The transition from overshoot to soft landing. Names what has been lost - the street full of children, the alloparenting network, the soul of the neighbourhood. Documents the mechanisms of dissolution: demographic overshoot, housing financialisation, the mortgage that ended parenthood, the collective action failure the free market cannot solve, the screen filling the vacuum left by absent peers. The category error: a factory is an investment, the place where you live is not. The grandchildren argument for property owners. Black Americans have a correct intuition the system sucks - the corpus provides the analytical framework. The practical entry point: knock on your neighbour's door. The soft landing is achievable. Written May 2026.