Grace Ross: Dreaming of a 21st Century Community
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
When I think of livable communities in Massachusetts, there are elements of all sorts of communities throughout the state that I simply adore. We have beautiful mountains, lakes, and seashore–from fishing to farming communities. Some immediate examples of beautiful places I have either worked or lived. I think of Framingham at one end, Marlborough as a small city, Worcester as the second largest city in our state. Where you want to live inevitably depends on whether you are a country type or a city girl like me (who loves the country and seashore but must have some of the bustle of a city and a city’s cultural life to be truly at home).
Framingham, along with being the largest town in the United States, has this amazing downtown full of small shops run by a very culturally diverse group of small business owners. Any number of these business owners may well be immigrants who–as we know from the recent immigration debate–are responsible for creating 80% of today’s new jobs. That’s a very good measure of the long-term economic viability of a community as well as a place guaranteed to being interesting for an afternoon shopping adventure without having to go any where.
Similarly, I worked many years in Marlborough, which continued to have a small but vibrant downtown but a long time working class base–making it fun without any pretension. People say hello and if you are in trouble, there are likely to be helping hands without judgment. This is the kind of village that can raise a child.
Conversely, a community where the primary shopping option is a big box store like Wal-Mart for instance is not such a good sign although you could distinguish between large retailers like Costco that are unionized versus Wal-Mart that isn’t. As we know, the minimum wage paying businesses are most often large chains that are not unionized; on top of that, they are sending their profits out of the local community. In contrast, small businesses tend to pay a little better and they tend to reinvest more money into the local community in terms of not just charitable contributions, but also in terms of paying their workers better. All around they invest more money in the community and also put more of their own money as local business owners into buying their supplies locally and passing on farther down the economic chain their own product to other local businesses as well as spending and investing locally as owners of local businesses.
A truly 21st century community moves with grace and thoughtfulness into the future. Critically important to our future as a country moving from a plurality of folks of European descent to a plurality of people from many other parts of the world will be communities that are successfully integrating multiple language groups, and cultural diversity. One aspect that endeared me to Worcester from the beginning was the wonderful festivals put on by different cultural subgroups of the city. There are around 100 languages that are spoken in this city. All of these are signs of a thriving future-oriented, economically sustainable community that has moved into the 21st century together.
The financial wellbeing of a 21st century community will be founded in a few characteristics. Businesses of the full range of sizes as opposed to the unhealthy model of a few really big businesses where nothing new is growing up in the natural course of the life cycle of businesses. Similarly, you’d want to see a community where the economic divide between residents is not too broad. If the community represents the kind of economic divide that exists in our nation with a top one or two percent having the vast majority of the resources of the community that’s not going to create a sustainable future. Instead, not such a wide spread for the vast majority of folks between the lowest wage earners and highest wage earners is a promising sign. It should bode better for not having as many folks out of work long term, which draws on the resources of the community in a lot of unhealthy ways and creates a psychologically and physical unhealthy situation. I mean this literally. If folks don’t have good medical coverage than you’re putting yourself in danger with things like meningitis being easily passed around. We want to avoid those kinds of contagious diseases, which most industrial nations have managed to do.
You wouldn’t want to see a lot of foreclosures. You wouldn’t want to see a lot of empty residential housing. Nor the concomitant, pretty large homeless population. These factors bode very badly for the housing and habitability future of a community.
And there has to be access to outdoor space: mountains or bodies of water that are clean and healthy, places for people to recreate, for animals to thrive. Nearby, locally owned farms are part of 21st century communities; they ensure local food. As gas prices and transportation of materials continues to get more and more expensive, our local farms are going to be critical for food production and our health as environmental challenges get worse. As our access to clean water, clean air, and green uses of land gets scarcer, I would research local ordinances from banning plastic bags, allowing local-owned small scale alternative energy, banning too much petroleum products on our lawns to avoid the terrible, measurable impact on the health of local bodies of water. Nor is the presence of vast amounts of local truck traffic impacting our air and roads or energy production from dirty burning coal plants or even a nuclear power plant with the proven strontium 90 in rainfall. These all have long-term health impacts especially if you’re thinking of raising a child.
No community will be perfect but regardless of the amount of human density you prefer, these are some of the markers of economic, psychological, and physical health in our environment, in our workplaces, and in our local cultural lives and social interactions. Communities that are consciously and wisely guiding their way into the 21st century exist all across our wonderful state.
Grace Ross is a former Gubernatorial candidate and author of Main St. Smarts.
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