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A few weeks ago, Civil Beat’s editor Patti Epler asked me if there was a political issue that was not getting the attention it deserved. 

Here’s my choice: Neighborhood renewal. That may seem like an odd or trivial choice. It’s not. It’s essential.

Neighborhood renewal is a way to get us away from our unhealthy and unproductive obsession with national politics and also break the usual round-in-circles combination of hope and cynicism that dominates the way people in Hawaii view the state.

It’s a way of actually getting stuff done — stuff your policymakers don’t do for you because they can’t even though you think they can.

According to Seth Kaplan, author of “,” the neighborhood is “the most significant unit by which we organize our society. It determines how safe we are, the quality of the schools our kids go to, what resources we have access to daily, the kinds of job opportunities we have, our psychological well-being, and even, as we have seen, how long we live.”

Despite its economic prosperity, the U.S. is much more fragile than many of the 70-plus countries that Kaplan has lived in and studied. 

There is so much research about neighborhoods’ tremendous impact on people’s lives. They affect a person’s success even years after she moves somewhere else. Strong neighborhoods can reduce the death toll from natural disasters. Lack of trust has become a problem in American society, but people in flourishing neighborhoods trust each other more.

Neighborhood renewal advocates like Kaplan think we need to rebuild this country from the ground up, neighborhood by neighborhood, ZIP code by ZIP code.

Are Hawaii’s neighborhoods fragile? Here’s a typical up-tempo answer: Hawaii is different because with our strong sense of aloha and ohana, we already have strong neighborhoods. We share, we help one another, we have a strong sense of place.

Really? How much of this is true and how much is romance? After all, Hawaii has the same social problems as everywhere else in the U.S. and is having the same challenges dealing with them.

Hawaii’s homeless population is among the largest in the U.S. Our public schools are no better at dealing with significant learning issues. According to , we do at best an average job of meeting the needs of our children. Less than half of Hawaii’s families with children to survive week by week.

So, let’s take a closer look at Hawaii, keeping in mind the limits of how things get done here and the need for neighborhood-based responses to overcome those barriers.

Consider education and the homeless — what Hawaii needs, what we don’t get and how neighborhood renewal movements elsewhere have succeeded.

I’ve lived here for close to 50 years, and the complaints about Hawaii’s schools never change. Each legislative session some kinds of policies get adopted that are supposed to make public schools better.

And each time some things improve, but the basic issues of poor test scores, truancy and troubled schools remain.

The typical public response? Blame the Department of Education, blame the teachers and of course blame those politicians.

Here is what’s so revealing and so amazing about that response. People keep believing that the same process that has failed to meet their needs for so long will suddenly turn around and make things work. 

A better way of looking at this, one that recognizes the power of neighborhoods, is that it’s not about political incompetence, laziness or corruption. 

It’s about a missing piece that educational policymaking in the conventional sense does not have the capacity to fill. 

That piece is the neighborhood. So much student success depends on what goes on far from the DOE’s downtown offices and beyond a school’s walls.

Good schools in neighborhoods where you least expect them, “overperforming schools,” come about because people in that neighborhood do the work to make that happen.   

They are diamonds in the rough because people in the neighborhood played the key role in making them jewels.

Like Thread, a focusing on the link between troubled families, fragile neighborhoods and educational success. Much of Thread’s work is with high school students in the bottom quarter of their class.

Each student in the program is assigned four volunteers — that would be people like you and me — to work with her on anything she needs, from packing a lunch to tutoring and mentoring. 

The four-member volunteer team is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 10 years, possibly even longer.

A hefty commitment for sure. But very effective. The graduation rate of these hardcore bottom of the class students beats the city average. Fifty-seven percent go on to get either a college degree or another post-high school certificate. 

The families benefit, and so do the volunteers, who rave about how much the program helped them. Renewal in many ways.

It’s the same with homelessness. Some of the students Thread helped were in fact homeless.

As hard as Hawaii’s public officials work on homelessness — and that work is quite brave and impressive — improvements are only incremental, making barely a dent. 

They are ameliorative but not definitive because there is simply no way to make a big dent.

What’s missing is the power and responsibilities of the neighborhood, or as David Brooks once put it, the difference between homeless policy and helping that homeless person in your neighborhood.

Unless people take more responsibility for doing something about them in their neighborhoods, the homeless hamster wheel will go on and on. 

You’re skeptical about the power of neighborhood renewal? Understood. But ask yourself, compared to what?

Surveys show that Americans trust their political institutions at the lowest level ever. In , 87% said the presidential campaign does not make them feel proud of the country, 76% say it is not focused on important policy debates, 68% describe the campaign as too negative and two-thirds found both Trump and Biden embarrassing.

So, what’s your plan as a citizen? To make things better by voting in presidential elections and hoping for the best while in fact you are probably fearing the worst?

Voting is such a miniscule part of civic life. It’s a tiny and pretty wobbly piece of the puzzle of how to make things better. Civic life requires so much more than mailing in a ballot.

There are so many national and international issues that are serious enough to be existential — the Middle East, authoritarianism, climate change. But day to day, there is little you can do about those.

Communities have their own everyday existential issues, like improving our schools, keeping our streets clean, dealing with homeless people and feeling good about friendly, reciprocal relationships with the people close by.

A few days after my conversation with Patti, I had a dream that led to my choice of neighborhood renewal. 

I dreamt that groups of people coming from all directions were walking their dogs to a new dog park alongside Civil Beat headquarters at the top of Waialae Avenue.

Think of how people at dog parks gather both inside and outside the fence and how often “can I pet your dog?” is a way for strangers anywhere to meet. 

Think of the number of veterinarians and pet stores that have filled vacant spots in your neighborhood’s shopping centers.

Think of why many homeless people have dogs as companions.

Think small.