OPTING OUT
My first year out of college, I lived with six other people. All of us were involved in a Christian ministry on the PENN campus, so our living together was an opportunity to practice and experience intentional mini-community. For one, the oldest two in our group let the rest of use their car whenever we needed it. For another, we took turns buying groceries and split the food bill seven ways. It was a great year of seeing how living communally can have rich spiritual and practical benefits.
The next year, two of the seven of us had moved, one new person joined the ministry team and the house, and I left the ministry team but stayed in the house. Communal living was diffused, and not just in the spiritual aspects (for example, I wasn’t plugged into everyone else’s schedules, responsibilities, and meetings). Our eldest two were still generous with their car to me. But it was harder to justify splitting the food bill evenly. Everyone else ate most of their meals outside of the house and on campus, while I did a lot of cooking at home. So it made sense for me to bear a higher proportion of the monthly food bill, something which I willing did sometimes and sometimes was less receptive to.
By two years after that, I had left the house and so had almost everyone else I had lived with. But the new tenants were friends of ours and involved in varied ways with the original ministry, so the intent was there to practice Christian community. But that food bill got even harder to split fairly. One person wondered why he had to chip in for the chicken when he was a vegetarian, while another cried foul that she had bought all the cereal during her last shopping run and didn’t get a chance to enjoy any of it. Pretty soon, people started buying their own stuff and labeling it.
I share this story not to memorialize my original team of seven or to vilify the last group’s lack of willingness to share, but rather to illustrate how hard it is to share when the sense of community has become fragmented and diffuse. This kind of thing is happening more and more in our housing in this country. Homeowner’s associations like cooperatives and condominiums have been around for at least three decades, but this latest iteration, gated communities, has really been hot lately, especially in the high-growth areas in the West and Southwest. They offer tons of amenities for people who can afford them and who prefer them.
What they also do, though, is illustrate this diffusing of community. By opting into a gated community, a group of people have chosen out of other housing options which obligate them to be part of a broader tax and services package. It is precisely because they do not wish to be part of that broader tax and services package that they are opting into gated communities. For gated communities offer some level (not totally) of autonomy, to replace city services like trash collection with their own private trash collection, and to be “taxed” for just the services they want, no more and no less.
The economists will tell you this is a very efficient good, in that there aren’t any messy spillovers like there are in larger cities, where all families’ taxes go towards things like schools and parks and health clinics, even though not all families consume those things. The sociologists will vilify gated communities because they are destroying the notion of community in this country by literally walling off from the rest of the world.
I am doing neither in this post. I am just reminiscing over how great community was that one year I lived with six other people, and how quickly and easily those kinds of community benefits, and therefore the motivation to act communally, can erode over time.
My first year out of college, I lived with six other people. All of us were involved in a Christian ministry on the PENN campus, so our living together was an opportunity to practice and experience intentional mini-community. For one, the oldest two in our group let the rest of use their car whenever we needed it. For another, we took turns buying groceries and split the food bill seven ways. It was a great year of seeing how living communally can have rich spiritual and practical benefits.
The next year, two of the seven of us had moved, one new person joined the ministry team and the house, and I left the ministry team but stayed in the house. Communal living was diffused, and not just in the spiritual aspects (for example, I wasn’t plugged into everyone else’s schedules, responsibilities, and meetings). Our eldest two were still generous with their car to me. But it was harder to justify splitting the food bill evenly. Everyone else ate most of their meals outside of the house and on campus, while I did a lot of cooking at home. So it made sense for me to bear a higher proportion of the monthly food bill, something which I willing did sometimes and sometimes was less receptive to.
By two years after that, I had left the house and so had almost everyone else I had lived with. But the new tenants were friends of ours and involved in varied ways with the original ministry, so the intent was there to practice Christian community. But that food bill got even harder to split fairly. One person wondered why he had to chip in for the chicken when he was a vegetarian, while another cried foul that she had bought all the cereal during her last shopping run and didn’t get a chance to enjoy any of it. Pretty soon, people started buying their own stuff and labeling it.
I share this story not to memorialize my original team of seven or to vilify the last group’s lack of willingness to share, but rather to illustrate how hard it is to share when the sense of community has become fragmented and diffuse. This kind of thing is happening more and more in our housing in this country. Homeowner’s associations like cooperatives and condominiums have been around for at least three decades, but this latest iteration, gated communities, has really been hot lately, especially in the high-growth areas in the West and Southwest. They offer tons of amenities for people who can afford them and who prefer them.
What they also do, though, is illustrate this diffusing of community. By opting into a gated community, a group of people have chosen out of other housing options which obligate them to be part of a broader tax and services package. It is precisely because they do not wish to be part of that broader tax and services package that they are opting into gated communities. For gated communities offer some level (not totally) of autonomy, to replace city services like trash collection with their own private trash collection, and to be “taxed” for just the services they want, no more and no less.
The economists will tell you this is a very efficient good, in that there aren’t any messy spillovers like there are in larger cities, where all families’ taxes go towards things like schools and parks and health clinics, even though not all families consume those things. The sociologists will vilify gated communities because they are destroying the notion of community in this country by literally walling off from the rest of the world.
I am doing neither in this post. I am just reminiscing over how great community was that one year I lived with six other people, and how quickly and easily those kinds of community benefits, and therefore the motivation to act communally, can erode over time.
Comments