If I asked you to picture a prototypical cyclist, you’d probably conjure an image of a lean white guy rocking a snug, Spandex-Lycra blend racing suit. You know, this guy, or maybe this one. It’s exactly this sort of image that inspired Jenna Burton to create Red, Bike & Green — a group that sets out to break the stereotype and get more African Americans riding bicycles.

It was 2007, and Burton — a Connecticut native and a graduate of Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C. — had moved to Oakland, drawn to the city’s history, diversity, and activist culture. Although she hadn’t been on a bike since she was 9 years old, Burton was inspired by the cyclists she saw hitting the streets each day, so she decided to join them.

“Being a recent grad, I wasn’t making a whole lot of money. It was nice not to have to worry about gas or car payments,” she says. “In this region, where the culture is already there, I didn’t feel like the oddball riding the bike.”

Among her family and her former college classmates, however, her decision to two-wheel it was seen as, well, different. Even in the bike-friendly Bay Area, a black cyclist was a bit of an aberration. This led Burton to start an all-black cycling group, simply because “I wanted other black people to be just as excited about bike riding as I was.”

For the group’s first ride, Burton called up friends with bikes, largely drawn from the activist community. Although there was enthusiasm among the 20 or so invitees, only a small handful actually showed up — but even as part of a group of three, Burton felt much more empowered than when she pedaled the streets alone. Red, Bike & Green was born.

These days, rides draw anywhere from 20 to 50 participants. One tradition that has held from the early days is the monthly ride during Oakland’s First Friday arts festival. As Burton describes it, she got the idea six years ago, when First Fridays were still a relatively subdued affair put on by a few Uptown art galleries and wine bars. It was a nice effort, she thought, but something was amiss: In racially diverse Oakland, the First Friday crowd was predominantly white.

“There was something that wasn’t cool about it,” Burton says, and she decided to try and fix that something with Red, Bike & Green. “There needed to be diversity, to represent the black people that have been in Oakland for generations.”

The First Friday rides draw mostly young, hip, more able riders, so Red, Bike & Green also developed a family-friendly ride on Saturday mornings, where folks show up with kids, grandparents, and dogs in tow. Along their routes, the group strives to patronize black-owned businesses, generating support from community members who aren’t necessarily interested in riding. It’s hard to disagree with Burton’s inclusive approach and her three-point plan, which outlines how cycling can empower black individuals and community through health, economic, and environmental benefits.

The only community that hasn’t been entirely supportive, ironically, is the cycling community. “I think because we’re casual, we don’t go really fast, the routes themselves aren’t that challenging, a lot of people don’t wear helmets on our bike rides … A lot of the really avid cyclists aren’t too impressed by us,” Burton says. “But that’s fine, because that’s just two different parts of cycling.”

Still, Red, Bike & Green operates under a fiscal sponsorship from the nonprofit East Bay Bicycle Coalition, and local chapters have arisen in Chicago and Atlanta. Representatives from all three chapters recently met at the National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C., there to remind other stakeholders that not all cyclists look like white dudes in spandex (or hipsters on fixies).

Although she sees Red, Bike & Green’s voice as an important one in the national conversation on cycling, however, Burton is quick to point out that the group’s focus is squarely on organizing rides, rather than lobbying or political action: “We just don’t have the capacity,” she explains.

Just by its very presence, however, Red, Bike & Green makes a political statement. A crowd of black bicyclists at First Fridays makes a statement about Oakland’s shifting demographics and diverse history. “This is our city, too,” says Burton. It’s a diverse, complex, and changing city, but with the leadership of Red, Bike & Green, it’s one that the black community is proud to explore on two wheels, Spandex-Lycra blends be damned.

Christina Ruiz and Helen Ochoa don’t seem to have much in common. Ruiz is a stylish, photogenic fashion school grad who owns and operates TopShelf Boutique, San Francisco’s first fashion truck. Ochoa is a single mother of three, an immigrant from Guatemala who lacked a credit score and struggled for years to find a decent apartment for herself and her children. But their differences are not so vast as they seem. Before she opened TopShelf, Ruiz, too, was financially flailing, suffering from a bad credit score that prevented her from financing her mobile shop. Without access to traditional loans or credit, both women turned to the same place to realize their dreams: San Francisco’s Mission Asset Fund.

