CHAPTER NINE

Get More Political

Fifteen minutes before class started, I collected my name tag lanyard and scanned the room. We’d been told to come early to the Blacksburg Motor Company, a former car dealership turned LEED-certified meeting space, so we’d have time for dinner. A few punctual souls were now scattered among long tables, eating pizza from paper plates. Five o’clock traffic crawled past the windows. A pull-down screen glowed with a PowerPoint slide:

2015 Citizens Institute

Welcome

My own plate of pizza in hand, I took a seat next to a young woman who looked like she’d rushed straight from the office. “So,” I said, “what made you sign up for this?”

The woman blew out an apologetic breath. “Well, first I should tell you that I never, ever, ever thought I’d be living in Blacksburg.” By her own confession, Cassie was a transplant from Richmond who, in marrying a Virginia Tech professor, had reluctantly committed herself to Blacksburg for the foreseeable future. “I miss all the restaurants and stuff to do that Richmond has. Blacksburg is a lot smaller than I’m used to. But my husband really likes his job, and I decided I needed to have a better attitude about being here.”

“Oh, honey,” I wanted to say, “I sat next to the right person.” A better attitude about Blacksburg was pretty much the reason I did anything these days. Signing up for the Blacksburg Citizens Institute was merely my latest effort.

I’d seen the flyer for the Citizens Institute, a civic education program offered by the town government, on the bulletin board at the public library a few months earlier. In some of the hundred or so U.S. cities that host such courses, they might go by names like “citizens academy,” “neighborhood college,” or “Town 101.” All operate with the same basic objective: to let average residents take a look inside the gear works of their town government.

Here, participants spend nine spring Mondays cycling through Town of Blacksburg departments for a weekly lesson in what government employees do all day. On Housing and Neighborhood Services night, we’d tour low-income housing complexes. Police Department night would feature a canine officer demo. If some small part of me might once have been reluctant about the wonkiness of a nine-week civics class, it had been overshadowed by the recognition that Citizens Institute was exactly what you would do if you really cared about your city. If you want to love your town, I reminded myself, act like someone who loves your town would act.

Anyway, I needed the education. My admittedly naive view of local government was derived largely from viewings of the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, about a city parks and rec department in fictional Pawnee, Indiana (slogan: “First in Friendship, Fourth in Obesity”). Overeager deputy director Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler, serves her city with almost pathological good cheer. At one tense public meeting, Leslie shrugs off the invective hurled by citizens, saying, “These people are members of the community that care about where they live. So what I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.”

Meanwhile, Leslie’s antigovernment boss, Ron Swanson, works on bleeding the beast from the inside. “I have so many ideas,” he says at one point. “Some are simple, like take down traffic lights and eliminate the post office. The bigger ones will be tougher, like ‘Bring this crumbling to the ground.’”

I wanted to be Leslie Knope when I grew up, at least the part where she was wildly committed to her town. And yet for all the time I’d spent thinking about Blacksburg, I’d failed to think much about the capital-T Town itself. How it worked. Who made it run. What the quiet background thrum of government meant for my happiness where I lived.

In my defense, most of us don’t ponder the parks department or the police force unless it fails us (Why haven’t they plowed the snow yet?). The better bureaucracy works, the less attention it draws. If we do think about government workers and elected officials, we tend to view even the local ones as faceless bureaucrats. They’re people we know about but don’t really know, which makes them easy to hate. Kind of like the Kardashians.

Citizens Institute’s simple remedy: Get to know government employees. “It’s really easy to have a negative perception of government when you don’t know the people behind the scenes and don’t know how things operate,” says Heather Browning, Blacksburg’s community relations manager. “But it’s hard to fuss too much about the horrible recycling program when you meet the five people who operate our recycling program and see how hard they work.”

That first Monday night in the Blacksburg Motor Company, Citizens Institute successfully made me not hate the town manager, Marc Verniel. That was not, I learned, a universal feeling. Verniel’s was one of the very public faces of the town, so every time Blacksburg attempted to make a major change, he was the guy people “cared loudly at.” You want to widen Main Street? You want to turn College Avenue into a pedestrian plaza? What?? Even the plans for the now-beloved Market Square, where the farmers’ market meets each week, spurred livid complaints about the removal of precious parking spaces downtown.

