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The growth of American suburbia began with a bang, not a whimper. In the 1950s and 1960s, we built new residential subdivisions and commercial strips on the fringes of every major U.S. city\u2014and we built them fast. Unprecedentedly so.\nMany of these places are struggling today. Home values are stagnant, as the modest mid-century houses don\u2019t command a premium in today\u2019s market. The schools aren\u2019t what they once were. There is decaying infrastructure and rampant retail vacancies. There was no such thing as a Complete Streets movement in 1960, so these first-generation suburbs also tend to be dominated by dangerous stroads and lack even such basic pedestrian accommodations as sidewalks.\nColerain Township, Ohio, on the edge of Cincinnati, is one such place. A 2016 essay by Johnny Sanphillippo spotlights many of the area\u2019s problems. Yet could a place like Colerain also have underappreciated assets, and a brighter future than it gets credit for?\nJohn Yung thinks so. Yung is an urban planner and a senior project executive at Urban Fast Forward, a consulting firm doing some of the more interesting and creative revitalization work out there today. Urban Fast Forward does commercial real estate and planning consulting aimed at helping communities develop and move toward a vision. This work includes placemaking, tactical urbanism, zoning changes, but also, crucially, storytelling. A story that the members of a community buy into is like a brand: it helps them identify and build on their strengths.\nWhat a place like Colerain\u2019s Northbrook neighborhood has in spades is social capital. Its working- and middle-class residents are passionate about the community and have organized quite effectively to take action on quality-of-life issues such as crime and traffic calming. Sidewalks converging on the site of what used to be a neighborhood pool are physical evidence of the history of efforts to create on-the-ground community: \u201cThere\u2019s a desire in Northbrook to be connected,\u201d says Yung. And that stems from the fact that they used to be more connected than they are now.\u201d\nAnd that level of organic community engagement, says Yung, is everything.\nUtopian \u201csprawl repair\u201d schemes aren\u2019t up to the task of a place like Colerain Township\u2014there\u2019s just too much of it, and not a hot enough market to interest deep-pocketed developers. Plus, such top-down efforts would transform the place into something unrecognizable. There are things that can be done from the bottom up, though. Northbrook has opportunities, Yung says, to create local businesses and initiatives\u2014\u201cindicators of neighborhood authenticity\u201d and to preserve those that exist.\n\u201cWe\u2019re going to have to do things that are more incremental and more intentional, in order to establish a story for Northbrook to move forward.\u201d\nUrban Fast Forward has worked with Northbrook to improve its housing stock\u2014collaborating with a county-level land bank and the Port Authority to create a community-based housing rehab organization. They\u2019ve also undertaken placemaking efforts. The community recently purchased land for a playground made of car tires, butterfly haven. Individual efforts may seem modest, but the combined effect, Yung hopes, will be meaningful.\nHow do you build traction with this sort of bottom-up, scrappy approach? \u201cStart small, and make a lot of noise.\u201d\nYung also discusses the broader challenges not just for Northbrook but for the Cincinnati metro area as a whole. Although Cincinnati has underrated urban neighborhoods and a growing art and food scene, Yung says, there is still the challenge of attracting political buy-in to a different vision of the future that is currently muted or absent. The state DOT remains set on expanding highways. Pedestrian deaths are at an all-time high. Cincinnati\u2019s municipal leadership has neglected the streetcar line the city built (for better or worse) at great expense. Yung describes this shortsightedness as going to great lengths to build a swimming pool and the