THE BAY AREA has always been a laboratory for community. We’ve written the playbooks for co-ops, eco-villages and bold experiments in alternative living. We’ve crafted neighborhood sanctuaries like the Castro, built on pride and protest, and West Oakland, where the Black Panther Party redefined community power. That spirit hasn’t vanished, but it’s harder to hold onto.
Young people are moving to Austin and New York, parents are exhausted, unsupported and fleeing to the suburbs, and we’re in the middle of a vast loneliness epidemic. Amidst the swirl of the housing crisis, safety concerns, and promising new plans from Mayor Daniel Lurie to tackle both, one theme keeps surfacing in my late-night conversations and group chats: community. Not the abstract kind, but the real, tangible kind: shared childcare, communal dinners, maybe a big plot of land with some tiny homes (hello, Bestie Row in Texas) and a communal chicken or two.
Lurie’s initiatives focus on building more housing and improving public safety — and they’re badly needed. But what’s missing is an investment in the invisible glue that makes cities livable: the everyday ties between neighbors that create real belonging. This craving for closeness isn’t just a vibe shift — it’s a signal that the way we’ve structured modern life might be due for a rethink.
If we don’t rebuild the human infrastructure that makes cities feel like home, no amount of new apartments or policing will be enough.
A glimpse of what we lost
A lot of us first encountered real community in dorms, where sharing a bathroom with 15 strangers somehow felt like a rite of passage. Some of us dipped our toes into co-ops or eco-villages. A few brave souls tried co-housing. But eventually, many of us settled into the well-worn grooves of single-family homes, separated by fences, driveways, and a polite wave if we catch our neighbor taking out the trash.
Back then, those community experiments felt like phases — temporary, perhaps a little eccentric, something we’d grow out of. But now, they feel like previews of a life we didn’t know we’d miss. Fleeting as they were, they gave us a taste of what it means to be truly interdependent — and many of us haven’t found anything quite like it since.
Even if you’re not ready to blow up the concept of the nuclear family (might I recommend Sophie Lewis on the subject), the craving for connection doesn’t go away. Within our cozy domestic bubbles, community still matters — and not just the kind that happens once a year at a block party with questionable potato salad.
Community has proven time and time again to keep us safe. It reduces crime, domestic violence, loneliness and increases property values.
It may sound like a buzzword, but community is a public safety powerhouse. Community has proven time and time again to keep us safe. It reduces crime, domestic violence, loneliness and increases property values. Not bad for something that basically boils down to people knowing and caring about each other.
Public safety experts have been saying it for years: neighborhood cohesion is crime prevention. The risk for violence for youth and young adults can be reduced through strong connections to caring adults and involvement in activities that provide opportunities to grow. In Richmond, California, a program called Advance Peace reduced gun violence by offering mentorship, job training, and support to those most at risk — not by increasing policing, but by building relationships. The result? A significant drop in shootings, and a powerful model for prevention.
Beauty builds belonging
In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s LandCare program transformed vacant lots into green spaces, and saw a 29% drop in gun violence in surrounding areas. Also in Philly, the Mural Arts Program engages youth, formerly incarcerated citizens, and community members to co-create public art. Participants report feeling more connected, hopeful, and invested in their neighborhoods — outcomes that correlate with reduced recidivism and increased public safety.
Even something as simple as a potluck with too many pasta salads isn’t just social — it’s strategic. It’s how people learn each other’s names, build trust, and create the informal safety nets that keep small problems from becoming big ones. These aren’t just feel-good activities; they’re proof that someone is paying attention — and that someone would notice if something were off.
We see this kind of quiet resilience in time banks, where neighbors trade skills like babysitting for bike repair, rebuilding the kind of everyday interdependence we used to take for granted. Programs like the Intergenerational Learning Center in Seattle pair elders with preschoolers, improving cognitive function in older adults and social development in children, while also serving as an antidote to the loneliness epidemic. And in many places across the U.S., shared childcare co-ops help working parents stay afloat while weaving tighter neighborhood bonds.
So why is community still so hard to fund?
Because you can’t measure trust in a quarterly report. Policymakers and funders like deliverables: arrests prevented, hospital visits avoided, charts with arrows going down. “Neighbors trusted each other more” doesn’t exactly scream ROI.
And community doesn’t have a lobbyist. Police departments, hospitals, and prisons have budgets and bureaucracies. Community leaders have folding chairs and a spreadsheet someone forgot to update.
There’s also the image problem. Investing in community sounds … soft. In a political world obsessed with being “tough on crime,” a community mural doesn’t exactly make the evening news.
But maybe it should. Because connection is prevention. And prevention, it turns out, is often cheaper, kinder, and far more effective than emergency response.
Imagine if we treated community like infrastructure. If we funded trust-building the way we fund bridges. If we required public servants — politicians, teachers, firefighters, police — to live in the neighborhoods they serve (and paid them enough to afford it).
What if we believed that regular people — yes, even the ones who forget trash day — are the best chance we have at building safer, healthier places to live?
We might stop treating community as a nice-to-have. And start recognizing it for what it really is: a public good, a safety net, and sometimes, a very good excuse for pie.
About the author
Alex Madsen is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project on Domestic Violence and Economic Security. The opinions expressed in this piece are solely her own.