Fix The Broken Window First — by Dan Lynn

By Dan Lynn

About 25 years ago, I bought an old building from 1882. It was full of history and sat right in the middle of our town — but it had fallen into disrepair. Broken windows, chipping paint, weeds everywhere. At over 12,000 square feet, it was far too big to fix all at once.

So we started with the front. We painted it, replaced the broken windows, pulled the weeds, and hung a new awning over the front door. The front looked great. The rest of the building was exactly as run-down as before.

Then something I didn't expect happened. People started stopping us on the street to say thank you. A few even had tears in their eyes. I remember thinking, all we did was paint the front and fix a window — why does this mean so much to them?

I understood later, when I read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and learned about the Broken Windows Theory. The original idea, from researchers James Wilson and George Kelling, is that a single unrepaired broken window signals that nobody cares — and that signal invites more neglect, more disorder, a slow downward spiral. But it runs the other way too: one visible sign that someone does care can give a whole place hope.

That's what we'd done without realizing it. The building was in the center of the town, and fixing it told everyone the decline had stopped. It wasn't lipstick on a pig. It was hope.

The lesson stuck with me: small, visible acts of care have an outsized effect. Sometimes you change how an entire community feels by fixing one window.