This is not your problem

Why we need to build the community view into our thinking

Six days ago, for reasons having nothing to do with my family or my girlfriend and every thing to do with a professional project, I started learning everything I could about the combined impact of flood insurance, climate change, and a recent legal change on home ownerships. And the possibility that the trio can create a foreclosure crisis.

Every tool that I looked at to describe the issue was geared toward the home owner, current or prospective.

None of the tools has built into them the idea that foreclosure is a community problem. That it cannot possibly be the province of only individuals making their individual decisions benefited and buffetted by the intersetion of luck and decisions.

But foreclosure — look at the outer ring of Detroit — is not an individual problem, it is a community problem. And one that can tilt resources in all kinds of crazy directions.

And we have to think of these problems as community problems; we need to bring a diversity of attention and resources to resolve them.

And that started me digging into civic engagement vehicles, particularly via code-a-code-a-thons, data sharing, and problem solving.

While there’s a lot of engagement — people interacting with the issue and sometimes even with each other — there wasn’t a lot of community built into the solution.

We don’t have views that show us the scope of the problem. My representative to Congress? She votes on issues that impact the people who live on the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf Coast. What if I want to understand the impact wrought by the Biggert-Waters Act and ask her to come up with mediating solutions? Solutions that keep people in their homes. What if the people just in higher areas of Brooklyn want to do that?

I’ve always been a big admirer of the ilovemountains.org. Put in your zip code and you see your connection to mountain top removal. That’s even what that page is called: My-Connection.

Community, right there, in the depiction of the problem.

It’s what we need more of.