Listening to Verniel talk, I came to two realizations. First, good towns don’t just happen. They’re planned into existence, against all odds and opposition.

Second, making decisions that keep all kinds of residents satisfied is incredibly difficult. To underscore that point, we played a planning-themed board game called Built. Seven of us circled a game board, a seven-by-eight grid, and arranged cardboard tiles labeled to represent elements of a town—Hotel, Small Business, Gas Station, Strip Mall, Bakery, Train Station, Empty Lot, and so on. The goal was to create a simulacrum of a place we wouldn’t mind living in.

Right away it got tricky. Where did we want the poultry processing plant? The prison? All the players had to set down paper tiles with our own names on them as well; essentially, we had to live in the world we were creating. I ended up insulated by a live theater, a coffee shop, and a pharmacy (Walker’s Paradise!), while next to me Skip’s property value was being dragged down by an unfortunate adult bookstore.

No matter how thoughtful we were about placing the train station next to the county transit hub so it was convenient for commuters, and lumping the power plant, car dealership, and light manufacturing into an industrial zone, life interfered. “Here are six more squares to find spots for!” a city employee would cry, or “Change any five squares in the next three minutes!” Moving one tile created ripple effects elsewhere. Someone always wound up in the bad part of town. Though Skip, a real estate agent, was sanguine about his seedy game-board neighborhood, if real property values were at stake, I’m guessing he might be the one writing angry e-mails to Marc Verniel.

Studies show that Americans feel a lot better about local politicians than national ones; in one poll, 72 percent of Americans said they trusted their city government to do the right thing, while only 19 percent said the same of the federal government. The trouble is, we trust our leaders just enough to stay completely uninvolved until we’re angry about something. Our first introduction to someone like Verniel is often when we’re ready to shove his awful road-expansion project down his throat.

Citizens Institute defuses that tension by inviting residents like me to a massive brag session, where city employees get to yammer about their successes to a willing audience. One evening we rode a bus around town while Matt Hanratty, the Housing and Neighborhood Services manager, told us how his team developed beautiful, sustainable homes for low-income residents. He was so earnest, so morally upright about it. I love this man, I thought.

A few weeks later we met with the volunteers who run the fire department and the rescue squad, and I thought, No other humans in the world are as fundamentally good as these.

Hang out with people who share only good news and you’re bound to feel enthusiastic. Maybe I was too Leslie Knope–naive, too eager to drink the government-authorized Kool-Aid. Yet every single Monday for nine weeks, I’d trundle off to class and have the same unvarying reaction: The people who run Blacksburg are pretty awesome.

The bus drivers. The parks and rec director. The lady who handles building permits. The SWAT team member who abandoned his twins’ birthday party to answer an urgent call. The mayor, who sat next to me in a mock town council meeting. I adored them all. Week after week, I became more besotted with the people running my town. Naturally, that made me feel pretty good about the town itself. (Also, at one Citizens Institute session I got to ride on a fire truck, and there are few circumstances in which a grown woman gets to realize that ambition.)

So many of my Love Where You Live experiments had worked because they managed to make me like people in Blacksburg. Citizens Institute accomplished that more successfully than anything else I’d done.

“I think town employees are the unsung heroes,” says Rick Morse, an associate professor of public administration and government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who studies citizens academies. “They’re always in the background working, and people don’t realize that all in their life is convenient and good because of what these other people do. For citizens, it’s kind of this aha moment: ‘Oh wow, these are good people, and they’re doing good things.’”

Their ability to do good things matters more than you might expect. After Somerville, Massachusetts, famously surveyed its citizens about their happiness in 2011, researchers found a correlation between life satisfaction and certain well-run city services, including traffic and parking enforcement, code enforcement, and the appearance and maintenance of parks. “It’s possible that happier people have a rosier view of the city,” a report noted, “but in this case, it is not a stretch to imagine that living in a clean, beautiful, efficiently run city is making people happier.”

For cities, making residents happier is a few levels up the Maslowian hierarchy, the kind of goal to consider once the proverbial trains are all running on time. But it makes sense that cities want to shoot for it, since residents who are happier with their city are more likely to be attached, and attached residents are more likely to get involved.

