually succeed in turning the Durfee Elementary Middle School into this community hub that’s now known as the Durfee Innovation Society. He did do that through extensive community outreach and incorporating some of the key gatekeepers in the local area into his project. But I also wondered about this… One of the aspects of the War on Poverty in the 1960s was the concept known as “maximum feasible participation,” incorporating essentially community action into these plans. Often those resulted in disasters, which you can read about in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s book Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. So what are some of the ways to avoid some of the disasters that happened during the War on Poverty and achieve the successes that Chris Lambert and his group did achieve with the Durfee Innovation Society in Detroit?
Seth D. Kaplan: There’s a few things that I think are different. First, the initiatives that I describe, one of them, the one who’s the purpose-built community, which is affecting the physical landscape… There is a financial aspect, but in most of these there’s not a huge (and in some cases there’s no) money involved. Obviously there’s some money to run this organization that he runs. But for the most part, we’re talking about very limited amounts of money and a strong focus on institution-building, a strong focus on relationship-building, a strong focus on incrementalism, a strong focus on some sort of demand-driven element. These are not protests, these are not community organizing in the traditional sense. These are mostly about building institutions and building webs of support that help people.
The big challenge that our country faces, I think, that’s really hard to get our hands on it from a policy level in Washington… We spend a lot of time discussing policy. But when I look out at this country, and I spend time walking around the country, clearly the biggest problem that most people are experiencing in their daily lives is the deinstitutionalization of social life. Whereas people used to belong, whether it’s marriage and family, whether it’s church, whether it’s what you might call the trans-local associations like the Grange or the Eastern Star or the American Legion or the local… Putnam talks about “bowling alone,” but those were associations. The Boy Scouts are an association. The settlement houses, going back further, were institutions. People used to experience life with many, many institutions that they were embedded in, that they were a member of, that they felt a stake in, that they had some ownership over, that they could contribute to. Every day people could wake up and say, “I am contributing to some institution, to some group of people, and to my place.” You become optimistic, positive, and value your time. And you have a sense of dignity and belonging when you’re engaged in doing things.
What our country has seen — and there’s many reasons for this — we have seen this great de-institutionalization of social life. Really the only way to address so many of our problems is we have to think of ways to nurture a re-institutionalization of our social life. When you look at the examples I give, they’re all about somehow building institutions that will bring people together on a recurring, regular basis. In an ideal situation, each place will have many of these institution-building processes going on simultaneously. They will have many of these initiatives to do incremental improvements to the physical landscape. Some places are disconnected, some places have only low-income housing, some places have no cafés. There’s a lot of things that there’s a physical element, but I would say the physical is very connected to the institutional. What we’ve seen most of all in our country is that the problem we have to address is this de-institutionalization. That’s about relationships first and foremost. So everything needs to be geared towards strengthening those relationships, in my opinion.
Geoff Kabaservice: I went this summer to the national conference of Braver Angels in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania…
Seth D. Kaplan: I probably saw you there, or we missed each other. Because I was there, but only the first day.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was pretty sure I saw you there. So I wanted to ask about that.
Seth D. Kaplan: I was there. I wish I could have stayed longer, but I was teaching the next morning, so that was it. I went on the Thursday, and you probably stayed until Saturday.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s right. But anyway, there is a problem to some extent with the model of Braver Angels, I think, in that I don’t think it’s enough to just have people from red and blue communities sit down and talk. You say that the way to really bring them together is actually to have them work on a common project.
Seth D. Kaplan: Yes. I’ve had several discussions with them. I love them. I feel so much at home at their conference. I’m thrilled with what they do. But I worry about the model. I believe that politics is not the right entry point for addressing our political woes. I believe the biggest problem we have — I go back to this — is the de-institutionalization. When we used to be enmeshed or embedded in lots of local initiatives, institutions, networks in our neighborhoods or in our places, and we were contributing to them, we worked together with people and we didn’t ask about their political affiliation. We might’ve disagreed about some things. But what we long have seen at the local or urban… I’m focused on the local-local, but I think it’s the same thing at the city level. The fact is that when problems are practical, people come together, and they tend to not have some of the polarizing ideological differences of opinion because they actually have to make sure the water is clean, they have to actually make sure the traffic signals work.
I’m thinking how in my neighborhood, a bunch of people didn’t like how one of the main traffic signals was working, and literally a bunch of them got together and got them to change the traffic signal. So there’s hundreds of these examples from my neighborhood, which I could certainly give. But to the extent that people cooperate on a practical project and get to know each other, and that happens locally, in person, and there’s some sort of recurring meetings or recurring cooperation… I’m on the board of a nonprofit. We meet — I’m on two committees, I’m on the board… I have these three groups, all related. I’m meeting all the time, often in person. And politics is not a topic of discussion. We just meet. We have to deal with some finance problem or fundraising problem or event problem or education, because it’s special needs students. Politics is not an issue there.
