IN SEARCH OF "COMMUNITY"

By BERNARD KAPLAN, Associate Executive Director,
Little City Foundation

The use of the word "community" is a constant and frequently misapplied refrain in governmental references to populated areas. It is frequently a rationale for stated residential goals and proposed legislation affecting priority considerations in the residential placement of special populations such as the elderly, the physically handicapped, the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled. It is currently the rationale for the proposed dismantling of large facilities whose populations would be relocated into "community settings". It is specifically applied by sponsors of legislation who wish to close large facilities serving the developmentally disabled.

The term "community" — applied demographically — has been generally understood in sociological literature as a reference to a settled area whose residents have a sense of rooted common experience, continuing individual and group relationships, a strong sense of belonging, and shared values. It is anchored by loyalties and institutions such as churches, schools, commercial establishments, recreational facilities, landmarks, terrain, etc. The facile use, and frequent misuse, of the term "community" violates this basic definition so as to exclude long established special facilities with long time residents who may, in fact, be more genuinely community residents than short term occupants of newly developed apartment complexes in the same neighborhood.

Current proposed legislation which would force the transferance of retarded persons, for example, from long term occupancy in a large residential facility to new small group homes "in a community setting" disregards the fact that the residential facility and the shared experiences and identifications of its population may truly meet all of the basic sociological characteristics of a community.

Such individual facilities may or may not be a good community. There are both good and bad communities, obviously. A long standing slum is a community. But the proposed legislation does not differentiate between beneficial characteristics of community life and those which are deleterious, but simply begs that question by referring to large facilities as "institutions" (another misapplied definition) in the pejorative sense, and contrasts them with small group homes as "part of the community".

We are aware of the placement of such small group homes — in one instance in a virtually abandoned industrial park — but the term community is flagrantly applied to that setting simply because the group home is too small to create its own environment. Thus, the use and misuse of terminology becomes self-defining in terms of "good" and "bad" residential placement of special populations. Whole concepts of desirability have been spun off in virtual unquestioning funding priority based on the confused misuse of the term "community".

We are reminded of the evolution of the concepts of "normalization" and "least restrictive environment" which have had perhaps something of a parallel set of "official" value judgments of appropriateness and desirability, regardless of reality.

The whole impetus of "normalization", "deinstitutionalization" and the notion of "least restrictive" environment has also embraced the term "community" as a virtual catechism for what is desirable in life experiences for "special" populations. One might add that the very desirable concept of "normalization" so often fails in the breach, when, for example, a mentally retarded child is placed in a "normal" school classroom with a teacher inadequately trained in special education and is forced to endure conspicuous isolation in a setting where he has no peers, just to remove him (and his funding) from an "institutional" setting where his needs may be more appropriately met. That is not less, but more restrictive — not normal, but artificial — and not part of a community of shared expectations, accomplishments and experiences.

Yet "normalization" and "community" have been used to buttress conceptual distortions and to create myths of desirable and undesirable living and learning experiences without regard, in many cases, to real life experiences or the most elemental sociological definitions of either concept.

There is a defining value judgment attendant on the misconceptions of "community" and very practical implications for the future placement of handicapped populations. Proposed legislation and governmental regulations affecting "community placement" have profound and unfair demoralizing impact on those who strive to create the best benefits of shared experiences for impacted populations in large facilities where they may share a wide range of resources, relationships and a sense of belonging.

Thus the arbitrary, "official" designation of "community" makes it a weapon against the positive attributes of shared community living. It is the old technique of Sophistry — if unable to disprove an essence —give it a bad name and attack the label. •

February 1987 / Illinois Municipal Review / Page 13