Summary

Part V, “Community,” opens with the stages of community building. The text takes readers back to the 1950s when a Greenwich Village woman, Jane Jacobs, looked out her window and saw a young girl struggling with an older man. A kidnapping? She watched and then noticed others nearby also watching – the fruit salesman, the butcher shop couple, the laundromat owner. All were ready to help. Jacobs later called this neighborhood a “ballet” or an “intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls” (265). This is the essence of community. Brooks then shares another, more recent story of a mother in an affluent neighborhood who could not find her 4-year old son one night around 10 PM. She hollered in the streets but no one emerged – a stark contrast with Jacob’s experience. What happened? Instead of community, there is loneliness - manifest in suicide rates, unemployment...