Chattanooga has no shortage of homes, but do you actually know who lives in them?

Something nobody puts in the Chattanooga tourism brochures is that you can move here (or move back here in my case) and still feel like a stranger for a long time.

Not because people aren’t friendly. Chattanoogans are deeply, almost aggressively friendly in a way that can make you wonder if something is wrong with you for not having three best friends you can call at a moment’s notice.

But friendliness and belonging are two different things, and a lot of people are quietly wrestling with the gap. I was one of them.

I grew up on the border of Soddy-Daisy and Hixson in a once-tiny suburb called Falling Water, and I couldn’t wait to leave the second I turned eighteen.

Ironically, a remote job brought me back to the Scenic City in 2023 after eight years away chasing dreams of becoming an Imagineer. I expected to slide right back into my old life like nothing had changed.

Instead, I spent the better part of two years living three minutes from the house that raised me while feeling like I was trespassing in my own zip code.

The thing about Chattanooga and any “small” town that grows while you’re gone is that nothing waits on you to come back. The city you return to is no longer the one you left, and the old systems that once created community naturally — school, church, neighborhood familiarity — don’t always connect people the same way anymore.

What replaced it is often a lot of people in the same room who don’t know each other nearly as well as it might appear.

Making friends as an adult is one of the hardest things a person can do, especially in a place that feels small enough that you should know everyone, but has grown just large enough that it’s impossible to actually do that.

One of my friends, Kat Vellos — designer and author of We Should Get Together — calls this ache “platonic longing”: the deep need for people who genuinely want to do life with you outside of romance or family. Her conclusion after years researching friendship and loneliness is simple: connection has to be built intentionally because it rarely happens on its own anymore.

Especially now.

We commute in sealed cars, work behind screens, and let entire weeks pass without regularly being around the same people long enough for connection to naturally form.

Sociologists have a term for the places that help friendships grow in spite of that: Third Places. Coffee shops, barbershops, churches, running clubs, bookstores, and neighborhood gatherings. Places outside of home and work where people begin recognizing your face enough that you stop feeling anonymous.

Chattanooga actually has a lot of these places.

They’re just harder to find when you don’t already feel connected to someone or something that can introduce you.

What I’ve realized is that belonging doesn’t come pre-installed, even in a place you grew up in. It has to be practiced deliberately, which sounds obvious until you’re trying to do it while quietly assuming everyone else already belongs somewhere more than you do.

Truthfully, most people are more disconnected than they let on.

The thing that finally started changing this for me came through writing a weekly newsletter about Chattanooga with my fiancée from the perspective of two curious, country cartoon rascal reporters named Bubby and Clementine. It sounds ridiculous written out like that, but creating something that forced me into community with other people ended up changing my relationship with the city itself.

That doesn’t mean everyone needs to start a newsletter.

But it probably does mean someone has to go first.

Join a running group. Volunteer somewhere. Go to trivia night three weeks in a row. Show up to the same coffee shop enough times that someone eventually learns your name. The bar for belonging is honestly much lower than we think once consistency replaces the pressure to instantly fit in.

I keep hearing versions of the same story from people around Chattanooga:

“I’ve lived here for years and still don’t really know anyone.”

Or in my case:

“I grew up here and still had to learn how to build community from scratch.”

For a long time, I thought that feeling was some kind of personal failure. But more and more, I think it’s actually the byproduct of a world that has made connection harder structurally, both online and off.

That realization is part of why I’ve been building Roundabout North Chatt, a free online community designed to help people in the North Chattanooga area discover local events, meet neighbors with similar interests, and hopefully make this place feel a little smaller in the best possible way.

Because the older I get, the more I’m convinced that hometowns don’t happen automatically.

They’re built slowly through repeated acts of participation, familiarity, and showing up for places and people long enough that they eventually start showing up for you too.

There's a welcome sign that stands outside Falling Water Elementary School in Hixson (or Soddy-Daisy, whoever you’re asking). When the school closed its doors for the last time in the Spring of 2016 (AKA the same year I got outta dodge), someone updated it with two words that said everything I was feeling in that same moment as well: 

"Goodbye Forever." 

Which if we’re being honest, is probably both the most dramatic and honest thing I’ve seen posted on a school sign. 

Falling Water Elementary opened in 1912 back when Hixson was still largely farmland and the idea of a North Chattanooga suburb was more aspiration than reality in that day and age. 

For over a century, that little schoolhouse was the first building a whole swath of kids ever walked into with a backpack on. It celebrated its 100th birthday in 2012 with a flag-raising ceremony and a community celebration that only happens when a place means something real to people. Four years later, it was gone. 

My sister and I were both Falling Water kiddos, and both spent our elementary years in that building — including third grade in Ms. Sneed's class, which I can confirm based on photographic evidence that I was a perfectly normal and not-at all-feral child — before eventually making my way through Soddy-Daisy Middle and into the world outside of the tiny private suburb that I knew at the time. 

When they announced the school would close alongside Ganns Middle Valley Elementary and be replaced by the newly built Middle Valley Elementary, it stung the way these things always do, even if we knew it was time to lay the school to rest. 

However, the thing about tight-knit communities is we always find ways to carry the good parts forward when growth inevitably comes. 

Somewhere inside Middle Valley Elementary today, there's a mural of a spunky child dressed in a poodle skirt captured during one of Falling Water Elementary’s last Decades Day, frozen mid-twirl. That girl is my sister, Avery! 

I think about this idea that the places and relationships we build over time still matter to someone, even after the physical structures are long gone. 

What we actually leave behind sometimes is the irreplaceable feeling of belonging to somewhere small enough to know your name in a sea of billions.

We've spent this whole issue talking about belonging, third places, and not
knowing where to connect beyond surface-level connections with our community.
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I spent a long time waiting to feel ready to belong somewhere before I actually
tried to belong there myself.

I’d set ridiculous expectations for myself such as, “I’ll be part of the community
when I knew enough people,” or “I’ll be part of my community when I go to this
many events,” but the whole thing about community is that it doesn’t exist unless
you put yourself into it with your entire being. You can’t half-ass community, or it’s
doomed to crumble to begin with that as the foundation.

Your neighborhood is full of people who are one folding table, one flyer, or a small
wave away from being people you actually know and have a relationship with.
You don't have to have it figured out. No one asked that of you. You just have to
show up before you talk yourself out of it. You might just be the friend someone
else is looking for.

— Logan