Would your neighbor return your wallet?
Researchers have a favorite question for measuring social trust. They ask people to imagine losing a wallet in their own neighborhood, and then ask how likely it is to come back: if a neighbor found it, if a stranger found it, if the police found it.
Nobody is really asking about wallets. They're asking whether you believe you live among people who would look out for you.
The question underneath is: How often do you actually see your neighbors?
In Happy City, Charles Montgomery argues that physical proximity is what builds that kind of trust, but only if our cities are designed for it. And that is a big "if".
Cities are idea machines, when we let them be
Cities have always been where ideas happen, because they put people who are different from each other within reach of each other. You overhear something. You meet someone who does the thing you've been stuck on. A conversation at a counter turns into a collaboration. That friction is the point.
A city designed around moving between private spaces — home to car to office and back — can be enormous and still leave everyone alone with their ideas. Collisions only happen where there's somewhere to collide: a walkable sidewalk, a public library, a community garden, a shared studio.
Without those places, most of us create alone. And that costs small businesses more than we might think.
For anyone building something small, that means no one to test an idea on. No one to say "I've priced that before, here's what happened." No one who notices the thing you've stopped noticing.
A lot of what holds people back isn't talent. It's working alone.
Building differently, together
There's a version of community for sale right now: a membership, a dinner series, a subscription that promises to end your isolation. I don't think belonging works that way, and I'm not interested in selling it.
The wallet question was never about people who are like you. It's about a stranger (or a neighbor you've never had dinner with). The strength of a good neighborhood is that it holds people who are different, lets them stay different, and still gives them enough in common to rely on each other.
There's one more thing the wallet question leaves unsaid. You care about that wallet because there's something in it you can't easily replace. Trust is easy to extend when nothing much is at stake, and it means something precisely when the loss would hurt. Neighborhoods work when people who all have something to lose decide to share anyway.
That's what we're building at Reeshè. Not a room where everyone matches, but a table where a textile artist, a furniture maker, a real estate agent, and a doula can sit together, stay exactly as different as they are, and share what none of them should have to build alone.
In practice, we share three things:
Frameworks. The structure for turning what you know into something people can buy. We've spent a long time refining these, drawing on years inside small creative businesses and agencies.
Experience. People who have done it, ideally here, in this city, recently. Plus a trained facilitator.
Space. An actual room, with actual people in it. Of the three, this is the hardest to come by, and we're lucky to have it.
On their own, small local businesses are fragile. Sharing those three things, they start to behave less like a row of separate shops and more like an ecosystem.
There is still a pitch
On Tuesday, November 3, we're running the first experiment of this kind: a small group of neighbors at our Garden Studio, 7 to 8:30 p.m.
It's free, and it's small on purpose (six seats) so it can be a conversation instead of an audience.
We'll spend the evening on two pieces of a workshop we run called Germinate, which covers the step before branding: what you're actually selling, who it's for, and whether the numbers work.
First, we'll map your practice: everything you make or do, out loud, so the room knows what's in it. Then we'll do the exercise I find changes how people see their business fastest: your ceiling. Take your price, multiply it by how many times a month you could realistically deliver it, and compare that number to what the business needs to earn. It takes about ten minutes, most people have never done it, and some of them find out that night that the business as currently designed cannot reach the number they've been working toward.
Your numbers stay yours. We'll work through the method together on a business I make up, you'll run your own on your own paper, and you share only what you want to.
You'll leave with something you can use the next morning, and probably a few people you'd trust with your wallet.
Think of the evening as a taste of the full workshop sequence. Everyone in the room that night is our first cohort, and anyone who wants to keep going gets the rest of the sequence at half price. No pressure to decide in the room, and no hard feelings if one evening is all you wanted.
Come with an idea, a half-built business, or curiosity about what your neighbors are making.
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