So the more we’re doing that, I think we are practicing compromise. We’re practicing working with each other. We’re building trust. And if we have none of that, to just bring people together and say, “Let’s have a discussion, and let’s just work out our differences or see that we’re not so different from each other” — it’s downstream. It’s much further downstream. It’s much harder to do, and you’re likely not bringing the people who are most polarizing into that conversation.
Geoff Kabaservice: I completely agree. Let me just quickly refer to one of the other organizations you profiled, and that was Partners for Education, which is now Partners for Rural Impact. It was founded and led by Dreama Gentry in 1995, and for most of its existence its home base was Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Can you tell me something about that organization?
Seth D. Kaplan: Well, first, for those listeners who have never been to Eastern Kentucky, I don’t think it’s the first spot on your plans for tourism, but what a beautiful landscape. What an interesting landscape. It literally is driving distance… You have to drive a few hours — it’s probably about six or so hours from Washington — but what a beautiful landscape, with the hills and the mountains. So I certainly would recommend that.
But here is Eastern Kentucky. Eastern Kentucky is representative of the problems of rural America. Not only is it sparsely populated and geographically divided because of the hills and the mountains, it has also very little philanthropy. In many places you go to, there are very few institutions. In some ways, the challenge of this area is worse than an urban city neighborhood, because there’s very little philanthropy money. There’s maybe a church, there’s the school, there’s the county government.
And so Partners for Education/Partners for Rural Impact, they basically were working through one of the few institutions that actually touched people’s lives, and possibly in many cases the only institution; maybe the church as well. And their main focus was cradle-to-career, which is a common way people approach education problems today. What they were learning, in terms of what they were doing… I had a chance, I wanted a school, and I spoke to people in the education sector. I wanted to find someone who was working on social dynamics, and that was the one that came recommended.
And they are very unique in terms of trying to build up the pride of people, trying to build up the sense of belonging to people. They’re trying to use their place as an advantage, in terms of feeling proud in their place. They learn very early that if you want to improve education outcomes, you cannot ignore what goes on in the household. I mean, the most important place for learning is not the school, it’s the home.
So they are, to the extent that they can — because clearly there’s limits of what any organization can do… But just like Harlem Children’s Zone, which has a motto that they follow in terms of how they work… Harlem Children’s Zone was meant to be all entry points: basically, every way we can affect the lives of the children, we want to be involved with them. And so their model is very similar. And they reach out to families, they reach out to local organizations. They very much try to affect the social context.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I find Berea College an interesting model as well. Because as many people will know, it caters to people from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Seth D. Kaplan: Yes, yes. You cannot go to that school if you’re… I believe you cannot go to that school if you’re wealthy. I believe everyone in that school has to be… I don’t know the criteria. But it’s a very special school with a very long tradition of catering to the needs of the poor or disadvantaged in that part of the country. So it’s really unusual.
Geoff Kabaservice: And all students are required to work. But the curriculum also, although it’s a robust liberal arts curriculum, draws heavily on the culture and arts of Appalachia.
Seth D. Kaplan: I would say it’s really hard to raise children up if you don’t give them a pride in who they are, where they come from, the place that they live in. To the extent that someone grows up in a neighborhood that is not attractive, that doesn’t make you feel good, and that the broader society somehow looks down upon — that’s really hard to do. It’s almost like you’re walking around with a weight on your shoulder.
So this idea that we build pride in who we are, we build pride in the background of children… I mean, I don’t want to take anything away, it’s certainly important that we build a national identity and national patriotism. But that certainly should include that every place is important, every place should flourish. And the sense that we belong to a place, the place makes us feel good about ourselves, our past.
And it could be, in Appalachia’s case, it could be music, it could be poetry, it could be the arts, it could be plays. Lots of ways that you can use the arts, and you can use history, and you can make people feel that they come from someplace special — and therefore you also are special. We want every child to feel that they’re special, that they come from some important background, that they are a part of something that’s important, and that they’re going to grow up to be an important contributor to something. And anything in a school, or in a social context, or in the culture that puts down people or places is not helping those children.
Geoff Kabaservice: I wish we had more time to get into some of the other examples you profile: Thread in Baltimore, which is creating a kind of family-like social support structure for truly at-risk youth; Communio, which is strengthening churches; the East Lake Foundation in Atlanta, which is actually remaking the physical habitat of one of the most dangerous areas (or what historically was one of the most historically dangerous areas) in Atlanta. But what are some of the characteristics that are common, I suppose, to all of the organizations that you profile?
Seth D. Kaplan: I close my book with two chapters. The second-to-last chapter is what I would call operational lessons. Each profile has, I don’t know, six, seven, eight, nine takeaways. And then I have these ten operational lessons, and then I end with four takeaways for any reader.
So the operational lessons are… I’ll just give a few examples. One, focus on kids, and especially boys. Richard Reeves has made that point very clearly in the last year. I don’t think he’s the first — there’s many books on this problem — but his book has seemed to have a bigger impact and has certainly received a lot of attention. But boys are doing much worse than girls in general. And kids in general, you’re going to have a much bigger impact on kids in terms of trying to help a place than on adults. Not that I want to ignore adults, but the kids are the future.
