Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems:
Community Edition

Mo’ money, mo’ problems. That’s what Biggie says. Me, I lack the net worth to fully test the premise, but I tend to agree anyways. Because it’s something that plays out at the community level over and over again.

Too often, people are conditioned to believe that, with the right vision, leadership or hard work, a community can prosper and, in time, overcome its problems. That you can exist at a point where you’re down, come together in response, then ultimately reach some idealized state where your challenging times are behind you.

It’s the promise often dangled to compel action. To bring people together in response to shared difficulty. Let’s do this thing, and get past it.

And you will get past it. But let’s not confuse transcending a particular problem with transcending problems in general. Because that’s a dangerous fantasy and the root of all future discord.

It’s a problem

Problems are the constant. They’re relentless. They take infinite forms but they never stop. Which means, for any community, your real question is this:

Do you want to be taking on the challenges associated with failure or the challenges associated with success?

At first blush, the problems of success seem a lot more attractive. But like “mo’ money, mo’ problems,” the real ideal might be counter intuitive. For example, the problems of failure tend to be obvious and unifying. Disinvestment, poor schools, pervasive cultural conflict. Things with broad appeal that rally people and bring them together. In the right hands, that can become a very powerful political tool, to be wielded in ways that bring real value to people’s lives.

In short, when people are uncomfortable — or desperate — they’re a lot more adept at seeing past the petty disagreements that might otherwise divide them. They engage each other because they need to.

Add to that the shared recognition of what success looks like. When you’re losing jobs, landing one good employer is a win. When your school is failing, raising scores or graduation rates is a win. It’s easy for people to work together at that level because it’s easy to agree on where you need to go.

Then, with enough commitment over time, your struggling community starts to turn a corner and before long, like every obnoxious movie where the bookish girl takes off her glasses, shakes out her hair, and suddenly gains the attention of everyone who’d previously dismissed her, you start to experience the sensation of being attractive.

That attraction brings new investment and new resources, which makes more positive change possible, until the day finally arrives when all the obvious problems you spent years tackling are now confined to the rear view mirror. And that’s the day when you realize you’ve got new problems — the challenges of success — and they’re no picnic.

For one thing, success brings more people accustomed to getting what they want, better positioned to pay their way to preferred outcomes, and less inclined to necessarily roll up their sleeves with people they don’t know. That’s not a value judgment, just a recognition of a frequent cultural disparity. Which leads to a growing divide between old-timers and newcomers, or working class and affluent, or even black and white. And while long time residents have perspective on the positive change possible over time, new residents bought into something specific, desirable and temporal. Which means they’re less inclined to see change as anything but a negative because it impacts the very thing they bought into. Which means the plans you’ve been working on, maybe for decades, and that have borne the fruit of success, are suddenly the target of scrutiny and opposition.

Success also makes struggle harder to see. When everyone in a community is hurting, no one disputes or dismisses that fact. But once a community achieves a certain level of comfort, shared difficulty becomes a minority condition. Which makes looking the other way a whole lot easier.

As communities become more successful (by typical industry measures), it not only becomes more difficult to establish what constitutes a win, it becomes more difficult to establish what constitutes a problem. Shared vision becomes harder to achieve as people, increasingly divided, apply the same ideological lens to local issues that they apply to national ones. Left vs. Right becomes just another way we find to factionalize.

So what’s the solution?

I’ve written before about how important the tenor of our temperament can be in forging community but hesitate to frame this post specifically along the lines of “gentrification” because that’s a word with a definition so loose that it allows us to absolve ourselves of our own culpability — identifying gentrifiers as everyone who got here after me.

Instead, this is about change and about the fact that there is no stasis. There is only the whole of history that has brought us to this exact moment in time and the accompanying opportunity to help shape what comes next.

So, then, what’s more desirable: the challenges associated with failure or the challenges associated with success? Personally, I think the answer’s somewhere in the middle — not “(Better in a) Hell Hole,” as Spinal Tap suggests, nor defined by easy access to multiple varieties of artisanal mayonnaise, a la Portlandia. But how do you find that elusive balance?

The best scenario is one in which you’re able to hold your community together, and that means getting better at listening, reading between the lines, tempering your preconceptions and biases, engaging in a meaningful way, and delivering on promises.

It means being a neighbor first. Regardless of circumstance.

If you can achieve that, then I suppose it’s better to do so in a successful, empowering context rather than one of demoralizing failure. But, one way or another, don’t expect it to get any easier. If anything, the challenges become more nuanced, and more contested.

Mo’ money, mo’ problems.

> A previous version of this article misattributed “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” to Jay Z. Mr. Z is actually known for far greater precision in articulating his problem inventory (99, to be specific). We regret the oversight. <

--Scott Doyon

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