In 2004, a sociologist at Sam Houston State University named Gene Theodori quizzed the residents of two small Texas towns. Had they ever attended a public meeting on town or school affairs in their community? Had they worked with others in their community to try to solve community problems? Had they participated in any type of community improvement activity?

Then he asked them questions likes the ones from the place attachment scale: How much did they feel like they belonged? How meaningful were their friendships in the community? Did they want to stay, or were they eager to move away? The more attached people were to where they lived, Theodori found, the more civically involved they were. The two went hand in hand. When you love where you live, you care what happens there. You want to get involved, and cities thrive on that involvement.

At the first Blacksburg Citizens Institute meeting, Verniel, the town manager, told us up front that getting us to serve the city was part of the master plan. “We have more than thirty boards and commissions in the town, and our Citizens Institute graduates are a really good pool of people to pull from, because you have shown interest in the town and you know about it. So don’t be surprised if you get a call from us sometime.”

The majority of Americans are crap at civic engagement, the process by which we citizens participate in the running of our town in an effort to make things better—happier—where we live. Very few of us get involved in local politics. Movers are far less likely than Stayers to do so, perhaps put off by the notion of city government as an impenetrable good ol’ boy network. Maybe they’re simply not attached enough to care.

Would you run for office where you live? The truth is, you have to be incredibly dedicated to your town to want to, but once you’re elected, there’s an enormous place attachment effect. That’s especially true for Movers. Sam Colville, a town council member in coastal St. Marys, Georgia, where he moved in 2009, said, “I had forty years within which to get to know and to feel a part of Kansas City. I don’t have forty years left to spend on doing that in St. Marys, so it’s a fast track to getting to know the city and to really enjoying its assets.” Dick Goodman, who ran for city council in Suwanee, Georgia, two and a half years after retiring there, joked that “according to my wife, I’m a walking chamber of commerce for Suwanee.” (Indeed. His e-mail signature includes Suwanee’s rankings on the Money, Family Circle, and Kiplinger best places lists.)

Stayers experienced an attachment bump as well. My friend Emily became a member of the school board in Huntington, New York, because it felt like a debt she owed the hometown where she grew up and has spent most of her life. “I feel much more pride about where I live now than I necessarily did when I was living here as a kid growing up,” she says. “I am Huntington’s biggest cheerleader, particularly for our school district but in general our town.”

I spent five years as a member of the town library board in Ames, Iowa, a position for which I applied and was appointed as a relative newcomer. Sometimes when I was elbow-deep in policy documents at an all-day community charette, I wished I’d had the strength of character to ignore the board recruitment notice like everyone else. Yet nothing I did in Ames made me feel more connected to my town. Along with a seat at the table and a highlighted copy of the budget, the library board gave me the feeling of being on the inside of things. As a board member I was a necessary, voting part of the organization and, by extension, the city. I mattered, and feeling like you matter makes you feel like you belong. No wonder Ames was the town I left most regretfully.

Jeff Coates, a program director with the National Conference on Citizenship, compares the effect of public service with going to college. “People become very attached to the place where they did their undergrad. I went to the University of Oklahoma. I’m a Sooners fan. I love watching Sooner football. Why? Because I invested a lot in that university, and when you invest a lot, you become that place. The same thing can happen when you invest a lot into a community.”

Exhibit A: Matt Tomasulo. A year after the creator of Walk [Your City] first showed me around Raleigh, I started getting e-mails from the Committee to Elect Matt Tomasulo. He was running for Raleigh City Council, with a platform of prioritizing close-knit, walkable neighborhoods. (Other ideas: more tiny houses and a “City Hall to Go” mobile services bus.) I totally would have voted for him.

Put Party Politics Aside

Americans take flack for being politically apathetic, so it’s ironic that politics is also blamed for stratifying the country into warring red zone/blue zone camps. With the persistent bleating of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, “Republican” and “Democrat” have become convenient shorthand for explaining what we care about, in politics and everything else.