The Mission Asset Fund is like a financial version of a potluck dinner: Everyone contributes something of their own, but each individual also benefits from what everyone else brings to the table. Its most popular financial product, “lending circles,” formalize the peer-to-peer lending practices common in low-income and immigrant communities. Members of a lending circle contribute small monthly amounts to a common pot, which is then loaned to a member in need. The borrower makes payments on the loan just like he or she would a bank loan, only there’s no interest or fees.

Borrowers are held accountable by the community — lending circles often include friends and even family members, so the power of peer pressure ensures timely payments. Mission Asset Fund reports the payments to credit bureaus, allowing borrowers to build credit histories and win access to traditional loans. According to the fund, the credit scores of lending circle participants have increased by an average of 49 points through the program.

And if someone doesn’t pay it back? Well, it doesn’t happen. When a borrower is struggling with payments, Mission Asset Fund sets him or her up with intensive one-on-one financial counseling and resets their payment schedule. So far, the approach has worked every time: Spokesperson Tara Robinson says the lending circles’ repayment rate stands at 100 percent.

The program is similar in philosophy to Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank, founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and a pioneer of offering microcredit to the poor, as well as recent American peer-to-peer lending programs like Prosper and Lending Club. While the latter two for-profit companies charge interest and require borrowers to meet certain credit standards, the basic goals — cutting out the Wall Street middlemen and leveraging the power of human interconnectivity to promote broad financial health — is shared by all.

The origins of the Mission Asset Fund are as distinctive as the people it serves. In the early 2000s, Levi Strauss — yep, the jeans people — closed its factory in San Francisco’s Mission district. The factory had opened in 1906, shortly after a major earthquake devastated the city, and for nearly a century it helped propel the hometown apparel company into a worldwide brand. Because of Levi’s close ties to, and deep history in, the city, it decided to do something unusual at the plant’s closure: The Levi-Strauss Foundation donated $1 million to support the predominantly Hispanic community of the Mission. A board of foundation members and local activists deliberated for several months over how best to utilize the funds, until they hit on the idea of a financial nonprofit.

The fund’s executive director, José Quiñonez, knows well the difficulties facing new immigrant families: He came to the United States from Mexico as an undocumented child, a prototypical candidate for the DREAM Act. Quiñonez earned his green card in the amnesty program of 1987 and, with papers in hand, went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of California-Davis, then a master’s degree from Princeton.

With Quiñonez at the helm, the Mission Asset Fund has been able to tailor its financial products to new immigrants, including setting up lending circles specifically to cover the costs of applying for U.S. citizenship.

“Individuals that don’t have access to the financial mainstream — people who don’t have access to banks or credit unions — they basically have to create that access for themselves,” explains Quiñonez. “Social loans are traditional loans that people make with each other, they’re very traditional in immigrant communities, but those loans never get recorded or reported to the credit bureaus.” Until now.

In addition to the seed money from the Levi-Strauss Foundation, the fund has found support from a range of both institutions and individuals, including numerous mainstream financial institutions that don’t always serve the needs of low-income communities. “We get referrals from local banks,” says Robinson. “They see us as part of a continuum.”

The Citi Foundation, an offshoot of Citibank, embraced the Mission Asset Fund after officials realized their own financial literacy classes were less effective than they’d hoped. The fund recently received a $200,000 Neighborhood Builders Award from Bank of America.

Because of the loans they received from the Mission Asset Fund, both Christina Ruiz and Helen Ochoa were able to turn their lives around. Ruiz’s TopShelf Boutique has been featured in Conde Nast Traveler, on the cover of the San Francisco Examiner, even in American Airlines’ American Way magazine. She says her truck — which really resembles a hip boutique on the interior, filled with brightly colored, ultra-trendy, moderately priced apparel — offers customers “an alternative to crowded malls and other traditional shopping experiences.” (There’s also something inherently awesome about buying clothes out of a truck.)

