In the last twenty years, “community” has become a competitive feature in the consumer housing industry, where developers bundle it into the package of amenities on offer. Customers can buy into a “strong” community where others appear to be weak or disorganized or in decline. Community then acquires value as a therapeutic asset that can be purchased by those who, among all the groups in society, probably have least need for its restorative virtues. Celebration’s planners set out to raise the bar in the industry by offering a deluxe, next-generation version of the all-inclusive community package, far beyond the “enclaving” model that promised a safe retreat from the hustle and bustle of the city, and the “lifestyle” model that threw in golf and other sports. Celebration’s packaging was expected to set the new standard for community-in-depth models of marketing. The demand for such a place rests on the perception that community is everywhere else an endangered species, especially in the nowhere of suburbia. Move to a real town, goes the pitch, and you’ll see the difference it makes in your social life.
Thirty-five years ago, the sociologist Herbert Gans took up residence in Levittown, near Philadelphia, to find out what difference a place really makes. GI suburbia had become the preferred punching bag of critics of the mass-produced life in the postwar years. To its critics, this new crabgrass frontier was an unrefined and soulless place of refuge, where individualism was stifled, where the fluid vibrancy of city community life was squeezed into the box of conformity, and where the nation’s husbands, among other things, were being emasculated. Suburbia, they concluded, was creating social automatons that were a threat to the health of democracy. Lewis Mumford, the influential architecture critic, typified this stance: “A new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis.”6 Gans’s classic study, The Levittowners, took issue with this view, which he characterized as an elitist perception on the part of urban intellectuals.7 Levittown represented the promise of the good life to working- and lower-middle-class families, and was disdained as cheap and vulgar by the well-heeled urbanites who had long enjoyed access to good taste, privacy, and security. Besides, weren’t the urbanites’ Victorian row townhouses identical, too? Gans’s findings disputed the stereotype that suburban environments had a life-draining effect on the people who moved there from city neighborhoods. The new environment, he concluded, had a negligible effect on community life, and it certainly had not created the new kind of social person that the critics of suburbia had sketched in caricature. Residents carried on their old ways in new settings. They kept intact their ties to ethnic, religious, and cultural groups, and their interactions continued to be shaped primarily by the social class of residents, who ranged from moralistic blue-collar workers to conservative managerial executives and liberal cosmopolitan professionals. If anything, sociability increased among Levittowners because of the homogeneity or, rather, compatibility of their immediate neighbors. Above all, Gans noted that the changes in people’s lives—most were happier than in the city they had left behind—were due more to aspirations to improve their lives than to the physical environment of suburbia.
In the time between the building of the Levittowns and the founding of Celebration, the middle landscape of suburbia has sprouted a hundred different species of development and undergone some significant population shifts. By the time of the 1990 census, a third of all African Americans—blacks were excluded, initially, from places like Levittown—had suburban homes. But despite the findings of Gans and others, the view of suburbia as an oppressive and alienating environment has prevailed. Those who are especially critical of suburban sprawl continue to assume that its physical disconnectedness produces residents with low moral or civic fiber. Today, the association is almost taken for granted—housing and traffic patterns determine civic personality—but it still is largely unsubstantiated. Do cul-de-sacs, half-acre lots, and houses with garages in front automatically produce mediocre citizens?
The answer may depend, ultimately, on how you view citizenship. But those who believe that the buildings we inhabit determine our civic behavior too often put the cart before the horse. Citizens are like the communities I discussed earlier. They often discover how to be active only when they feel their own rights are threatened or when they see others befouled by injustice, as in the civil rights struggle. Active citizenship has to be learned, long after it has been learned about in civics class. It can be learned from others, and it is undemocratic to assume that life in a suburban villa precludes such an education any more than life on a neglected inner city block does. Much more important is to see what the villa people do with their citizenship once it has been activated. Do they use it to protect their own resources and privileges or to help remedy the neglect of the city block dwellers? Celebration is the kind of place where active citizens were already well represented in the population. Their zeal was further energized by perceived threats to their property value and their children’s education. But would this citizenly vigor ever extend beyond the town limits, and if so, how far? At this point in time, the center city was barely on their map, least of all on their minds.
Earlier suburban newcomers like the Levittowners had moved from urban neighborhoods, and were more likely to empathize with those left in the inner-city neighborhoods. By the 1990s, this would no longer be the case. The majority of Celebration residents had lived before in suburban places and few had any extensive familiarity with center-city life to draw on, outside of jaunts to enjoy the museums, restaurants, and nightlife. In addition, the widespread perception of Celebrationites that they had sacrificed greatly to come to town did not help arouse their will to sacrifice for others. Celebration was the last place that Osceola County folks would associate with sacrifice, let alone trials and tribulations, and yet I would discover this was the self-image of many of their new neighbors in ZIP code 34747.
