Mayberry for the Millennium

Vegetarian Times, Dec, 1998 by Mark Harris

Today, house-hunters are seeking more than a safe neighborhood, a well-designed home and good schools. What they're looking for is a sense of community.

When Caroline Heggen first went house-hunting in the Washington, D.C., area in the early 1990s, she had her pick of dream homes. But her search dragged on for many months because the 50ish office manager and single mother had her heart set on a lot more than a great house and low property taxes. "I had no family in the area, so I wanted a place where my daughter and I could feel connected to our neighbors," she says, referring to a vital but often elusive quality. "I wanted a close community."

Having grown up in just such an environment--Angola, N.Y., a rustic hamlet outside Buffalo--Heggen had a good idea of what she was looking for: a place where neighbors gather for potluck dinners, mingle on front porches, lend a hand or a hand tool, watch each others' kids and generally share in one another's lives.

Eventually Heggen found the type of community she was searching for in the Kentlands, a housing development that was going up in a Maryland suburb of the nation's capital. Modeled after small American towns of old, Kentlands sits on 350 acres and features the design elements that bring people closer together and foster a sense of belonging, including a village green, ample sidewalks and houses built close together, with front porches. There's no guarantee that strolling along a sidewalk or rocking on the front porch will create a genuine esprit de corps, of course, but Heggen has found that to be the case at Kentlands. "I'm surrounded by neighbors who reach out," she says. "When my car broke down recently, my neighbor figured out what was wrong, ran out and bought the part, then put it in. That's community."

A SENSE OF CONNECTEDNESS

Heggen's search for a more communal place to live is representative of a much larger trend in this country. In a recent survey for the trade journal Builder, home buyers agreed that the quality they most desired in a house was not strong resale value or even solid construction, but a strong community surrounding it. The Trends Research Institute, of Rhinebeck, N.Y., reports that one of the hottest phenomena of this decade is "de-cocooning": our slow emergence from the cozy, self-sufficient homes we retreated to in the late 1980s and early '90s into a life of connectedness. As the trend-trackers see it, a national community movement is set to take off.

None of this surprises Charles Garfield, Ph.D., professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco and author of Wisdom Circles: A Guide to Self-Discovery and Community Building in Small Groups (Hyperion, 1998). "We are social beings in a very deep way," he says. "We look to connect with others because our emotional stability, our physical health, and our spiritual development depend on it. Deprive us of physical nourishment and we decline; deprive us of social nourishment and we'll decline too." And connection has never been more vital, Garfield argues, given the increase in the divorce rate, the need for both parents to work, the decline of organizations that once provided a sense of belonging, even the diminished camaraderie in the workplace thanks to downsizing. "There are few issues facing human beings today that are as important as cultivating the capacity for community," he insists.

Medical and psychology journals are full of evidence bearing Garfield out. Countless studies show that social isolation leads to mental and physical illness and even death, and that, inversely, a feeling of belonging and connectedness promotes wellness and longevity. Dean Omish, M.D., a pioneer of holistic healing and the author of Love and Survival (HarperCollins, 1998), says he has literally thousands of studies supporting this conclusion. Among the findings: People with few or weak social ties were twice as likely to die prematurely as those with strong ones; breast cancer patients who met in weekly support groups had twice the survival rate of those who didn't; and elderly adults with good social support had lower blood cholesterol levels and stronger immune systems than those without it.

The association between good health and living in a strong community is so well established, it has a name: the Roseto Effect, in honor of the small, eastern Pennsylvania town whose residents exhibited astounding good health as a direct result of living in a close-knit community. And when Roseto's tight weave unraveled in the 1960s and early 1970 as younger generations moved out and intimate socializing fell off, the health benefit of living there disappeared with it.

Rosetos are in short supply in our day. Instead of gathering for backyard picnics and convening on street corners, we're more likely to be hunkered down at the office park or belted in behind the wheel, commuting to the workplace or shuttling the kids between soccer games and dance recitals. And with three-quarters of mothers with school-age children now working, the neighborhood has lost many of its most active members.