As for Ochoa, the single mother who couldn’t find a safe and healthy apartment for her kids — well, after participating in a lending circle and taking some personal finance classes, she was able to put together both a deposit and a credit score that finally landed her a decent place. Instead of the disruptions of frequent moves or mold-borne illness, her three children have a place to study, play, and grow.

“I didn’t know anything,” Ochoa says in Spanish. “Now I have a high credit score. For me, it’s changed my life. All of it.”

“She’s gone,” the voice on the intercom said of my would-be landlady, the woman from whom I thought I’d rented an apartment for the next month. “You’re too late.”

I stood outside the building with my suitcase, so new to Buenos Aires, Argentina, that I had no idea of where the hell I even was. Two hours earlier, I’d arrived at the flat I’d arranged via the website Airbnb, which allows people to rent out their vacant guest rooms, living rooms, and apartments, and found the place locked and gated.

I hadn’t known what to do until a man ran from the doorway of the next building, repeating my host’s name and firing questions at me in a slurry of Argentine Spanish. I was overwhelmed from 30 hours of bus travel and could only nod as he stuffed an address into my hand and packed me into a quickly-hailed cab. I arrived at this mystery location, pressed the intercom button next to the door, and got a thorough dressing-down from the unseen stranger who, fortunately or unfortunately, spoke perfect English.

It would go down as one of the highlights (or is it lowlights?) of a three-month trek across South America in which I sampled all manner of websites and resources that facilitate sharing – and learned (often the hard way) the true value of human generosity.

Over the intercom, my landlady’s assistant informed me that she was out of the country and I was shit out of luck – no matter that I had confirmed the reservation with her via email the previous evening. Then, in a gesture of something like sympathy, the disembodied voice finally emerged, dressed in all-black and pointing toward the Avenida de Mayo. “You can find hotel rooms there,” he told me, “as cheap as $60 a night.” I took his directions to an Internet cafe and booked a hostel for $12.

The hostel only had room for me that one night and I didn’t have the money for it anyway (I’d pre-paid for the Airbnb apartment, and my travels in South America were budgeted to the last dollar) so the next day I threw myself on the mercy of strangers, sending out an SOS to the Couchsurfing Buenos Aires emergency mailing list. (Couchsurfing is the freegan version of Airbnb, a network of no-cost places to crash, and for a budget traveler in a crisis like mine, it can be a godsend.) A lovely woman named Veronica offered me a couch and I spent several exhausted days on her floor, reading and writing and talking and making contingency plans.

I’d lost my Couchsurfing virginity earlier in the trip, in Chile. I had liked the look of Peter’s profile — he was an American living among the natives, and his roommates Seba and Marta seemed friendly too. When I arrived at their apartment in Valparaiso I discovered I was not the only couch-surfer there that night; riding the other couch was an actor from Northern California who’d gone to high school with one of my cousins.

The next day, Marta and I spent the entire morning sitting at the kitchen table, talking culture and politics in both English and Spanish. That night we met up with other couch-surfers in nearby Vina del Mar — a collection of Americans and Chileans and Italians and Dutch getting drunk and eating paella together. I had been sad to say goodbye, and that first positive experience made it all the easier to reach out in the urgency of my unanticipated homelessness weeks later in Argentina.

From Veronica’s couch I was finally able to connect with my Airbnb landlady, and, after her ten-day sojourn abroad, I was able to move into the apartment. The rest of my stay was fine — although when I tried to get a refund for those lost ten days, shit got real. (To the credit of Airbnb, its customer service staffers were enormously helpful and courteous as they sorted things out, and I did eventually get my money back.

If I was overly confident about Airbnb, I had been most nervous about using Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF). During my time in Chile, I’d signed up to spend a couple weeks on a ranch in the southern part of the country. I’d read about it on WWOOF and communicated briefly with Ignacio, the proprietor, but I was still apprehensive. WWOOF is marketed as a work-trade, in which travelers offer moderate amounts of labor to small farmers in exchange for room and board, and it wasn’t clear to me what, exactly, I would be doing.