10
KINDER, GENTLER GOVERNMENT?
“Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence.”
—Thomas Paine
“Walt wasn’t against people voting; he just didn’t want them hanging their dirty laundry out.… I don’t agree. I don’t disagree.” —Michael Eisner
Everyone has made a sacrifice to be here.” This belief was an article of faith among Celebrationites, and everyone paid lip service to it. Sacrifice was seen as a built-in condition of pioneerism, stressed routinely in Town Hall newsletters and drummed home in the annual speeches by clergy and managers on Founder’s Day.
This perception of selflessness had even helped persuade some retirees to come to Celebration rather than to one of Florida’s adult communities. In this category were Jim and Jane Clayman, whose home on the pioneer row of Teal Avenue was crammed with art and artifacts from their working lives in Peru and Brazil and whose porch rockers had once stood on Jane’s mother’s porch in Kentucky. The Claymans had been attracted by the many young parents they saw at the lottery who seemed willing to forgo creature comforts for a worthier cause. “We’ll be eating peanut butter and jelly,” one of them had said to the couple, “but this is what we want for our children.”
Conveniently, perhaps, from both the residents’ and the developer’s point of view, the pioneer spirit could be invoked to explain away encounters with adversity: the hardships endured by residents while waiting, as long as two years, to move into a finished home; the Pyrrhic victory over the builders; separation from kith and kin in other parts of the country; the financial burden of stretching for a mortgage and meeting all the bills; the frustration of living through the growing pains of the school; denigration from the
press; and resentment from locals prejudiced against Disney. Witnessing at public meetings, especially school related, often began with a proviso like: “After all we have been through …” In this town, everyone was expected to show some evidence of personal sacrifice, and not just as a gesture toward community spirit. One refugee from an upscale condo canyon north of Miami explained to me that she “had learned to live without Neiman Marcus” (though she was still within shooting distance of Saks, at the Florida Mall). The upside was that she had found that the “civil servants are more civil here than in South Florida.” One parent, especially active in the PTSA, told me she believed the school “should recruit teachers who had the kind of value system that could embrace the personal sacrifice” that came with their low salaries. In response, I found the schoolteachers often wore their taxing workload like a badge of honor, while at other times they used it as a shield to deflect the reproaches hurled by parents. Especially deep sacrifices were professed by single parents who had given up the kernel and pith of their personal lives for the sake of their children’s education and betterment.
With all of this talk about sacrifice, I might have been excused for inferring that I was living in a training camp for humanitarian workers rather than one of the wealthiest towns in Central Florida. I thought I had surrendered a fair chunk of my own life to go and live in Celebration (among other things, my year out took a fatal toll on the relationship with my girlfriend), but this noble impression would have to be downgraded. Compared to the ordeals of my fellow citizens, my own burdens were a trifle. Living amid so many accounts of great hardship, I needed a regular reality check. Every so often, I would motor out of town in pursuit of places where poverty and hardship were as conspicuous on the ground as Spanish moss was on the trees. In Osceola’s trailer parks, Orlando’s ghettoes, and all the twilight districts in between, people might have thought they had gotten a raw deal, for which they might have paid dearly. Yet they would probably not have chosen to describe their lives as a condition of self-sacrifice. Sacrifice goes by other names when it is not buttressed by the sense of entitlement that often percolated through Celebration.
But Central Florida’s less privileged had one dubious advantage over the Celebrationites. If you do not have the option of living in a pricey, planned community you do not have to agonize over whether to restrict your freedoms in order to abide by the rules. Of all the sacrifices faced by Celebrationites, this was the one that generated the most commentary from outsiders, and the least reflection from residents themselves.
The hundred-page “Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions” signed by all homeowners, and the less weighty, but substantial, document signed by tenants like myself, were generally referred to as “standards” implemented to guarantee the physical upkeep of the houses and streets of Celebration. If these restrictions were of negligible concern to residents, they loomed larger for folks who decided not to move to Celebration, including some who had placed highly on the original lottery draw, and many others who had investigated residency through Celebration Realty. In the course of the year, I ran into several who had decided that the rules and restrictions were too much of an imposition on their personal land use. (Small lot sizes, lack of privacy, and the jitteriness about the school figured among the other reasons.) The chance to build this community would effectively be limited to those willing to regulate their conduct, and perhaps curb their liberties, to safeguard their property values.
