There’s a study I talk up all the time that found that you’re most likely to be place attached if your city does three things well: social offerings, aesthetics, and openness. People tend to understand the first two. It’s the third one, openness, that causes problems. Even after I explain that openness means your city welcomes all kinds of residents, sometimes people are like, “Huh?”

So here’s a concrete example. For a while now I’ve been volunteering with the Blacksburg Refugee Partnership,...