To create its top ten lists of conservative and liberal cities, the website Livability looked not only at voting patterns but at consumer preferences. Apparently, California Pizza Kitchen and Romano’s Macaroni Grill are favored by liberals, O’Charley’s and Cracker Barrel by conservatives. Car-buying patterns are revealing, too. Liberals want to drive Honda Civic Hybrids. Conservatives want to drive Ford Mustang convertibles.

Like our buying habits, our place preferences are closely aligned with our politics. In a 2014 survey of over ten thousand Americans, the Pew Research Center found that liberals want smaller houses, urban settings, and walkability. Conservatives prefer larger houses in smaller towns or rural areas and don’t mind driving from place to place. The more liberal or conservative people skew, the more pronounced their predilections along those lines become. It’s both clichéd and confounding. Pew’s report concludes, “If people living in ‘deep red’ or ‘deep blue’ America feel like they inhabit distinctly different worlds, it is in part because they seek out different types of communities, both geographic and social.”

Theoretically, we like our cities better when they embrace a diversity of residents. Remember, openness to all kinds of people was one of the three main factors that generated place attachment in the Soul of the Community study. In reality, living among people who share your political views—and more than a quarter of Americans admit it matters to them—creates a comforting Us vs. Them echo chamber. As a Democrat living in Hoboken, New Jersey (one of the most liberal towns in the country), or a Republican living in Benton, Arkansas (among the most conservative), you get away with thinking, Everyone here agrees with me! What’s wrong with the rest of you? Life can be a lot easier when we live among people who are like us.

If we cluster geographically by politics, we also cluster by personality. One miserable winter afternoon, I took a free online personality test at a website called OutofService.com. For each of forty-six statements like “I see myself as someone who is talkative” and “I see myself as someone who tends to find fault with others,” I had to rank myself between a 1 (strongly disagree) and a 5 (strongly agree). Once I finished, the program would tell me who I was based on psychology’s Big Five personality traits (with the helpful acronym OCEAN):

• Openness, or curiosity and creativity

• Conscientiousness, or responsibility and diligence

• Extraversion, or friendliness and talkativeness

• Agreeableness, or helpfulness and caring

• Neuroticism, or moodiness and anxiety

Simply taking the test revealed something important about me: I have no idea what kind of person I am. Waffling over whether “I see myself as someone who worries a lot” deserved a 1 or a 5, I realized that my grip on my own identity was disturbingly loose. Did I worry a lot? Sure, sometimes. Then again, not always. How about “maybe”? Was “maybe” good enough?

The only piece of requested data that was easy to provide was my zip code. Happily, University of Cambridge social psychologist Jason Rentfrow could tell a lot about a person from his or her zip code.

Rentfrow is one of the major researchers of place-personality theory, the idea “that people in certain parts of the United States may have slightly different personality traits, and that may contribute to differences in industries and economy.” As a child growing up in the American South, Rentfrow moved a lot, and he’d always wondered why different towns seemed to have their own idiosyncratic personalities, reflected in the character of the people who lived there.

Then, in graduate school at the University of Texas, Rentfrow read a book by Richard Florida called The Rise of the Creative Class, which pointed out the curious fact that creative and high-tech industries were concentrated geographically in certain regions of the United States. Why? Creative types probably moved to Silicon Valley because jobs were easier to find there. But was it bigger than that? Did place-personality theory explain the variations among towns that Rentfrow had observed moving around as a kid? Did cities have personalities the way people do?

Rentfrow happened to have a ready-made data set to test the idea, in the form of 1.6 million personality tests like the one I had completed at OutofService.com. That website was created by Rentfrow’s adviser, University of Texas social psychologist Sam Gosling. Because users provided their zip codes, Rentfrow and Gosling could geocode the results.

In their fascinating findings, Rentfrow and his fellow researchers discovered that personality types indeed clustered geographically. Residents of Wisconsin were the most extroverted, residents of Vermont the most introverted. On conscientiousness, South Carolina rates highest, Maine the lowest. Utah is both the most agreeable and the least neurotic; on the other side of the country glower neurotic West Virginia and disagreeable New York. Washington, D.C., is most open, followed by California and New York, as you might expect. Least open? North Dakota, by a long shot. It was as if places had their own temperaments.