One resident, a middle-income manager from a working-class background, explained to me one day that working-class people “don’t share the same civic culture as us” and “because they value their freedom of expression too highly, they would not tolerate the deed restrictions.” He figured he must “sound like a jerk for saying so,” but his comment was little different from the nightmare neighbor scenarios conjured up by-many others of unruly, low-class folks with trucks, rundown ’83 Buicks, and washing lines in the yard, not to mention garish colors on their window frames.
The “Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions” are common in planned communities (these days, many bankers will not issue loans without them), but, true to form, Celebration’s rulebook got special attention in the media and was widely cited by outsiders as evidence of the company’s totalitarian control over residents. One section, in particular, would become quite famous in its own right:
6a) Unless the Board of Directors otherwise agrees, the only acceptable coverings that may be affixed to the interior of any windows visible from any street, alley or other portion of the Properties are drapes, blinds, shades, shutters and curtains. The side of such window coverings that is visible from the exterior of any improvements must be white or off-white in color.
Town Hall clocked more phone calls about this one rule than all the others combined. Brent Herrington reminded townspeople, in a Town Hall newsletter in the fall of 1997, that he intended to implement the rule: “I have noticed a couple of residences where the owner has installed colored window coverings, and, unfortunately, these will need to be corrected.” For once, at least, the derisory response around town partially echoed the mockery of the media, especially since the warning was accompanied by Herrington’s opinion that the colored drapes in question were “icky.” Most residents knew that one highly visible window, in a Longmeadow home, had been in violation of the rule for several weeks, and the owners’ initial decision to hold out had become a cause célèbre. Since the rule was regarded as a little excessive, many townspeople saw this resident’s red drapes as a flag of liberty. In general, however, Celebrationites were quick to fault Town Hall for not cracking down sooner on offending residents. In this town, the developer was perceived to have better taste than the residents, and so homeowners were not happy when management was lax about enforcement.
In response, Herrington encouraged residents to take pride in Town Hall’s personal touch. In most planned communities with homeowners associations, negligent residents are sent a formal letter of warning. In kinder, gentler Celebration, they receive an informal phone call. This technique belongs more to the code of friendly customer relations—Disney’s field of expertise—than of an inflexible bureaucracy. As far as governance went, everyone understood that the basis for the town’s restrictions, perhaps even its “sense of community,” lay in the bedrock desire to maintain and promote the value of property investments. It was in bad taste, and antisocial, to remind anyone of this, and besides, it was unnecessary to do so since in Celebration this belief was as natural as breathing.
COMMON INTERESTS
Levittown, as Herbert Gans pointed out, was neither a town—which would offer employment—nor a community—which suggests a desire for sharing values. The Levittowners moved there to own a home, most of them for the first time in their lives. Celebration did not yet feel like a town, but it was conceived and populated with the aim of becoming a community as quickly as possible. Between the era of the Levittowns and this new place in Osceola County, the idea of building self-contained communities evolved into a staple of the housing industry in Sunbelt states like Florida. Today, most developers will say they are building communities, not subdivisions.
Historically, most communities were not designed by professionals at all, let alone planned in any systematic way. Community design was the outcome of piecemeal building by artisans, craftsmen, townsfolk, and peasants. Celebration’s neighboring lakeside towns of Kissimmee and St. Cloud are typical, modern examples. Most of the great European cities so admired for their urbanity are haphazard hybrids of aristocratic pleasure grounds, sober bourgeois quarters, merchants’ commercial enclaves, and proletarian holding tanks. It was not until the onset of rational urban planning at the turn of the century that professionally designed communities would see the light of day as an industrial enterprise.
Originating in Britain, in Ebenezer Howard’s blueprint for the Garden City (which rested on cooperative ownership of the land), this planning concept was translated into the Ameri
can private housing landscape in the form of common-interest developments.1 Today, we know these as planned unit developments, condominiums, or co-ops, where private developers offer buyers commonly shared land. Oftentimes, they are governed by covenants and deed restrictions that “run with the land” and forbid alternative uses of the land in the future. These covenants, which date back to twelfth-century England, protect property value, and, to ensure further protection, homeowners associations offer a form of community governance, at the behest of fellow residents’ votes and assessments, which assumes many of the public responsibilities of local government. In the United States, the evolution of these interlocking institutions has given rise to what Roderick McKenzie calls “privatopia,” which he describes as a condition of private government currently enjoyed by over 40 million Americans, or about 17 percent of the population.2 By the year 2000, it is estimated that a quarter of a million homeowner associations will exist, exacting restrictions to guarantee members’ property value, and where the only form of participation for homeowning shareholders is to satisfy their contractual obligations by maintaining their mortgage payments.
The Celebration Chronicles Page 27
