Caution -- Elitist Look-Alike Communities Afoot

One of the most inventive assaults on the automobile is couched in the notion of "walkable communities." By definition, those are places devoid of motorized transportation, certainly absent the cars and trucks owned and operated by individuals. And on the surface, they seem like a good idea.

No cars, no pickup trucks, no sport-utility vehicles, none of those things would mar the peace and tranquillity of the walkable community. No land would be sacrificed to parking garages or parking lots. The little vehicular movement that exists in a walkable community would be "calmed" through the judicious use of speed bumps, roundabouts and other impediments to driving.

Walkable communities would have intact town centers, sort of like the courthouse squares in small southern towns where, up until a few decades ago, certain people were not allowed to walk on certain streets on certain days or at certain hours if they were of a certain hue. But that was then and this is now, and America has changed. We are now a fully integrated, color-blind society in which anyone of any color in any class can walk or live anywhere as long as he or she has the shoes and income to get there.

At least, that is what the proponents of walkable communities would have us believe. Chief among those advocates is Dan Burden, founder of Walkable Communities Inc., which originated in 1996 in Florida -- the state where a lot of people walked to voting booths only to say later that their votes didn't count.

But that's being nasty; and I don't want to be nasty. I'm just trying to point out a few things, raise some questions before some of us are trampled by this business of walkable communities.

As I said, they seem like a good idea. Burden, for example, says his group was organized for the express purpose of helping whole communities, "whether they are large cities or small towns, or parts of communities, i.e. neighborhoods, business districts . . . become more walkable and community friendly." That sounds good. I'm all for that. But it's the urban elitist, anti-car, anti-democratic, potentially exclusionary message hidden in all of that feel-good rhetoric that troubles me.

You have to look and listen carefully to detect it; but it's there, and sometimes it's not so hidden at all at some walkable-community meetings in mostly white, middle- and upper-income communities. At such meetings -- and I've been to a few in Virginia and North Carolina -- no one says anything that can be adjudged racist or in any other way politically incorrect. They don't have to. The pronoun "we" in such a milieu is automatically understood.

That means when "we" want a walkable community with "speed controlled streets" in which residential lots and commercial properties are "properly scaled" that "we" have a single vision of what kind of community "we" want. And "we" know what "we" want because "we" share "common values," don't "we"?

It all bespeaks a given trust, an embrace of homogeneity, a "we-ness" that is by its very nature exclusionary in a multi-ethnic, multi-class society in which it usually is not too difficult to tell which group lives where. What happens if you aren't regarded as an integral part of "we" and you wind up walking in the "wrong" neighborhood?

This, for example, is a true story. Seventeen years ago, when my youngest daughter, Kafi, was a student at Williamsburg Middle School in North Arlington, a well-meaning white teacher asked her why she was still on the school grounds after hours. "How are you getting home?" the teacher asked.

"I'm walking home," Kafi said.

"That's silly! You can't walk all the way to Halls Hill," the white teacher said, referring to what was then a mostly black Arlington neighborhood. "Your parents will have to come and pick you up."

"My parents live around the corner," Kafi said.

I probably would not have heard about that exchange had I not been called to the school the next day to intervene in a disciplinary action against Kafi, who had ended her conversation with the white teacher by calling the teacher a "racist."

Seventeen years later, my North Arlington neighborhood remains mostly white and upper income. New neighbors are moving into new mini-mansions built on lots formerly occupied by more modest homes. The new neighbors are white. Halls Hill is now a mixture of blacks and Latins. Few people from Halls Hill are ever seen walking in my neighborhood. People from my neighborhood seldom walk in Halls Hill. We're separate, if not equal; and if we all join the "walkable communities" effort, we're more than likely to remain that way. Your feet, after all, can take you only so far.