How do places develop such strong constellations of Big Five personality traits? Blame history, climate, economy, aesthetics, topography. There’s a whole stew of possibilities. One explanation for why Rust Belt states like Ohio and Michigan scored high on conscientiousness but low on openness, for instance, is that their economy for years centered around assembly-line jobs where focus mattered more than creativity.

Or maybe it’s social contagion, a theory developed by Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Harvard Medical School, and James H. Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California, San Diego. Using data from the Framingham Heart Study, Christakis and Fowler found that happiness and unhappiness occur in geographic clusters. When friends or neighbors within a mile of you become happier, your chance of becoming happier increases by 25 percent. “We catch the emotions of the people we have relationships with and the people they have relationships with,” Rentfrow explains. “Anecdotally, it’s pretty obvious to those of us who have been in close relationships or have worked with difficult people, if you spend some time with someone who’s an asshole, that will affect you.” It’s not much of a leap to suggest that other emotions, behaviors, and attitudes—personality traits, essentially—are passed like a virus among people who live in the same town.

Also at play is the concept of person-environment fit, a term for how well your personal characteristics—your values, goals, abilities, needs, interests, preferences, and traits—correspond to those of where you live. We search for cities where we can see something of ourselves in the locals, and we’re more likely to find that when more residents do our kind of work for a living. Hence, creative types flock to the coasts, and then more creative types follow suit because they like to live around other creative types (and because they have more creative-type job opportunities there). The prophecy becomes self-fulfilling.

“At the end of the day,” Rentfrow told me, “your personality is going to be a strong determinant of how happy you are where you live. If you’re able to find an environment that satisfies your psychological interests and needs, that can have a positive impact on your daily experiences.”

When we pick a place to live, we usually don’t know how our town ranks on Big Five personality traits. Have we fallen in with the Relaxed and Creative types—low on neuroticism, high on openness—that Rentfrow says cluster in the West and the Carolinas? Will we be living among the Temperamental and Uninhibited Americans—more neurotic, less agreeable—found primarily in the Northeast? Sometimes personality is something we can sense. It’s a large part of what draws us to certain places. Feeling, even instinctively, that the people who live in your town are like you makes you feel like you belong.

The trouble is, we’re not always sure who we are. That was my fundamental problem with the Big Five personality test I took. After bungling through the survey, I balked at the results. Twenty-second percentile for agreeableness? Twelfth percentile for extraversion? That meant 88 percent of test takers were more outgoing than I was. “That’s not me!” I thought indignantly. “Could that be me?” Maybe it wasn’t, because when I retook the test at OutofService.com in sunnier weather, my agreeableness score rose to 50 and my extraversion score to 22. Still low, but not fetal-position low. I apparently changed my personality as easily as I changed clothes.

Even when we know who we are, we don’t always know what we want. Humans are notoriously poor predictors of what makes us happy. In place terms, that suggests we’re clumsy at identifying a good person-environment fit. We hope that a small town will mellow us when we’re too neurotic for the slow lane. We move to a wild city but we’re too introverted to adore it. Eagerly we take “What City Should You Actually Live In?” quizzes, hoping the results will point out something about our personality we haven’t noticed yet. (According to BuzzFeed.com, London was my destiny. SouthernLiving.com advised—wait for it—Austin, Texas.)

Most of those quizzes are click-bait fabricated by twenty-year-old website interns. The “What Town Matches My Politics?” quiz on the website of Clarity Campaign Labs, a political research and consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., seemed more legit. I selected my home state and answered seven simple questions about my politics and my feelings about climate change, gun control, abortion rights, taxes, and urban living. With eerie precision, the site’s algorithm used my answers to pair me with a town in my state that leaned left in a socially conservative way: Horntown, Virginia, population 574.

Our political philosophy reveals something about who we are. It’s at least as indicative of our personality as our agreement with a Big Five test statement like “I see myself as someone who remains calm in tense situations.” If we want to land in a town that’s a good person-environment fit for us, it’s not ridiculous to take the area’s voting patterns under consideration.

