This is going to start in a strange place, but stick with me.

I was thinking about how men behave in public bathrooms. Walk up to a urinal and there’s essentially no privacy. Another guy can be standing a few feet away and nobody thinks twice about it. But walk into a stall and you immediately close the door and lock it. If someone stood in the stall with the door wide open, it would seem incredibly weird, even though from a privacy standpoint it wouldn’t be all that different from what was happening at the urinal 30 seconds earlier.

Why?

I think the stall changed the expectation. The moment the door was there, privacy became something you expected to have.

It got me thinking about how much of our behavior is based not on what we objectively have, but on what our surroundings have taught us to expect. Marketers understand this pretty well. Cities, I’m not sure they do.

Think about shipping. There was nothing outrageous about waiting a week for something you ordered online years ago. Then Amazon and others made two-day and next-day delivery normal. Now order something and see “delivery in 7-10 business days” and it almost feels like you’ve gone back in time. Seven days didn’t become longer. Our expectations changed.

The same thing happens when you stay at a really good hotel, eat at a great restaurant or deal with a company that answers the phone immediately. Once you’ve experienced better, mediocre becomes much easier to recognize.

Now take that same psychology and apply it to a neighborhood.

Drive through a run-down area you’ve never visited before and you’ll probably notice everything. The boarded-up building, weeds growing through the sidewalk, faded storefront signs, litter, broken streetlights, empty lots. Someone who has driven that same street twice a day for 20 years may barely notice some of those things anymore.

That’s not because they don’t care about their neighborhood. It’s because human beings adapt.

And I wonder if that’s one of the least discussed consequences of long-term blight.

We talk about what neglected properties do to property values. We talk about crime, lost tax revenue and the difficulty of attracting businesses. Those are real and important. But what happens when neglect also changes what the people living around it consider normal?

The pothole has been there for five years. The building on the corner has been empty since their kids were little. Nobody remembers the fountain actually working. That park has always been somewhere you don’t go after dark.

Eventually people stop asking why.

That may be much more dangerous than people constantly complaining.

City officials probably don’t enjoy receiving complaints about the same broken sidewalk every week, but at least the person calling still believes the sidewalk should be better. What worries me is the person who called five times, saw nothing happen and finally decided there was no point calling a sixth.

Fewer complaints can look like improvement on a spreadsheet. Sometimes I suspect it’s resignation.

And here’s where this gets really interesting to me. I think the psychology can work in reverse.

Imagine taking one neglected block and actually fixing the whole thing. Not spreading a little money across 20 neighborhoods so everyone gets a new bench and three trees. Take one block and make it exceptional.

Fix the sidewalks. Plant mature trees. Improve the lighting. Clean everything. Help the storefronts. Deal with the abandoned property. Put in landscaping that looks like somebody actually cared about the result.

Something strange would probably happen afterward.

The neglected building one block away that everyone ignored for years would suddenly look worse.

It didn’t deteriorate overnight. The comparison changed.

The weeds would become more noticeable. The faded sign would start looking embarrassing. The empty lot that everyone had mentally edited out of the neighborhood would suddenly become an obvious problem.

That’s why I’m beginning to think one of the most powerful things improvement does is raise expectations.

We’ve all seen this happen privately. One homeowner beautifully renovates a house and suddenly the neighbor paints theirs. Someone else replaces the landscaping. Another house gets renovated. A few years later you drive down the street and wonder when the entire neighborhood changed.

There wasn’t necessarily a master plan. Somebody changed the reference point.

This could explain something else I’ve wondered about for years: why communities that already look good sometimes seem almost obsessive about maintaining that standard while badly neglected places can tolerate things that would cause an uprising somewhere else.

Maybe it’s not simply wealth.

Drop a piece of garbage on an immaculate street and you notice it immediately. Drop it beside ten other pieces of garbage and it blends into the scenery. People living in the first place aren’t necessarily better people or more civic-minded people. They may simply have a different baseline for what looks normal.

That matters when we talk about poorer neighborhoods too.

Two kids can grow up ten miles apart and learn completely different definitions of what a neighborhood is supposed to look like. One grows up around beautiful parks, maintained landscaping, clean streets, attractive public spaces and a downtown where families actually spend time. Another grows up around empty buildings, broken sidewalks and public spaces that haven’t received serious investment in decades.

Then, years later, we ask both of them what they expect from their city as though they’re starting with the same reference point.

Of course they aren’t.

That’s not an argument that people in struggling neighborhoods somehow prefer less. I think it’s an argument for giving them much more.

We have a tendency when investing in poorer areas to focus on adequacy. What’s the least expensive way to replace the playground? How cheaply can we redo the streetscape? How many improvements can we spread across the largest area?

Maybe that’s backwards.

Maybe the neighborhood that has been neglected for 30 years is exactly where you build the incredible park. Put in the landscaping people expect in the expensive part of town. Build the public space that makes somebody driving through stop and wonder what happened here.

Give people something so much better than what was there before that it becomes difficult to accept the old standard anymore.

This is where the connection to marketing comes back in.

The best companies don’t merely satisfy expectations. Sometimes they reset them. Once consumers experience something dramatically easier, faster, prettier or more enjoyable, competitors are suddenly judged against the new standard.

A city can do that too.

And maybe that’s one reason some revitalization projects create momentum while others seem to accomplish almost nothing. The successful ones don’t just fix something. They make people look at everything around the improvement differently.

I’ve seen plenty of cities spend millions of dollars making tiny improvements everywhere because spreading the money around seems fair. Politically, I understand it. But I wonder if concentrating that same investment and creating something undeniably great might sometimes accomplish much more.

One beautiful block can make the next ugly block uncomfortable.

One amazing park can change what residents think a park should be.

One successful public space can make people start asking why their downtown doesn’t have three more.

That’s when the improvement has done something much more valuable than beautification. It has changed the reference point.

And once you’ve shown people what their neighborhood could be, it becomes much harder to convince them that what they’ve tolerated for years is good enough.