The surprise was a pleasant one. My “labor” consisted almost entirely of riding horses. Sure, I picked some apples too, and one day I helped to paint a fence, but mostly I just got to ride horses — beautiful, well-trained polo ponies, in the gorgeous near-Patagonian autumn. It was the sort of vacation for which people pay thousands of dollars, and when my time in paradise finally came to an end and Ignacio dropped me off at the bus stop to head off to Buenos Aires, I half-expected him to present me with a bill for my stay. He gave me a hug instead.

Because really, when the sharing economy is working at its best, it is not powered by money — it runs on generosity. And human generosity is an enormously powerful thing.

At the very start of my adventure I sat in a cafe in Santiago, where I’d gotten to know Russel, the friendly proprietor; I was lost in thought, my backpack at my feet. The cafe was empty except for two well-dressed, middle-aged women who came in, sat down, looked at a menu, and left. I arose to leave a few moments later, only to discover that my backpack — and with it my cash, debit card, passport, phone, laptop, glasses, camera, and stand-up joke notebook — had disappeared.

I approached the register in a desperate daze. Russel grasped the gravity of the situation before I did and called the carabineros, then helped translate my police report. A few things fell through the cracks — but then, “my laptop has a sticker of a Pop-Tart dressed like an astronaut trying to go into space with a toaster” doesn’t make much sense in any language.

Russel and his partner, Carlos, offered me a place in their guest room nearby, loaned me cash to buy food, and Russel pulled a notebook and pen from his own bag so that I could start to rewrite my lost jokes. It took me 10 days to get my new passport and debit card and I spent that time in the company of my adoptive Chilean family and their countless friends — Jose and Jorge and Fernando and many more.

On Good Friday, we all trucked out to their country house for a seafood feast, setting the table to the soundtrack of “Jesus Christ, Superstar.” Gallons of wine later, I watched my hosts break out wigs and costumes and belt selections from Evita. I had found my tribe, thousands of miles from home, in a moment of panic and need. They had helped a stranger, but when the time came for me to depart, they said good-bye to a friend.

We said farewell to Nadine on an unassuming August morning, my brother and I, standing there on the curb as the tow truck hauled away the little blue Toyota that had taken me across the country to California in 2005. I thought I’d be sad to give up the car that I’ve driven for the better part of a decade, but the truth was, I was really excited to start taking the bus again.

Most of the press about public transportation focuses on its efficiency, its reduced cost, and its reduced environmental footprint. But that’s not why I love it. Nope, the reason I prefer public transit to just about any other motorized way around is one that, to my mind, doesn’t get nearly enough play: Riding the bus or the train is fun as hell, you guys.

I know, I sound like I’ve lost my mind. Crowded buses and commuter trains are, in the contemporary imagination, the opposite of fun, but if you’re stuck in one you can at least have a friendly chat with a stranger — an impossibility in car traffic. Sure, sometimes you might have to endure the Commute of A Thousand Smells, and every now and then there’s some crazy person ranting at the bus driver about space travel, but hey, God made earbuds for a reason, right?

Although public transportation is more often thought of as a chore than something to be actually enjoyed, my advice to would-be riders is to embrace the experience headphone-free. Block out the rest of the world, and you miss out on the amazing, random — and, yes, fun — experiences that can only be had when you’re forced to endure strangers.

Once, a drunken gentleman, inspired by my kelly green polo shirt, serenaded my friends and me with an Irish ballad. Another time, riding the L-Taraval in San Francisco, a cellist and guitarist entered the Muni train at separate stops, began chatting, and struck up an impromptu concert. Another rider busted out a harmonica, some began to dance, and when it came time for the cellist to get off, the entire train car burst into applause.

I’ve flirted with cute 19-year-old boys who, as I tweeted afterward, inspired me to start a book titled, Extremely Old and Incredibly Flattered (someday, I’ll actually finish it); turned down marriage proposals from toothless old men; and received compliments for shirts and shoes and toenail polish. Once, after sprinting down the block to catch my morning ride, I was told by a bus driver that I run fast — marking the only time anyone has ever complimented my speed at something other than eating a sandwich.