I find it hopeful, though, that in Blacksburg and many other locations, town council candidates run without party affiliations. The Democrat/Republican divide cedes importance to simply making stuff happen. “Mayors are pragmatists, they’re problem-solvers,” says Benjamin Barber, a political analyst and author of If Mayors Ruled the World. “Their job is to get things done, and if they don’t, they’re out of a job.” There’s no time for filibustering and gridlocking. Schools need to function. Potholes need to get filled. Trash needs to get picked up.

No one likes to feel that they don’t fit in with the prevailing politics or personality of their city. I’ve talked to people who have confessed that, despite the time and concerted effort they’ve put in, their city has never felt like home. In those serious cases I usually blame a poor person-environment fit.

When you live in a town where people are not like you, politically or otherwise, you can feel isolated and alienated. The antidote, and the way to experience more place attachment where you live, is twofold. First, learn to appreciate other residents for who they are and what they do for you, as I did at the Blacksburg Citizens Institute.

Second, work with others to make good things happen in your town despite your differences. That’s collective efficacy, and it’s the aim of entering the civic life of your town. Your personality and beliefs matter, but maybe not as much as the fact that you owe your city something. That you are, in the words of the American Democracy Project, a “steward of place.”

Use Civic Technology

How exactly does one steward? The National Conference on Citizenship offers a few questions that make for a good civic engagement gut check:

• Have you ever contacted a local government official about an issue that’s important to you?

• Have you ever boycotted or protested in your town?

• Have you ever attended a local public meeting?

• Do you talk with friends and family about politics?

• Have you attended a political rally or speech where you live?

• Have you signed a petition, online or off?

• Do you keep up on the news?

• Have you worked or volunteered for a political party or candidate?

Such behaviors are the equivalent of putting a dog in the fight. They make you care more about the outcome, which makes you feel rooted where you live. Yet very few of us perform these basic acts of local civic engagement.

In hotly contested presidential elections, only around 60 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. We’re even less likely to vote in local elections. In mayoral races from 2008 to 2011, no major city mobilized more than 45 percent of its voters. In a few places, including San Antonio and El Paso, turnout was in the single digits.

To be fair, city politics can be hard for Movers to grasp. It usually takes me a few years after I move to a new state just to remember the name of my governor. (Just Googled Virginia’s. It’s Terry McAuliffe.) If we’re paying attention at all, it’s to bark about national issues while roundly ignoring the municipal traffic projects, business permits, housing developments, and recycling programs that influence our lives on a daily basis.

It’s not that way everywhere. In Japan and France, more citizens vote in local elections than national ones. But in America, unless there’s a sex scandal or a proposal to legalize marijuana, local politics operate in an “equilibrium state.” That’s code for “We don’t care that much.” Perhaps it’s too confusing or frustrating, or we don’t know where to begin. Much easier to stay home, cuddling our laptops.

Good. Stay there. Digital placemakers are effectively bringing the mountain to Muhammad in the form of civic technology. That’s an umbrella term for the way coders, hackers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and politicians are huddling around computers, trying to reinvent the way cities interact with their citizens.

Most governments are late to the technology party. Check out your city’s website. Does it look like it’s been updated in the past five years? Can people apply for food stamps or business permits online or pay the electric bill with an app? No? Civic technologists want to change all that by applying a start-up mind-set—quick action, little red tape—to making government services more accessible and public life less arduous.

The best success story in the field comes from the San Francisco–based nonprofit Code for America. Nicknamed “Peace Corps for Geeks,” the group annually sends a cohort of fellows into cities across the country to create custom technology that’s responsive to local government needs. In 2012 in New Orleans, Code for America fellows built the website BlightStatus (now Civic Insight) to track more than thirty-five thousand vacant lots in the city in real time. The following year, fellows in Louisville designed a criminal justice dashboard to monitor local jail occupancy and offer incarceration alternatives. Other apps and websites developed under Code for America’s auspices help users map public art, locate social services, and figure out where to get a flu shot in their town.

Some civic technology apps are just fun, in a community-minded way. The website Blockee lets users “pimp” their neighborhood by adding GIF planters, bike lanes, and other “civic bling” to Google Maps images of their street. Click-That-Hood is an online quiz that tests how fast you can name your city’s neighborhoods. When I played the version some coder had created for Blacksburg, names of neighborhoods like Miller Southside, McBryde, and Ellett Valley flashed across the screen, and I scrambled to match them to the right locations on the map. I got all twenty in under two minutes, surprised at how well I knew where things were now. (Thank you, mental map.)

