Last month, my wife and I moved into a darling little house in a town that we fell in love with four years ago, when we were living overseas and looking for a community that felt like home.
We had no idea, at the time, how much the perfect town we found would begin to feel like the America in turmoil we’d seen from abroad.
We had spent 13 years in the Persian Gulf region and were looking for a place with a touch of green – wooded lots, bubbling brooks, perhaps a deer or two – and somewhere close enough to a major city where I could commute to work. Friends suggested their hometown, Greenbelt, Maryland, a Washington bedroom community. Greenbelt seemed to have everything, including a decent Lebanese restaurant.
Why We Wrote This
A Monitor writer and his family fell in love with a city, only to see it hit by federal government cutbacks and other challenges. Now, as it responds, they are discovering a new reason why it’s a place to call home.
Most important to us was a sense of community. We had lived in New Delhi, Johannesburg, and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia – vibrant communities where expatriates could reach out to local people and fellow expats alike. With its ethnically diverse population, and well-traveled researchers and scientists working at the nearby U.S. Department of Agriculture research center, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the University of Maryland’s College Park campus, Greenbelt ticked a lot of the boxes.
But somewhere between the time we purchased our home in May 2025 and the time we moved in three months later, the atmosphere in Greenbelt changed. Layoffs of federal employees ordered by the Trump administration were hitting Greenbelt hard. By the time we arrived, for-sale signs had sprouted across town. The real estate website Redfin reported that since the layoffs were announced, home listings in nearby Washington, D.C., were up 25% over last year, compared with 14% nationwide.
One day, the local newspaper, the Greenbelt News Review, reported that President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was planning to close the USDA’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC), which is a major local employer. Then a neighbor shared a post on Facebook about reduced operations at Goddard Space Flight Center.
For us, these were worrisome signs. We had seen this in our years living abroad. When a community loses its people, it loses its secret sauce. Social networks and after-work activities – weekly dinner parties, Ultimate Frisbee leagues, open-mic nights at the New Deal Café, church meetings, Little League games, the local farmer’s market, theater clubs – all depend on people showing up and sharing their talents.
But after a month here, the old Greenbelt we fell in love with began showing its resilience. Greenbelters are banding together to support one another and find solutions.
We found out that earlier in the summer, Greenbelters gathered at our community center to share information about resources available to laid-off federal workers, such as job training, housing assistance, loan programs, and funding opportunities for small businesses, as well as mental health and other social services.
Scott Baldauf/The Christian Science Monitor
On a recent Saturday morning, Greenbelt’s mayor and city council took 30 spandex-wearing bicyclists on a tour of the town. Mayor Emmett V. Jordan, a tall, athletic storyteller, said he was proud of his city. He wanted to show off the bike trail network that links its historic center with lower- and upper-income neighborhoods, as well as with the local Metro station that connects to Washington.
On Labor Day, my wife, father-in-law, and I set up camp chairs along the main route into town to watch a parade. Given the state of the economy and the creeping fear of federal layoffs, this event could have gone either way – celebration or protest march. What we saw looked like something out of a Wes Anderson movie: open-top convertibles with the local beauty queen, clubs for Rotarians, rumbling motorcyclists, Corvette owners, rope-skippers, dog owners, Scout troops, high school marching bands, a brass-and-drums street band clad in tie-dyed shirts, an interfaith group, labor unions, and the requisite array of elected officials and political candidates.
Community support for the jobless, Labor Day parades, bike tours with the mayor: These are just the glimmers of hope that my wife and I needed to see to reassure us that our new hometown – indeed, our country – has the resilience to weather the current economic and political storms. As so often happens, a community displays its strength and character not when times are easy, but when they are hard.