I would say another example is… This is a bit contrarian. But you focus on the segment of the population that is the segment where you’re going to have the biggest impact. And that could vary. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Thread focuses on the bottom 25% of ninth-graders at its Baltimore high schools that it works in — I believe it’s at six high schools now and growing. So the bottom 25%, the worst performers, and then they make a ten-year commitment, 24/7, to support them, love them, help them any way possible.
Another hand, what was Partners for Education, they focus on the second 25%, 26 to 50%. And they found that that group, per-investment, was the best group to focus on. Because that group… The top 25% did not need help and the bottom 25% was very hard to reach. But that second 25%, they could not only make a big impact, but that impact would have spillover effects on the two neighboring 25% groups.
And I would also say there’s a physical element here. When you’re trying to improve a neighborhood and you’re looking for what neighborhood to start off with, some neighborhoods are much more likely to have an impact. When you talk about the failures of past programs, I think part of it is how they went about things, what they focused on, what was their theory of change. But surely, one of it is where they focus. And it’s much easier to make the neighborhood better if it has a strong anchor institution, like near a university. Or it might have good housing stock, might be near an attractive tourist site, might be near a nice green area, or also might be physically close to a more successful part of a city or area. You always want to start from places where you can succeed, and then incrementally spread across the landscape in a horizontal fashion. So I would say that’s another point.
I’ll say one more point is that we need to look, as a country, for successful models in specific places. And we need much more to go back to this idea that we need trans-local organizations. The most successful trans-local organizations at one time had not only thousands, they had as many as 15,000 chapters across the country — all run, for the most part, with volunteers. To the extent that we find successful models — and several of my models are trying to grow. Communio, that works with churches on marriage, they’re in many, many places across the country: purpose-built communities in about 27, 28 different neighborhoods and so on and so forth. We need to find successful models. We need to help them replicate. We need to work horizontally, success to success, as much as we can. And these are just three of the ten lessons that I give in that chapter.
Geoff Kabaservice: The third lesson that you offer is that you should simultaneously target as many drivers of neighborhood health as you can — and ideally you would target all of the sources of dysfunction, which is quite a lot. And that extends even to the broader economy, and maybe this individualistic culture that we started out talking about.
And there are people who are hypothesizing that we may be heading back into a period like the 1970s, when we saw rising crime in the cities, when we saw family disintegration, when we saw all kinds of negative impacts from de-industrialization and the broader trends in the economy. And I wonder if you are more optimistic or pessimistic that, if we can scale up some of these examples that you’ve written about, we can avoid having a repeat of the 1970s, of the urban disintegration of that era.
Seth D. Kaplan: First, I would be optimistic because we have the rear-view window here. We have lessons learned. I think we know better about a lot of things. I mean, everything is a learning process. I would certainly be optimistic that at the neighborhood level, more and more people are focused on the core problems. Most of things that have been done in recent decades are focused on the silo nature of problems. Loneliness is a problem, so let’s think about what we do for loneliness. Drug overdoses is a problem, what can we do for drug overdoses? Poverty is a problem, lack of housing — let’s focus on housing or food.
I think there certainly are more and more people that appreciate the importance of place. I think Raj Chetty in particular has popularized some of the importance of this. I don’t think it’s generalized to understand that this is not only a problem of poor people. It’s a problem of most neighborhoods, though not all for sure. So I’m optimistic in terms of that.
In terms of the broader issues… And neighborhoods of course do not exist separate from what goes on in the broader society, the broader culture, city, or region that they’re embedded in. And my focus is on neighborhoods. My focus is on social. I have chosen that as the area to focus on because I believe those were the most neglected. A lot of people are doing very good work on economic, urban, national issues, so I purposely have put those aside. But I do completely agree: It’s not one or the other. Both matter. We should not create what some people would call a false dichotomy here. And I certainly think neighborhoods can only do as well as cities can do. It would be very hard to be a successful neighborhood in Detroit these many decades because of how bad the city was doing. Now that the city is making progress, you can at least get some neighborhoods to rebound and improve.
So I would just say, all these broader factors matter. But I do think there is a greater appreciation of the role of place, region, and a greater understanding that we need to think horizontal: horizontal across the country, horizontal across cities, horizontal across the urban/rural divide. And to the extent that we stop thinking vertically, stop thinking only economically, we think socially and horizontally, I think we will be much more successful in addressing these larger problems and ensuring that what we do that works will be spread horizontally in a way that ensures that many more people benefit.
Geoff Kabaservice: From your lips to God’s ears. Well, thank you so much, Seth Kaplan for joining me. And congratulations again on the publication of your new book Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time.
Seth D. Kaplan: Thank you, Geoff. Great questions. Appreciate the invitation. Thank you so much.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.