In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Trust Lubricates Cooperation Machinery, factories, equipment, and the financial equity of businesses are all examples of physical capital that produce products that satisfy human wants. The knowledge, values, and relationships that spur production and creativity to satisfy human wants comprise equally important social capital. If social capital is to enable the members of a community to work together for their mutual benefit, there must be trust among the community’s members. That was a major finding of political sociologist Robert D. Putnam’s study, published in his 1993 book, Making Democracy Work, a summary of his twentyyear -long study of politics and social organization in Italy. In his chapter “Social Capital and Institutional Success,” Putnam wrote, “Trust lubricates cooperation.”1 Putnam’s foray into the relationship between local community functions found that the “social capital” of intergroup cooperation and a strong civic tradition not only laid the foundation for fair and equitable decision making by the government in a democratic political system but also fostered economic growth. I learned the same thing as a young man when I was elected president of the Corryville Civic Association in 1959. After my discharge from the Air Force in 1957, I went to work in my family’s store, Gruen Apparel, located on Vine Street where it levels off after climbing up from downtown Cincinnati. The Corryville neighborhood had been developed in the nineteenth century to provide homes for working-class, Germanspeaking families on their first step up the economic ladder in their new country. The advertisements announcing available housing for the new development were written in German. By the time my father opened his store in 1939, most of the German-speaking families had moved on, and their single-family homes and apartments were now occupied by a new group of working-class, 103 5 How Neighborhoods Change, Why Occupants Change Neighborhoods white, mainly Catholic households. They had the kind of civic attitudes and personal aspirations that Putnam would have recognized as providing the social capital needed for a well-functioning democracy. My predecessor as president of the civic association was a bus driver for the local transit system— he had a magnetic personality. I was honored that they elected me their new president, even though I was one of the few members who was not a resident of Corryville. In the late 1950s, urban renewal had come to Corryville in the form of the federally funded General Neighborhood Renewal Plan, or GNRP. One prong of this urban renewal effort was aimed at enhancing the core neighborhood shopping district along Vine, where my family’s retail store occupied two adjacent buildings at the center of the block. For virtually all neighborhood retailers, both then and now, the most sought-after component of renewal is parking space—more parking space than there was before renewal—and that was part of the renewal plan. Eventually, the Cincinnati urban renewal agency assembled and purchased the land behind the stores on the main block of Vine Street and converted the vacant land into a public parking lot. The parking lot was financed by setting up an assessment district that charged an annual tax on the property owners served by the parking spaces. Assessment districts are formed to provide the future revenue needed to pay off bonds sold to finance a capital improvement. They are established when a majority of the property owners in a designated area or district vote to tax themselves to obtain the benefits of the improvement. The proceeds of the tax were used to pay off bonds issued to pay the costs of buying the land and blacktopping the lot with asphalt. At the junction of Vine and Auburn near the main business block, the redevelopment agency added some retail space to replace underutilized and obsolete buildings, which was somewhat helpful to the businesses in the area, or at least did it no harm. It was much harder to gauge the effect of proposals for beautification and traffic changes through the residential streets and other efforts aimed at arresting the slow decline in the quality of the local residential stock. Both public and private meetings with the urban renewal professionals did little to help me understand how the various GNRP proposals were going to lessen or remove the basic problem faced by the homeowners in the neighborhood. In a nutshell, the problem was that when the risks associated with gauging likely future house values were considered, it was cheaper...

Share