Annually, Code for America holds a National Day of Civic Hacking, a marathon session where programmers use publicly available data to design websites and blitz-code local apps. More than ninety in-real-life events were held in 2015, from Silicon Valley’s heartland to the nation’s capital. The group also runs a business accelerator, and one of its first picks in 2012 was a company called MindMixer (now MySidewalk).

A couple of Omaha-based urban planners, disgruntled by low turnout at public meetings, started MySidewalk as a kind of twenty-four/seven digital town hall to make it easier for residents to voice opinions without leaving the house. That was a problem in desperate need of a solution. Nationwide, less than a quarter of Americans go to public meetings, a figure only slightly less appalling than the 19 percent of us who have contacted a local elected official to express an opinion.

With my personality (sixty-ninth percentile for conscientiousness!), I can’t help wanting everyone to be a good citizen in the classic ways the National Conference on Citizenship measures. Write those letters! Sign those petitions! Storm that city council meeting and wait a few hours for a turn at the microphone. It’s your civic duty.

On the other hand, this is not 1988, and “Come see us in person” shouldn’t be a city’s only communication strategy. For each of its 1,300 clients, MySidewalk creates online forums where local users can opine on questions like “How can we make Southfield [Michigan] a 21st century city?” or “Is there a program or activity that another library does that you would like to see at Kearney [Nebraska] Public Library?” Sometimes residents earn reward points for submitting ideas, redeemable for prizes like city pool passes or an outgoing voice-mail greeting from the mayor. Decision makers, whose photos appear on the site, respond in real time.

According to MIT researcher Ben Armstrong, who compared MySidewalk comments with the ones heard through the microphones at a Pittsburgh town hall meeting, “the people who show up in person are older, and they are probably more willing to spend an evening at a local community center.” He added, “We know from a variety of research that those who participate online are typically younger and wealthier.”

The hope is that, slowly, demographic shifts and technology begin to reach citizens who might otherwise be on the civic margins—people who don’t have transportation, can’t find child care, or can’t get away from work. If, for instance, a time-strapped young mom posts online about a local park, then the play equipment she recommended gets built, “this changes her feeling of civic engagement in her community because she was directly involved,” says Emily Olinger, vice president of client experience for MySidewalk. “As the park changes, she gets to say, ‘I shared my idea of how my child uses the playground and where I think things should be, and it’s happening.’” Once someone sees that their voice is being heard, civic engagement clicks.

Civic technology doesn’t have to be bound by geography. Programmers too far away to join a Code for America hackathon can log on to its Civic Tech Issue Finder and solve tech challenges for projects in other countries. It works best, though, when local people solve their own problems, as over fifteen thousand coders and hackers do as part of Code for America brigades.

In late 2014, a programmer named Ben Schoenfeld happened to start a brigade in my town, called Code for NRV. (NRV stands for New River Valley, Blacksburg’s broader metro area.) At weekly civic hack nights in a coworking space above PK’s Bar & Grill, members sit around with their laptops and work on the group’s ongoing projects. Money from the national Code for America organization buys pizza, soda, and beer.

In Blacksburg, Ben says, there isn’t the low-hanging technological fruit you see in some cities. The town’s website is fine. There’s already an app for the Blacksburg Transit bus system. So the group has focused on developing apps that make life better, like a safe streets crime mapper and a multicounty park finder.

For someone with a very particular set of skills, Code for America projects are precisely the kind that foster place attachment. You’re working with people who are like you. You’re solving a problem together (collective efficacy!). You’re making your city more open, responsive, or beautiful. As Ben, who looks like a slightly nerdy George Harrison, told me, “I haven’t found [another] project in Blacksburg that makes me feel more connected to the region.”

Most of us, however, do not have that very particular set of skills. We’re the end users of the world, not the coders and designers. For us, civic engagement comes from using technology to connect with our town government, as with MySidewalk, or to connect with fellow citizens, with a company like Nextdoor. Since Nextdoor’s launch in 2011, about 40 percent of U.S. neighborhoods—more than six hundred thousand in all—have signed up to create online Nextdoor “neighborhoods,” digital communities that function a bit like private, hyperlocal Facebook pages.

