Khizr Khan, whose son died fighting in the United States Army, powerfully reminded the 2016 Democratic National Convention of, when he waved a copy of the United States Constitution—for it defined his citizenship and was the source of his patriotism.
Within that broad inclusive framework, people should have the freedom to congregate in communities with others like themselves. The community, rather than the nation, becomes the vehicle for those who cherish the bonds of ethnicity and want some cultural continuity. Of course, communities should be open so that people can move in and out if they wish. Some will, no doubt, prefer to live in ethnically mixed communities while others will choose to live with people of their own ethnicity. They all should have the freedom to do so. Freedom of association, with active discrimination prohibited by law, has to be the future of large diverse countries. We will eventually learn to cherish the other, but till then let us live peaceably, side by side if not together.
Markets too must become more inclusive. Large corporations dominate too many markets, increasingly fortified by privileged possession of data, ownership of networks, and intellectual property rights. Credentialed licensed professionals dominate too many services, preventing competition from those who do not have the requisite licenses (one reason friendly neighbors cannot help rebuild a house today). In every situation, we must locate barriers to competition and entry and remove them so that opportunity is available to all. Thus, as we strive for an inclusive state and inclusive markets, which embed the empowered community, we will achieve an inclusive localism. This will enable community revival and a desirable rebalancing of the pillars.
What of truly distressed communities? Is revival even possible? Consider the community of Pilsen on the southwest side of Chicago, a few miles from my home. This once terribly damaged community is now turning a corner.
A Real Community Pulling Itself Up
Pilsen used to be populated by Eastern European immigrants, working in manufacturing establishments around Chicago. Since the middle of the last century, Hispanic immigrants and African Americans moved in steadily, and the Eastern Europeans moved out.6 In 2010, Hispanics or Latinos made up 82 percent of the population, and African Americans 3.1 percent. Non-Hispanic whites composed 12.4 percent of the population in 2010, up from 7.9 percent in 2000.
Pilsen is poor, with median household income averaged over 2010–2014 at $35,100, about half that of metropolitan Chicago as a whole. It has an unemployment rate of nearly 30 percent averaged over 2010–2014. Over 35 percent of individuals over twenty-five have not graduated from high school. Only 21.4 percent of individuals over twenty-five have a bachelor’s degree, less than half the comparable ratio in the overall US population. Nearly half of renters or homeowners have housing costs that account for more than 30 percent of their income. Keeping people in their homes is essential for community stability, and Pilsen has a hard time of it.
Low education, low incomes, and high unemployment are a recipe for drugs, alcohol, and crime. Pilsen was truly a war zone. At its peak in 1979, there were 67.4 murders per 100,000 residents in Pilsen, over double the wider city rate. In comparison, Western Europe averages a murder rate of about 1 per 100,000 per year. As recently as 1988, a Chicago Tribune reporter counted twenty-one different gangs along a two-mile stretch on the main 18th Street thoroughfare.
Yet Pilsen is a community that is trying to pull itself up. One sign it is succeeding is that the murder rate has been significantly below the overall Chicago rate for a number of years since the early 2000s, exceeding it slightly only every few years. As we will see, communities typically do not pick themselves up spontaneously—leaders emerge to coordinate the revival. Among those driving Pilsen’s revival is Raul Raymundo, the CEO of the Resurrection Project, a nongovernmental organization whose motto is “Building relationships, creating healthy communities.” Raul came to the United States from Mexico as a seven-year-old immigrant, went to Benito Juarez High School in Pilsen, attended college (including some time in graduate school at the University of Chicago), and started helping out in the community. He found his vocation after the murder of a young man just outside his church, when his pastor asked the congregation what the community was going to do about it. Answering the call, Raul and a few others started the Resurrection Project, with $5,000 each from six local churches. When the candidate they found to head the project declined to take the job, Raul stepped in, and he is still there, after twenty-seven years. Today, the Resurrection Project has funneled over $500 million in investment into the community.
As with other revival projects, the community first undertook an inventory of its assets to figure out what it could build around. It had its churches that would provide moral, vocal, and financial support for any revival, it had decent schools, it had a strong Mexican-American community with tightly knit families, and it was in Chicago, a city that goes through ups and downs but is still one of America’s great cities.
The first order of action was to engage the community to make it more livable, which meant keeping the locality clean, ridding the streets of crime, and strengthening the schools. Residents were organized to hound the city sanitation department to do their job—clean the streets and collect garbage. People were urged to form block clubs and ad hoc groups against crime. They would walk out of their houses when they saw suspicious activity so as to crowd the criminals out, or jointly call the police so that the criminals would not know who to blame. The community campaigned successfully for a moratorium on city liquor licenses in Pilsen, got some especially problematic bars closed down, and worked with police, churches, and absentee landlords to target and close down known gang houses.7 Remedial education, after-school extracurricular programs, and job-training programs increased, enabling young people to get more from their schoolwork, and giving them a ladder to jobs. Parents were urged to get involved in the schools, and they did. New school programs started—one example is the Cristo Rey Catholic School, which aims to give its students a quality education, while keeping it affordable. Cristo Rey got local businesses to pay the school fees of students. As partial repayment, each student worked one day a week for their sponsoring business. The student attended school the other four days, getting both a good education and work experience each week.
Virtuous cycles started emerging. As some older gang members turned to legitimate business, their prosperity inspired other gang members to develop skills other than the ability to inflict violence. The proliferation of youth-oriented programs at the schools gave them a way to escape their past. As crime came down, new businesses started opening, including franchises like McDonald’s, and they offered low-level entry jobs that drew youth into work. As Chicago became more of a hub for the regional distribution of goods, more jobs were created as wholesale warehouses and refrigeration centers opened in Pilsen, drawn by the still-low real estate prices and falling crime.
With the area more livable, the Resurrection Project turned to keeping the poor, some of who have very few assets and very little buffer against a sudden loss of job or illness, in their rented homes. This would stabilize the community, but it gets harder as the community strengthens because rents are increasing and buying is becoming costlier. The Resurrection Project tries to increase access to credit locally, so that people have options. Its volunteers work with community members to improve their financial understanding, to get them to build and improve their credit histories by, for example, paying their utility bills regularly and on time.
Large banks, of which a growing number have now set up in the community, are not well equipped to understand community practices. This hampers their lending. In Pilsen, a working woman’s mother will often cook for her and babysit her children, so the worker’s salary goes a much longer way because she does not pay for these services. Similarly, family members may lend each other money, making it possible for someone to keep up loan payments even if their income is volatile. Typically, such practices are hard for a loan officer from a large bank to substantiate or document, which is why he has to go primarily on the explicit record of income.8 Community-based financial institutions, where decisions are made locally based on their better understanding of the community, know the worker is more creditworthy than her salary slip might suggest. Being free from the tyranny
