An initiative like Be A Neighbor JTNY wouldn’t have been needed 20 or 30 years ago.

Even if you didn’t necessarily like your neighbor, we could hold polite conversation if we passed on the sidewalk or even simply give a quick wave as we drove by each other’s houses. It’s a pretty sad commentary on the way life has changed over the course of a generation that the Jamestown Development Department feels the need to spend any time whatsoever on something like Be A Neighbor JTNY.

“There’s been a lot of talk around the community about the lack of community,” Kasie Foulk, deputy development director, said during a recent Planning Commission meeting.

What’s left unsaid is telling. There’s been a lot of talk about the lack of community in Jamestown – but there’s also been far too little action dating back a generation. So we can understand why the city is undertaking Be A Neighbor JTNY. It’s an attempt to spur the action that has been lacking. We’ve seen such efforts come and go over the years and don’t hold much hope that Be A Neighbor JTNY will last very long or have much of an impact. That’s because, much like other hard things, rebuilding neighborhoods can’t be done with a social media hashtag. It takes work. And too many people don’t want to put in the work to create neighborhood bonds.

If we want to see a return to the neighborhoods that we remember fondly from our youths, then we need to see a return to the high homeownership rates that we saw in our youths. Spending 30 years paying a mortgage gives people skin in the neighborhood game. Three decades is a long time to despise the people you live near. And it’s nice to have the peace of mind that when you’re not home you have a good enough relationship with your neighbors that they’d keep an eye on things – and vice versa. The problem we face now is that too many are being priced out of home ownership despite a continued fast-moving real estate market that is bringing more revenue into Jamestown. Many of our rental properties change tenants too quickly for people to build the types of neighborhood relationships the city is trying to encourage. Frankly, given the annual statistics we see from the Jamestown Police Department, some people just can’t be considerate enough to be considered a good neighbor.

The Be A Neighbor JTNY program isn’t a bad idea, but it has a lot working against it in 2026 that ultimately limit its likely effectiveness.