The Big Idea of Local Government

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Paul Grimes
January 13, 2024

As my years in this profession go by, I am always drawn to new perspectives on how to capture the essence of what it means to be a local government professional. And as leaders in our respective organizations and communities, the big ideas are what we have to get right if we are going to be effective.

Most recently, I came across a couple of unrelated pieces of literature that prompted me to think of our work in what, for me, was a bit of a jolting simplicity—the “big idea,” if you will. I will get to that, but first let’s get to the literature.

The first is a book by columnist and author David Brooks. Brooks readily admits that he has evolved over the years and would likely comment on how his phases of life have forced him to change his perspective on things.

In his most recent book, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, Brooks offers a perspective that is at once both obvious and provocative. Much of our division as a country, which is juiced and turbocharged by social media and modern internet communications technologies, has resulted in us effectively bypassing the learned art of understanding each other. Understanding takes deeper conversations, a little time spent with one another to get to know each other better.

Now, think about the invective in local city council chambers and school boards. The parties to an argument on a social or political issue advocate as if the other side were to prevail, our national survival would be at stake. These moral certitudes are almost always harbingers of trouble, and we are seeing it in full relief in the various social media chat boxes and echo chambers. But do you think those moral proselytizers really know each other?

Brooks points out another interesting view in his August 2023 column titled, “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?” In trying to understand the rise of populism across a number of modern Democratic nations, including the United States, Brooks suggests that perhaps it is the elite class that is not “seeing” the 80 percent or so of other middle- and lower-income Americans. Our entire social order is based on achievement, which is not a bad thing if kept in balance. But if the system we live in sees highly educated parents who go to elite schools who marry each other, work at high-paying prestigious jobs and spend enormous resources for their kids to gain advantages that regular folks will never know—and then rinse and repeat for a couple of generations—is there any wonder why the working and middle classes might feel “unseen”?

And it is this feeling of being unseen that fuels resentment and perhaps a more toxic maybe-this-system-just-isn’t-working-for-us mindset. While many in the highest “educated classes” often speak of the marginalized, somehow they “always end up building systems that serve ourselves.” Daniel Markovits, in his book, The Meritocracy Trap, says, “elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege super skilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”

I think the challenge for local government administrators is, in many ways, how we can create the conditions for everyone to be seen. What systemic approaches can we envision that encourages the socialization and fellowship that builds social ties and understanding, or “social mixing,” even if we are fundamentally on different sides of political or social issues? Maybe we would find out that we share far more in common than that which pulls us apart.

You might think that the traditional institutions in our local communities offer that opportunity. In an interesting paper by Maxim Massenkoff and Nathan Wilmers, the authors evaluate the concept of class segregation in daily activities. In other words, where do people rub shoulders, and where are they best suited for “mixing” across socioeconomic strata? The authors focus on measures of isolation, or the sharing of encounters with one’s own group members.

Are local schools, public or private, good at social mixing? Nope. Among the least diverse, in terms of socioeconomic status, are elementary and secondary schools. Think about it: affluent suburban area schools are filled with affluent kids. Poor urban or rural schools are comprised of poor kids. And they hang out with kids from their schools, which means kids most like them.

How about places of worship? Less isolated than schools, but still pretty much a reflection of the types of folks that attend those places of worship. Not a lot of mixing there.

Oddly enough, the highest places for mixing, according to the model put forth by Massenkoff and Wilmers, are full-service restaurants, gas stations, hotels and motels and convenience stores. And, while some may disparage chain restaurants, we might note that they offer some of the highest levels of social mixing of any restaurant. Chains like the Olive Garden, Chili’s and Buffalo Wild Wings have more diversity of income than just about any other place. In short, the data the authors analyze demonstrates the places that contribute the most to mixing by economic class are not civic spaces like churches and schools, but rather large restaurant chains and general merchandise stores.

So, what to make of all this? I don’t see anyone going to 7-Elevens for community social hours or holding community meetings in a Walmart vestibule. Nor is it very promising for us to take on social engineering projects. Yet it might be useful to consider that our conclusions about how best to connect people in our communities and create the conditions for understanding, “being seen,” and connecting are not what we thought they were. Rather, we can think about ways to encourage a mix of restaurants and types of retail where all social classes in our communities find something of shared interest, including each other.  There are many examples across the United States for fostering social connections. The key point is that local government can serve as a convening entity or catalyst for encouraging more social mixing, particularly if we recognize that it is a primary purpose of what we do in local government rather than mere happenstance.

One of the key challenges for our time is to maintain connection in society and our communities, even when manifest forces try to pull us apart. And a big idea is determining how we can adapt to these forces by creating places where people can connect, exchange, know, understand—and be seen.

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Author: Paul Grimes the city manager of McKinney, Texas. He can be reached at [email protected].

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