Seth Kaplan on How to Fix America’s Fragile Neighborhoods

Neighborhoods have always played a distinctly important role in American public life. The neighborhood is the most intimate public setting outside of the home, the place where mediating institutions of common life—schools, stores, gyms, houses of worship—connect citizens to each other. American neighborhoods, however, have lately grown fragile and unhealthy, reflecting the nation’s loneliness epidemic, its underwhelming public education system, its demoralized society.