Drivers may have to contend with road rage, but if any facet of my commute sends me to therapy, it will probably be my bloated Bus Ego.

Ah, but doubters will counter, it’s hard to haul stuff on public transit — to which I say, only if you are unimaginative. I’ve carried my share of groceries, of course, but also a Craigslist-procured record player, mini-fridges (plural), and, once, a full-sized office chair. (More than one fellow passenger cracked, “You brought your own seat!”) Another time, I packed a new car battery for Nadine into a suitcase and took it to my brother’s by train, giggling at the irony the whole way through the Transbay Tube.

Sometimes taking public transportation has even helped me to procure more stuff, as when I stumbled upon a bag full of records at my morning bus stop. Building my collection of vinyl without having to overpay a hipster for the privilege? Sign me up!

But it’s the personal connections made on public transit that can be most significant. As I took the bus to my first day on the job at Rebuilding Together Oakland, filled with the usual new-job-jitters, a woman sitting next to me asked about one of my tattoos — a small hammer on my right wrist. I explained that I’d gotten it after working with Habitat for Humanity, commemorating my time there. She had never worked with Habitat, but she told me about a similar organization, called Christmas in April — which had subsequently been renamed Rebuilding Together. After such a serendipitous coincidence, how could I go into my first day anything less than confident?

More recently, I befriended an elderly Asian woman on my way to the airport. I was heading back to Cleveland for my cousin’s wedding, I told her, and she, a classical music junkie, asked if I enjoyed the Cleveland Orchestra. We chatted all the way to her stop. Two weeks ago, we caught a Baroque chamber music concert together in Berkeley, and we have plans to hit up more performances in the future.

My favorite memory comes from early 2009, when I’d just returned to the Bay Area after a truly miserable year of unemployment and homelessness. As I exited the train in downtown San Francisco, fare inspectors were checking for proof of payment, and when I showed my stub, the gentleman in the Muni hat said a strange and remarkable thing: “You have a determined forehead,” he told me, asking where I worked.

At the time I was still unemployed, Craigslisting and sending out resumes for hours on end. I had an interview the next day and in my spare time I wrote jokes on napkins, gradually working up the courage to stand before a microphone and an audience to test them out. I’m looking for a job, I told him, and he smiled.

“You’ll get the right one,” he said. “You are the type of person who can achieve whatever you put your mind to. I can tell.”

There was a line growing behind me, there in Civic Center Station, and so I moved on with a grateful smile; the next day I aced my interview and got the job, and one week later I performed standup comedy for the first time, fortified with alcohol but sober enough to recognize that people were laughing, that my jokes were landing, that I was, in fact, achieving exactly what I’d put my mind — my determined forehead — to.

I’d probably have rebuilt my life from its 2008 nadir regardless. But whether it’s provided entertainment, or companionship, or just a ride, public transit has made the process a whole lot easier and more enjoyable. I’ve figured out the secret that slavish devotion to car-based convenience hides from so many: Any bus can be a party bus, if you approach it with the right attitude.

I just finished 11 months of barely paid work as an AmeriCorps member with the Oakland, Calif.-affiliate of Rebuilding Together — a nonprofit service organization that, when I describe it to people, invariably elicits the reply: “Oh, it’s just like Habitat for Humanity.”

Well, yes — and not so much …

See, this wasn’t my first stint working on low-income housing. Six years ago, I worked as an AmeriCorps member with Habitat for Humanity. My days were devoted to everything from setting rebar and pouring concrete to nailing shingles on rooftops. We built houses from the ground up, leading teams in sunshine and in fog to turn bare patches of land into mini-developments for low-income homeowners.

Rebuilding Together is a little different. Founded in 1973 as Christmas in April and renamed a decade ago to reflect its year-round, secular programming, it renovates and repairs existing structures for low-income homeowners. My work with Rebuilding Together was harder to spot than Habitat’s, and took less time to execute, but in many ways I suspect I made a more lasting impact, while taking less of a toll on the planet — and therein lies an important lesson for everyone who works on housing for those in need.

