A post on Front Porch Forum, the town-by-town digital bulletin board that has been running across most of Vermont since 2006, asks to borrow a ladder. It gets six replies and two actual visits, between people who live three streets apart and had never spoken.
A city can add housing, transit, and public space and still produce neighborhoods where residents do not know each other. Physical proximity makes contact possible; it does not make it happen. What converts possibility into an actual relationship is usually a specific, low-friction occasion, and those occasions used to be generated informally through overlapping routines and institutions, churches, unions, civic clubs, that have weakened in most places over recent decades.
The Buy Nothing Project, founded in 2013, has scaled to thousands of hyperlocal Facebook groups organized street by street, specifically to manufacture that occasion, a gift request, a shared tool, where it no longer arises on its own.
Renters and recent arrivals feel the gap most acutely, since they lack the tenure that used to generate incidental familiarity with neighbors over years. Older residents in neighborhoods that have lost their informal institutions feel a related but distinct version: physically embedded, socially thinning, watching the connective tissue erode as the venues that used to generate it close or empty out.
A well-designed plaza with no organizing layer on top of it is still just a well-designed plaza. What is opening up is a wave of small, local tools trying to be that organizing layer, apps and platforms built for coordination at the scale of a block or a few streets rather than an entire city.
Front Porch Forum works, town by town, because Vermont is small enough that a hyperlocal network can actually mean something. Whether that model holds in a city of eight million, where hyperlocal has to mean a single block rather than a whole town, is the question every Buy Nothing group and Nextdoor imitator is still testing in public.