In local politics, it doesn’t take a lot of people to have a visible impact. The average Cambridge City Councillor is elected with around 2000 first place votes on the ranked choice ballot (in a city with a population of 113,000). For most public-facing issues, the number of people making a public comment on the issue numbers only in the single digits. This makes it straightforward for a small set of loud voices to give an impression that there is much more broad support for a set of policy decisions than there actually are.
What this means in practice is that by suppressing a small number of voices, and amplifying a small number of voices, the visible impact on what the opinion of the community is can change drastically. In order to take full advantage of this, long-time residents build power structures that protect and reinforce their dominance of the conversation.
Neighborhood associations, homeowners associations, and small business associations all concentrate a small set of voices – creating a forum of highly engaged residents. With even a small number of participants, residents can create a powerful minority – one which can draw significant attention from local politicians, who struggle to find any venue in which residents will engage at all. With a small grouping of individuals, they can gain the attention of city and state politicians representing their local area.
The problem – as with much in local politics – is that the types of folks who have time and energy to dedicate to building neighborhood groups have a tendency to represent a set of interests outside the average or median for a community. These community building efforts involve an investment of time – favoring those who are less likely to be employed, less likely to be parents of small children, and less likely to be heavily involved in other activities. As with all groups, once they are built, they tend to reinforce their existing culture: by focusing on the needs of the current community, they will tend to make the group less appealing to those who are not already members.
The end result is that these groups, which are perceived to represent the community, don’t meaningfully do so. In the Cambridgeport neighborhood where I live with something like 15,000 other residents, the neighborhood association meetings tend to draw between 20 and 40 participants; the mailing list has only 700 members, and only about a dozen folks who actively post to that list.
In many cities, geographic representation pulls in another component due to City Council representation, but Cambridge has chosen a system which does not use geographic regions for electing City Counillors. Instead, the 9-member council is entirely at large, meaning that all councillors are representing all the residents of the city. With no geographical component, in most cases it is difficult for councillors to build a repore with any particular district. (Several councillors are clearly strongly associated with the districts they live in or have historically represented the interests of, but that is not built into the system.
Even outside of the group dynamics that play out at in-person meetings, the power that existing voices have in the conversation can be enforced. Taking my own community as an example, the Cambridgeport mailing list is technically operated by the Cambridgeport Neighborhood Association. However, in practice, opposing voices can be effectively silenced via bullying techniques. In a recent case, one of the board members of the CNA drew the line that disagreement with a point that she was making was not an appropriate conversation for the list. Via these “soft” actions relating to what conversation is allowed on the list, the dominant voices can maintain their appearance of relative power – by chasing any voice which disagrees away from the community.
In the end, there is also an explicit power dynamic. The interests of property owners and renters are often fundamentally opposed in local politics. Property owners want to see property values stay high, and city-levied assessments and tax rates stay low. Renters typically would look the other way: low property values means lower market rate rents, and higher taxes can mean higher rates of city services without a direct impact on their costs. In a community where leases are renewed at the landlord’s discretion – as is the case in most communities, including Cambridge – landlords can simply choose not to renew a tenant’s lease as a means of displacing them from the community and removing them from the conversation. Another option, even more pernicious, is to use the threat of lease non-renewal to demand acquiesence to some demand, creating an appearance of agreement as a result of the tenant no longer publicly engaging.
Communities organizing to their mutual benefit is an absolutely essential part of successful local politics. Neighbors banding together to make their communities stronger is essential to protecting each other. But when those same groups seek to hold themselves apart – to silence, to exclude, and to limit access – that power turns from a force for good to merely another form of control. Entrenching the existent dominant voices at the cost of newcomers, these power dynamics reinforce the systemic imbalances that already exist, and in the process, elevate a small number of voices above the much broader community, making it difficult to sort out the true feelings of residents.
In my own community, I hope that our elected representatives can continue to listen to the broadest range of voices possible, and not simply the loudest ones; that they can find ways to engage with the entire community, and not just the established neighborhood associations; and that those of us who generally have less powerful voices in the conversation can find a way to make ourselves heard.