The Sundarban
Final month, my wife and I moved proper into a darling puny home in a town that we fell in love with four years ago, when we were living overseas and making an try out for a neighborhood that felt cherish home.
We had no idea, on the time, how mighty the very glorious town we realized would open to truly feel cherish the The United States in turmoil we’d seen from overseas.
We had spent 13 years within the Persian Gulf scheme and were making an try to obtain a scheme with a mosey of inexperienced – wooded heaps, bubbling brooks, per chance a deer or two – and someplace cease ample to a necessary metropolis where I could per chance perchance well well go back and forth to work. Associates suggested their hometown, Greenbelt, Maryland, a Washington bed room neighborhood. Greenbelt seemed as if it would salvage every little thing, alongside side a factual Lebanese restaurant.
Why We Wrote This
A Monitor author and his household fell in love with a metropolis, most attention-grabbing to sight it hit by federal government cutbacks and various challenges. Now, because it responds, they’re discovering a new reason why it’s a scheme to call home.
Necessary to us became as soon as a technique of neighborhood. We had lived in New Delhi, Johannesburg, and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia – shiny communities where expatriates might per chance perchance well well attain out to local of us and fellow expats alike. With its ethnically various population, and successfully-traveled researchers and scientists working on the cease by U.S. Department of Agriculture research center, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Heart, and the College of Maryland’s College Park campus, Greenbelt ticked most of the containers.
Cryogenics manager Susan Breon stands in a smooth room with NASA’s Robotic Refueling Mission 3 Fluid Transfer Module at Goddard Space Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Maryland, in April 2018.
But someplace between the time we purchased our home in May per chance well well 2025 and the time we moved in three months later, the ambiance in Greenbelt changed. Layoffs of federal employees ordered by the Trump administration were hitting Greenbelt interesting. By the time we arrived, for-sale indicators had sprouted across town. The precise estate web place Redfin reported that since the layoffs were introduced, home listings in cease by Washington, D.C., were up 25% over final twelve months, when in contrast with 14% nationwide.
Sooner or later, the local newspaper, the Greenbelt News Evaluate, reported that President Donald Trump’s Department of Executive Effectivity (DOGE) became as soon as planning to cease the USDA’s Beltsville Agricultural Analysis Heart (BARC), which is a necessary local employer. Then a neighbor shared a post on Fb about diminished operations at Goddard Space Flight Heart.
For us, these were worrisome indicators. We had seen this in our years living overseas. When a neighborhood loses its of us, it loses its secret sauce. Social networks and after-work activities – weekly dinner parties, Final Frisbee leagues, launch-mic nights on the New Deal Café, church meetings, Minute League games, the local farmer’s market, theater clubs – all depend on of us showing up and sharing their skills.
But after a month right here, the present Greenbelt we fell in love with began showing its resilience. Greenbelters are banding collectively to help one yet another and obtain solutions.
We realized out that earlier within the summertime, Greenbelters gathered at our neighborhood center to fragment knowledge about resources on hand to laid-off federal team, equivalent to job training, housing assistance, loan options, and funding alternatives for runt companies, to boot to mental health and various social providers and products.
Scott Baldauf/The Christian Science Monitor
Folks stroll and slump within the Labor Day parade, Sept. 1, 2025, in Greenbelt, Maryland.
On a most modern Saturday morning, Greenbelt’s mayor and metropolis council took 30 spandex-carrying bicyclists on a tour of the town. Mayor Emmett V. Jordan, a principal, athletic storyteller, talked about he became as soon as ecstatic with his metropolis. He wanted to blow their salvage horns the bike path community that links its ancient center with lower- and upper-profits neighborhoods, to boot to with the local Metro set that connects to Washington.
On Labor Day, my wife, sweetheart’s father, and I place up camp chairs alongside the principle route into town to ogle a parade. Given the tell of the financial system and the creeping terror of federal layoffs, this occasion might per chance perchance well well salvage long gone both methodology – occasion or drawl march. What we saw seemed cherish something out of a Wes Anderson movie: launch-top convertibles with the local class queen, clubs for Rotarians, rumbling motorcyclists, Corvette owners, rope-skippers, dog owners, Scout troops, high college marching bands, a brass-and-drums avenue band clad in tie-dyed shirts, an interfaith community, labor unions, and the requisite array of elected officers and political candidates.
Team reduction for the jobless, Labor Day parades, bike tours with the mayor: These are precise the glimmers of hope that my wife and I needed to sight to reassure us that our new hometown – certainly, our country – has the resilience to weather the present economic and political storms. As so on the total occurs, a neighborhood shows its strength and character no longer when times are straightforward, but when they’re interesting.