I had a great time working with Habitat: I worked with tremendous people and learned a ton, much of which proved useful with Rebuilding Together. But the difference between building a new house and rehabbing an occupied one is like the difference between opening a cadaver and working on a real-live patient — whether you’re poking at a person or an old house, there’s a need for diagnostic skill and interpersonal ability that the opposite condition doesn’t require.

Beyond the requisite skill level lie the environmental and social impacts of each strategy. New building is more resource-intensive than renovation. And while, in the Bay Area, Habitat focuses on infill rather than sprawl, that’s not the case elsewhere. (In fact, Habitat affiliates in Colorado and Arizona have actively fought anti-sprawl ballot measures, arguing that land-use restrictions raise housing costs.)

In addition to a smaller ecological footprint, Rebuilding Together’s efforts have the added benefit of neighborhood stabilization — and I’m not using that term as a euphemism for gentrification. In fact, Rebuilding Together serves as a bulwark against real-estate speculators and home-flippers.

One of the homes I worked on this April was a beautiful West Oakland Victorian, built in the 1870s. The neighborhood around it has been gentrifying rapidly in the past few years — several of the neighbors we met were right out of an Anthropologie catalog — but our particular homeowner, a sweet and elderly black woman, had lived there since the 1950s. The Rebuilding Together team stripped lead paint (and repainted), installed new flooring, repaired old wiring, and rebuilt a dangerous and crumbling back deck. The homeowner, her children, and her grandchildren can continue to live safely in their house for years to come.

If Rebuilding Together does such great work, though, why have most people never heard of it? Well, it turns out that Habitat is kind of an insane juggernaut in the world of nonprofit housing services, with money and resources that others can only dream of. (It also has Jimmy Carter.) Plus, it’s easier to work on a house where nobody lives yet — and “We put families in new homes!” has a certain marketing sex appeal that “We prevent houses from falling down on old ladies!” just can’t match.

But as you probably know, there are a lot of empty houses out there these days, and it’s become harder for Habitat justify new construction. Recently, Habitat has quietly shifted its strategy to become more home-flipper than home-builder. Although the group still does some new construction, there’s been a decided movement toward renovating and reselling foreclosed properties to low-income buyers.

Habitat has also just initiated a new program called A Brush With Kindness that imitates the Rebuilding Together model, but the standards vary wildly from affiliate to affiliate. In Miami, for example, the only services offered are landscaping and exterior painting. Habitat Northern Virginia includes painting, wheelchair ramps, roofing, fencing, siding, and weatherization — but all are focused on external repairs, leaving critical gaps inside the homes.

The good news is that Habitat and Rebuilding Together are starting to team up. This year I was involved in the launch of a pilot partnership between Rebuilding Together Oakland and Habitat for Humanity East Bay, in which RTO coordinated homeowner relations while Habitat completed five major exterior projects including roofing, ramps, and stairs — projects that cash-strapped Rebuilding Together lacked the resources to carry out. Next year, Rebuilding Together Oakland hopes to expand the partnership, beginning a truly sustainable collaboration that plays to the strengths of both organizations.

It is remarkable how much hidden poverty surrounds us in America, particularly among the elderly, and although the client population I served at Rebuilding Together doesn’t seem particularly poor by some metrics — after all, they are all homeowners in the pricey Bay Area — a simple glance inside many of their homes belied such a belief. There are people in major cities in 21st-century America living without electricity, hot water, and ovens or stoves, with holes in the floors, walls, and roofs. These people are not homeless, nor looking for a new home; often they have worked their entire lives to pay off their mortgage and now, elderly, they are incapable of maintaining the place independently.

My fingers are crossed that Habitat’s entry into the home-repair sector will lead to more funding opportunities to address this silent crisis. Maintaining our existing housing stock — whether on a nonprofit or a for-profit level — requires a radical shift in strategy from the traditional American ideology of building new. The long-range impacts of new construction on climate change and land use cannot be ignored; neither can the homeowners who need our help immediately.

