That’s why, in the 1990s, a late Southeast Denton resident created SEDNA. And though its motives to organize runs deeper than inefficient neighborhood engagement (the city displaced many residents’ ancestors from their thriving black community in the 1920s to construct a public park), SEDNA demonstrates why strong towns need neighborhood-level engagement.

SEDNA meets the last Monday of every month. Not at the council chambers. Not at a trendy coffee shop downtown. Instead, the group meets at the MLK Jr. Rec Center in their neighborhood of Southeast Denton.

Makes sense, right? Consider where you feel most comfortable discussing your own issues. Can you imagine discussing your experiences with, for example, alcoholism, infidelity, or abuse at a coffee shop’s open mic, as strangers nod along just enough to appear as if they’re listening?

This is where the rec center—or wherever you and your neighbors collectively feel comfortable—shines. Sure, SEDNA hosts its meetings at the rec. But it’s also where residents exercise, take classes, and converse with neighbors as their children play basketball.

That familiarity ensures that residents feel comfortable expressing their issues with the neighborhood. Not in the formal, you-get-three-minutes-before-I-ring-this-bell way. But in a way that, as you’ll learn below, addresses the actual quality of life issues that neighbors want to discuss.

Lesson #2: Neighborhoods Need Cheap Talk

I first discovered the term “cheap talk” in Prabhjot Singh’s Dying and Living in the Neighborhood—the best book, in my opinion, on the future of health care.

Prabhjot describes “cheap talk,” a term often associated with Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom’s work, as “direct, informal communication where there [is] no immediate contractual or enforceable obligation between parties.”

In other words, conversations led by neighbors who have no ties to each other beyond neighborliness, and uninfluenced by top-down, specialist-led interventions.

Reflecting on your past experiences at council meetings, this concept may sound unusual. If residents speak to an agenda item regarding, for example, a proposed road widening in their neighborhood, you’d like the traffic engineer to share their expertise, right? Surely a brief, jargon-filled description of “level of service” and “vehicle miles traveled” would ease their concerns, yes?

In council chambers, residents must accept these responses. That’s because, per the council’s rules of order and procedure, council people and city staff have fulfilled their obligations. But have the responses truly tapped into the residents’ tensions? Fat chance.

SEDNA has mastered cheap talk and demonstrates it at every meeting. As opposed to administering a list of agenda items, the president—longtime neighbor, advocate, and friend to many in Southeast Denton—prompts an informal, open discussion regarding happenings in the neighborhood.

I’ve listened to residents speak passionately about drivers speeding through their neighborhood, men riding dirt bikes that awake their children throughout the night, and households selling drugs down the block. In the council chambers, how would experts address these concerns? Sympathetic nods? Promises to address them in future agenda items?

Again, this rule-based approach to neighborhood engagement dismisses the residents’ concerns. But worse: it shuts down testimonies that could inspire low-lift public investment to address the issue.

As these heated discussions have unfolded, I’ve witnessed a series of moments that will shift any city leaders’ perspective on public investment. These residents don’t want master plans, ribbon cuttings, or task forces. Instead, they want to know what actions city leaders can take today to address their concerns.

No grand scheme, just small, immediate action.

Cheap talk reveals our neighborhoods’ most pressing needs—and city leaders must make it their duty to listen and act on it.

Lesson #3: Neighborhoods Need City Leaders to Listen to (and Act on) Cheap Talk

Cheap talk on the neighborhood-level sets the stage for what, at Strong Towns, we call “the Strong Towns approach to public investment.” It looks like this:

Humbly observe where people in the community struggle. Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle? Do that thing. Do it right now. Repeat.

This approach makes sense. Why spend billions to construct a new rail line when residents just want to walk safely to the corner store? Why spend millions to update your centralized police station when residents need its police officers to heighten surveillance on a dangerous block? (The list goes on and on.)