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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

Apropos of our recent discussion on neighborhood makeup, I came  
across this:

John Leo
Bowling With Our Own
Robert Putnam’s sobering new diversity research scares its author.
25 June 2007

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone,  
is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably  
so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity  
have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social  
capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that  
create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the  
surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the  
immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people  
do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce  
social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups  
themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower,  
altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The  
problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but  
withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language,  
people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’— 
that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more  
diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This  
proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los  
Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington,  
rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse  
San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that  
they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in  
the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather,  
people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close  
friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to  
volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects  
less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform  
more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference,  
and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a  
crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of  
diversity on social withdrawal.”

The full article is at:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-06-25jl.html