posted on Wednesday, January 02, 2008 8:37 AM
by
Jeremy RVARC
Mobility and Gangland
Via Michael Brendan Dougherty's
Surfeited With Dainties.
Peter Landesman of LA Weekly has an
expansive piece (warning: rated PG-13 for strong language) on street gang culture and violence in Los Angeles. Though notable for its discussion of the expansion of street gangs outside of the their traditional urban areas (including a mention of rural Virginia as fertile ground for new gangs), that discussion doesn't really belong here. What does is this line from the story:
The modern American gang was born [in Los Angeles]. The enormous spread of the city and the lack of public transportation turned its vast freeway and street system into a network of boundaries that cuts the city into hundreds of isolated pieces.
We're familiar with the statistical connections between crime, violence, poverty, and population - combine high levels of the latter and you're bound to get high levels of the former - but it certainly wasn't obvious to me that mobility and isolation was a vital ingredient in the formation of street gangs. In retrospect, it
should be obvious. Driving is an expensive proposition, though most of us take the insurance, licensing, maintenance, car payments, and gas prices in stride without thinking twice about the cumulative effect of these costs; for urban L.A., without light rail and an anemic public transportation system, this means people without the means to drive are stuck in the neighborhood they were born in. The urban sprawl become another kind of "flyover country," though now the flying is done by cars zooming by on overpasses that have no connection to the neighborhoods they pass through.
As in meiosis, L.A.’s bigger neighborhoods and their gangs will usually divide into subgangs, or cliques, focusing on cul-de-sacs and parking lots that are claimed as sovereign territory. Nickerson’s Bounty Hunter Bloods street gang is split into at least a half dozen cliques around the numbered streets that cross the project (the Five-Line Bounty Hunters hang out on 115th Street, the Four-Lines on 114th Street, etc.). It doesn’t matter that the demarcations separate people identical in race, class and marginality. The people identify with their shared piece of pavement.
Neighborhoods are defined not just by who lives there, but also how they're connected to other neighborhood and the community at large. When it's easier to move between and among neighborhoods, social mobility expands and it is more difficult for people to feel isolated by their own cul-de-sacs. Without that mobility, it's easy to see how desperate poverty can manifest hyper-local identification and resulting turf conflicts.
The NewVA region is by no means L.A., nor will it ever be. Nor are L.A.'s gang problems solely the result of transportation problems. Certainly, however, lack of mobility was a catalyst in the culture that eventually spawned street gangs. It's a pointed lesson that the social and economic costs of skimping on transportation options are greater than one might imagine.