How is trust in the local government formed or harmed?
When considering how residents may conceive of their trust with the city, it is important to first distinguish between local government and planners. I refer to the local government as the aldermen and their staff, while planners are referred to separately. In many cases planners are working with and/or through the local government in the work they do, but they are distinct. First, we will examine: how is trust in the local government (whether they have residents’ best interests in mind and their ability to follow through with their plans) formed or harmed?
Quantitative Considerations
“Although data on trust in planners specifically has not been collected, the city of Chicago has data that explicitly measures the amount of trust residents have in their local government. I took this data from the Chicago Health Atlas, and plotted it in Figure 16, which shows the percentage of people in each community area who say they trust their local government. The average percent of people who say they trust the city across community areas is 43.6% with a standard deviation across community areas of 11.1%, indicating that most people across the city of Chicago do not trust the local government. There appears from this graph to be a slightly higher proportion of residents who trust in the local government on the North side of Chicago. On the North side of Chicago, the average trust level is 49.6%, with the values for these community areas ranging from 34.5%-68.5% (standard deviation of 7.6%). This average lowers to 42.3% in the South, with community area values ranging from 22.9%-70.6% (standard deviation of 12.5%).
It is the lowest in the West with an average of 38.3% from community areas values between 23.1%-52.9% (standard deviation 9.2%). This finding is significant for two reasons. First, the average levels of trust in the South and West parts of the city are lower than the city average, while the average levels of trust in the North are higher. Second, the South contains the community area with the highest level of trust, the community area with the lowest level of trust, and the highest levels of standard deviation. These patterns, and this larger North, West, South divide could be influenced by many factors, one of them being the degree of Hardship experienced by the South and West sides of the city.
As discussed in the previous chapter, the Hardship Index is a score that denotes a series of neighborhood concerns with poverty, vacancy, trash, etc. We also saw in that chapter that Hardship was disproportionately concentrated on the South and West sides of Chicago. In Figure 17, I compare the Hardship Index and degree of trust in the local government for each of the community areas in Chicago, and there is a significant negative correlation between the amount of Hardship a neighborhood experiences and its degree of trust in the local government.
This means that neighborhoods experiencing greater hardship are less likely to trust the local government will do what’s right for the community. This makes sense given the relationship between the local government, the decisions that led to these disparities, and chronic levels of hardship on the South and West sides such as the persistence of vacant lots, closed schools, etc. This connection between hardship and lack of trust resonates with Putnam’s observation of less trust among Black and financially burdened communities (Putnam 2000). Residents, even those that were not alive during these government missteps, hold these instances close as a part of their history, and speak of the enduring impacts of these events on current levels of trust in their communities.
Conclusion
In summary, mistrust is formed through the concentration of hardship, historic wrongdoing, the lack of continuity between or poor performance of city aldermen. Trust in local government is low across the city, particularly on the South and West sides where this historic wrongdoing was concentrated and where the challenges of disinvestment and hardship persist. Even among those who already have very low expectations for or trust in local government still seem to be impacted by disappointment to the extent that it reinforces their lack of trust in the local government.
Those who have had positive experiences with their aldermen, and therefore a positive sense of trust, are still aware of the negative associations commonly held about the local government. Another closely linked experience that residents have which impacts their trust, is their experience with planners—that is, those who are explicitly working to change the physical landscape of the neighborhood, with or without the input of the residents in the area. These experiences we will turn to next.