Typically a resident starts a Nextdoor neighborhood by personally recruiting a critical mass of neighbors and starting online conversations. Anne Clauss, who spoke to me about the Nextdoor neighborhoods she started in Hamilton, New York, and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, said she and a friend invited everyone they knew in the neighborhood, then preloaded the site with questions: What time is the school play tomorrow night? Does anyone know a carpenter? “I never needed a carpenter,” Anne said. “You ask dumb questions and you look dumb. People start to respond because they want to help. ‘Oh, Anne, I know a good carpenter.’ ‘Oh, Anne, the play is at seven; you can get tickets from my daughter.’” By seeming vulnerable and accepting assistance, Anne says, “all of a sudden you have an instant bond.” (Not bad advice for neighbors in general.)

Nextdoor fosters the kinds of useful interactions—borrowing a hedger, selling a bike, discussing a park cleanup—that create the collective efficacy towns need. As of 2015, more than 870 agencies in 630 cities used Nextdoor to broadcast government, police, and fire department updates to Nextdoor members in town. In Sacramento, California, as Nextdoor membership soared and the police department used the site to connect with citizens, crime dropped by 15 percent.

In civic engagement, social cohesion matters. That’s why the state and city Civic Health Indexes created by the National Conference on Citizenship measure not only how often people write letters and vote, but how often they talk to friends and family, exchange favors with neighbors, and work with neighbors to solve a community problem. It’s all interconnected. Be social, and you’re likely to want to do the harder civic engagement actions. Sarah Leary, one of Nextdoor’s cofounders, said she’d lived for three or four years on her block in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco and knew exactly one person. Since starting a Nextdoor neighborhood there, she’s gotten to know dozens of people. Not coincidentally, she’s also volunteered for the neighborhood emergency response team.

Toward the end of my weeks in the Blacksburg Citizens Institute, I saw that the city had set up an online survey to elicit feedback about its website. Riding the high of my government-employee lovefest, I tried to remember that there was a human behind this survey who was trying to do his or her job well.

I had also read a few things recently about Code for America’s Digital Front Door Initiative, which proposes redesigning municipal websites to make them more transparent and welcoming. Thus emboldened, I spent ten minutes poking around Blacksburg.gov and brainstorming ways to make the site more like the Code for America ideal. It took me another ten minutes to answer eleven survey questions about how I use the city’s website and what I thought should change. (Hot tip: Pick fonts that don’t look like they were stripped from my high school term paper.)

I’m not going to lie. As Love Where You Live experiments go, completing an online survey was . . . kind of anticlimactic. No warm fuzzies. No burst of satisfaction. That’s okay, because I’m guessing it mattered to someone in my town. Sometimes placemaking is just doing the boring stuff our towns need from us.

Love Your City Checklist

Follow your mayor and city councilors on social media. (First you’ll have to find out who they are. For that, visit your city’s website.)

Figure out when your next election is and vote, even if it means you have to spend thirty minutes cramming on the issues.

Join your local citizens academy, if your town or county has one. They go by many different names (citizens college, neighborhood university, and so on), so e-mail your town clerk and ask about local availability.

To keep up-to-date on what’s happening in local government (plus new restaurants, volunteer opportunities, and a place attachment bonanza of additional information), read a local news source, online or in print.

If you have coding skills, join a Code for America brigade where you live, or sign up for a one-off civic hackathon. Code for America hosts a National Day of Civic Hacking once a year. Find an event near your town at HackForChange.org.

Run for an elected town office, or just volunteer for a city board or commission. Cities are mostly grateful for the help.

Download and use civic apps for your town. To find them, Google the name of your town plus “app.”

If there’s something in your place that’s driving you nuts—a pothole, a broken light—go on your city’s website and figure out who can help you get it fixed. Corollary: If there’s something in town you love, write about that, too. City employees aren’t overwhelmed with positive feedback. This will make someone’s day, and you’ll feel amazing.

Attend a city council meeting. Just one. Try it.