Last month, I spent a glamorous, fun-filled, sawdust-flavored week in the city I know best as my hometown’s rival: Pittsburgh, enemy of Clevelanders everywhere. As an AmeriCorps member with Rebuilding Together — a national nonprofit that renovates and repairs owner-occupied homes for low-income homeowners — I was obligated to attend a workweek celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr, and his commitment to service. I expected to end the week with great memories and a sense of accomplishment; I didn’t expect to fall in love with the city of Pittsburgh along the way.

Our work was in the Homewood neighborhood, separated from wealthy areas like Shadyside and Squirrel Hill by an elevated busway. Cut off from the rest of the city, the early-20th-century houses dotting Homewood’s genteel streets have blighted and declined in value as residents who could afford to leave moved out. Pittsburgh has shared the Rust Belt’s general population loss, and impoverished neighborhoods like Homewood have been hit especially hard.

Rebuilding Together Pittsburgh has been in the neighborhood for a couple years now and aims to be there for many more, assisted by both public and private partners — including the Pittsburgh Project, an innovative faith-based nonprofit dedicated to revitalizing the city (which also housed us out-of-towners for the occasion), and residents like Elwin Greene, the energetic and optimistic founder of Homewood Nation.

There was a lot of work to do: Of the 70 AmeriCorps members present, some painted, some sheetrocked, some hauled trash, and many did all of the above. I spent MLK Day in a dumpster and the rest of my time on stairs — building steps to a back porch and basement, and fixing an interior staircase whose ornately carved bannister served as a reminder of Homewood’s upper-class roots. Although the staircase was beautiful once, someone had fallen through it recently, and my goal was not to restore its beauty but its safety. (Which was easily done — six years of living in California may have left me laughably susceptible to snow and cold but it has also taught me to build things to survive earthquakes — those steps are never coming down!)

Alongside decay, however, are signs that Pittsburgh is thriving. My parents drove in for a night, and my defiant, committed Clevelander of a father was entranced by the city’s relative success. We meandered across snowy hillside roads, observing enough intact housing stock to make any of Pittsburgh’s Rust Belt brethren jealous, and as we dined at a hip downtown Latin-Asian fusion restaurant, my dad quizzed our bemused busser about exurban development and average commute times. (“Less than an hour?” she responded, backing away slowly.)

I posited that Pittsburgh might have been saved, in part, by its topography: Bland, big-box redevelopment is much more difficult without flatlands, and the hilly, river-intersected natural environment might serve to protect the urban, built one.

“It’s the San Francisco of the Midwest,” my father rhapsodized as we drove back to their bed & breakfast, a stately century-old Victorian in a once-rich neighborhood that housed a grand and colorful Art Noveau wonderland — and all so reasonably priced that even my frugal parents caved in to its charms.

“They don’t like to be called ‘Midwest’ here,” my mother replied.

Midwestern or not, Pittsburgh is a far cry from the San Francisco Bay area, where I now live — and that’s a good thing, because what Pittsburgh is instead is, well, Pittsburgh. Sure, its downtown might be stocked with some trendy (and tasty) restaurants, but nestled in its snowy hills among picturesque bridges are gems of both the architectural and human variety, as gorgeous old houses sell for less than 50k and imaginative intervention bubbles in home-brewed organizations like the Pittsburgh Project.

Rebuilding Together’s base for the week in Homewood was a makeshift warehouse inside of an old Rite-Aid, and I can’t think of a more perfect demonstration of Rust Belt resilience: leveraging decay and brand-name abandonment into reinvestment and grassroots-driven opportunity.

It happens in Pittsburgh, and throughout the Rust Belt, because residents have no other choice but to use whatever they’ve got, to apply creativity and persistence to limited resources and see just what they can do. As an outsider waging a similar uphill battle in my own underdog city of Oakland (I wrote about that here), I found both hope and truth in Pittsburgh’s fight to save itself: hope in how far they’ve come already, and truth in how much Pittsburgh deserves to be saved.

Yep, one week was enough to make me a convert. Homewood — and the city in general — may have been dismissed by many, but I’m rooting for it. Just don’t ask me to root for the Steelers. I may have learned to love my Rust Belt rival, but I’ll always be a Clevelander at heart.

