"But in the quest to entice people a few exits down the highway, developers are increasingly availing themselves of a type of research called psychographics, or some variation of it, to inform their decisions on whether to build colonials or craftsmen, dog parks or tot lots, to gate or not to gate, and in general, to decide how they want a community to "feel."

The [psychographics] concept, which assumes that people buy things because of their personality and values more than age or income, goes back to a 1959 academic paper describing the psychological differences between people who buy Fords and those who buy Chevys. It became popular among Madison Avenue types in the 1980s, particularly as computer technology enabled pioneering firms such as Claritas to merge vast amounts of census data with vast amounts of consumer data, creating dozens of personality-oriented market segments -- the "young digerati" or "money and brains" -- to describe the entire U.S. population."

- from the article
------------

This makes me think of my suburban community, and wonder at its nutty collection of peoples. I am pretty sure that my community is odd in the sense that is religious/tribal based: meaning that we have a ton of Jews in my area. At Christmas you won't see a single light anywhere. This is unusual, I think, but all the more so because I think it is pretty impossible to find any two of my neighbors who agree on anything. Really. I have a diehard old Zionist from Poland to my left, an elderly Russian couple to my right, a very liberal couple of professors across the way, an orthodox businessman with his wife and 4 kids 5 houses down. Sprinkled among them is a Latino family who are plumbers and a Chinese family who own a restaurant. None of these people vote the same, think the same, speak the same language, etc.. I think if they had tried to create a psychographic profile of the people who live in my area, it NEVER would have been created.

Does good community arise out of homogeneity? Or is it more likely that the profiling described in this article, a simple questionnaire, is too shallow an indicator - and that 20 years from now these communities will have sorted themselves out along different lines?

washington post's property values