Why I Build for Neighborhoods

The software neighborhoods actually need doesn't get built by startups. That's not an accident. Startups need markets that scale to millions of users fast enough to justify the funding. A neighborhood is small by definition. West Waldo has maybe 3,000 people. The whole west side of Kansas City might have 80,000. That's not a market. That's a community. And communities don't produce the kind of returns that attract venture capital, so the software either gets built for cities that can afford enterprise contracts, or it doesn't get built at all. The people running neighborhood produce stands and block associations end up on Google Sheets and Facebook groups, hoping the platform doesn't change its terms again.

The two projects I'm most focused on right now are Commonweave and NeighborhoodOS. Commonweave is a framework for community-owned infrastructure. Think of it as a set of building blocks for the boring necessities: shared directories, scheduling tools, resource registries - the kind of stuff that should just exist for any neighborhood that wants it. Not software as a service. Software you run yourself, that your community owns outright. NeighborhoodOS sits on top of that. It's a civic AI platform. A way for a neighborhood to have its own assistant that knows local context: who to call about a broken water main, where the community garden plots are, what the zoning meeting on Thursday is actually about. Not a chatbot pointed at a generic knowledge base. Something rooted in a specific place.

Earlier this month I went to 710 Central Street in Kansas City to talk with Aaron Deacon and the folks at Kansas City Digital Drive about whether a 90-day pilot - what I've been calling a Workshop - could actually get off the ground. KCDD has been doing digital equity work in KC for years. They know the communities I'm building for better than I do. The conversation wasn't about pitching anything. It was about figuring out if there's a real partnership here, a fiscal sponsorship path, or a way into NSF funding for a pilot that would put real tools in front of real people in a real neighborhood. Maybe it goes somewhere. Maybe we figure out the fit isn't right. Either way, someone has to start the conversation.

That's the thing about this kind of work. Nobody is going to do it for you. The well-funded version of this tool - the one with a sales team and a conference booth and a feature roadmap - isn't coming. Not for West Waldo. Not for Brookside. Not for the neighborhoods that need it most. I've been watching that gap widen for ten years. Konrad at Everyday Produce has been running his stand in Waldo since 1985. He shouldn't need to understand Shopify's API to tell his customers what's in season this week. Someone has to build the version of this that actually fits how he works. I'm tired of waiting for that someone to show up.

If you're building something like this too - neighborhood infrastructure, community-owned tools, civic tech that's actually for the people it's supposed to serve - I want to know what you're working on. Email me: [email protected].