The view from Oakland.Photo: Sharat Ganapati

I don’t live in Cleveland anymore, but I didn’t leave because I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I was stricken with the burning need to explore, to go new places, and stake a claim for myself. And the more I travel, the more I find myself drawn back to my Rust Belt roots — not Cleveland per se, but some semblance of it elsewhere in the world.

When I graduated from Georgetown in 2005, social momentum seemed to offer two choices: Stay in Washington, D.C., or be a rebel and move to San Francisco. I chose San Francisco. It was — it is — architecturally beautiful and politically liberal; the weather was good and the vibe was exciting. It was expensive as hell, too — it would be a real challenge on my meager Americorps living allowance — but I figured that I’d get one of those fancy high-paying careers that all San Franciscans seemed to have, then settle in, build a family, and grow old.

It wasn’t long after I arrived, however, that I began to feel unnecessary. San Francisco is exciting, sure, but it’s because the city — like New York, or L.A., or other urban brands — churns along on its own rhythms, driven by the labors and commitment of the hundreds of thousands of people who have already established themselves. It seemed like every niche was filled, and usually by someone both richer and cooler than me. I moved around for a few years, bouncing between different addresses in the Bay Area, heading down to Southern California for a spell, and even revisiting Cleveland, a fancy high-paying career slipping further and further from reach as the worldwide economy imploded.

And then, in early 2009, I discovered a little patch of Cleveland in California, just across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco: Oakland. Like my hometown, Oakland is ridiculed by those from posher zip codes and written off by most outsiders (and even some insiders). I came to Oakland for a non-fancy, low-paying job that I loved and found my own version of paradise, replete with affordable rents and restaurants without four-hour waits for a seat. It was just the kind of place where an urban-minded, broke-ass, fashion victim like myself could feel at home: Wearing sweatpants to the grocery store was socially acceptable, and I didn’t need an impressive job title or great condo to fit in.

Like Cleveland or any other down-and-out city across the country, Oakland is a fixer-upper kind of town, thirsty for young people, where elbow grease and commitment to place matter more than the state of one’s bank account. Since moving here, I’ve found the purpose I was lacking when I lived across the bay, and I’m gratified that my work has a real impact in the community.

Earlier this year, a friend and I co-founded Femikaze, a feminist sketch comedy troupe. (And if you don’t believe that “feminist” and “comedy” are natural allies, you should come to one of our shows!) We had our first independent production in October, a full-length show here in the East Bay that sold out three of our four nights. We’ve already scheduled three more shows for next year.

It’s the kind of thing that would have been exponentially more difficult in San Francisco, where any given Friday night offers thousands of entertainment options, including dozens of comedy shows. We’re only a few miles away from the frenzy here in Oakland, but it’s quiet enough that we don’t have to shout to get anybody’s attention. There’s room for two determined women, with no patron and no budget, to start something.

Many San Franciscans find my decision to quit the hip side of the bay befuddling. “There’s nothing there,” they say of Oakland. They’re not entirely wrong, either. There really IS less (although far from nothing) in places like Oakland and Cleveland — or Pittsburgh, or St. Louis, or Knoxville, or dozens of other underrated, underpriced, overlooked cities — than can be found in thriving urban centers like San Francisco, New York, or Boston. But that’s just their charm.

“Less” might be boring to some, but to those of us who strive to create and produce and make a difference, “less” also means fewer resources are required to start something new, and less competition comes from established entities. As someone perpetually short on cash but long on idealistic ambition, I’ve found more opportunity in a second-tier city like Oakland than I ever knew in San Francisco. And although some people out there like to use my address as the butt of a joke, I’ve found it to be a rich, fertile place to build a life on my own terms.

To recent or upcoming college graduates, I offer my own bit of meager counter-wisdom: Forget about Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and L.A. Look for a city that will value your presence and appreciate your efforts, a city that doesn’t think you’re disposable just because you’re young. It’ll be easier on both your wallet and your soul.

Sure, you might catch some flack for moving to a place where “there’s nothing there,” but take it from me — I came from the Mistake on the Lake, and to my mind, “there’s nothing there” is just another way of saying “there’s nothing in my way.”

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Rust Wire.