"When we first moved here, people pulled their cars into their garages and put the garage door down before they got out," Atlanta native Fran Sutherland reminisces about her first year in her suburban Las Vegas neighborhood. "I couldn't believe it! We'd moved here from New Orleans, where kids played in the street, but here there was no one, no one at all."
Her husband Gary had been a college hockey player, and within weeks he'd rounded up the neighborhood kids and taught them how to play. They began on roller blades, with sticks flying and Gary coaxing something resembling team hockey from the chaos. By the time we met, five years later, their street was full of kids playing and Gary coached a high school club hockey team, a junior high club, and a team in the city youth hockey league. "We're still the only adults out front," Fran laughs, "but the kids are all out here."
The Sutherlands had crossed Las Vegas' great divide, the line between transience and community, almost without trying. They looked around, found nothing intriguing, and turned the place they'd moved to into a template for their desires. The clay wasn't what they expected, but they made their own personal community from the raw material around them. Undeterred by architecture that kept people apart, by the daunting heat, and by social assumptions that seemed designed to put them off, they struck at the group that is always in search of people to do things with: kids. That adults hung back while the kids shouted joyously as they chased after hockey pucks in the street should come as no surprise.
The trend toward communities of affinity is more pronounced in Las Vegas. When people move into subdivisions en masse ¡V when it appears that builders roll out a carpet with the homes on it and say, "That one over there, the third on the left, that's yours" ¡V the absence of even the rudiments of community are accentuated. There's no welcome wagon, no one to greet you, no one to come by and say, "Welcome to what passes for a neighborhood."
For some, this lack of such basic institutions was hard to fathom. "It didn't make sense," one housewife said. "Every place else I'd moved into a new subdivision, we'd all become friends ¡V at least we all had the builder to (complain) about."
In Las Vegas, that didn't routinely happen. Few invested in their geographic neighbors. Instead, they created neighborhoods of affinity, communities based on interest, not proximity.
Neighborhoods of affinity are a tricky business. They involve relationships that used to be second tier ¡V the parents of your son's Little League teammates. In transient situations, they become the foundation of community. They take on a frontline importance, replacing relationships among adults that date back to eighth grade. Communities of affinity embody interest, not space, and are accentuated by the stark reality that parents who let their pre-teens and young teenagers move about unsupervised court disaster. Because of "Soccer Mom" and the prevalence of carpools and chaperoned children's activities, communities of affinity have acquired new and more substantial roles across the nation.
In Las Vegas for the foreseeable future, this is how we'll build community, different from our parents and grandparents. The city is one start-up after another, built from the ground up even as its boundaries of style, scale, and space were being reinvented. The people like the Sutherlands, no matter what they initiate, are somehow of a piece. They share traits and ideas, a way of looking at the world. They're the ones who are most at home in the new Las Vegas, for the vacuum it long has been is like nectar for their needs. They understand that they won't always succeed, that the odds of overcoming transience are enormous, and that every institution they build is fragile. But there's a palpable enthusiasm, a sincere belief that the work we do today will matter tomorrow, that it'll create a community we can be proud of.
After a Little League organizing meeting, I said to one guy: "You know, four years from now, we'll start something else up and it'll be the same bunch of us." He nodded assent. "And you know what'll be different?" I continued. "We'll all be four years older!" We drove away with a smile born of a kinship that transcended education, religion, place of origin, or any other marker. We were builders, people who started institutions that would last for our children, and if we're lucky, for our grandchildren. It really does come down to people.
Hal Rothman, chair of the history department, is a prolific writer and oft-quoted expert on urban issues in Southern Nevada and the West. The 2004 Silver State Award recipient also hosts the radio program "Our Metropolis" at 6:30 a.m. Sunday mornings on KUNV 91.5 FM.
