"People come and go. It's not like it used to be when families stayed in one area and you Uncle and Aunt lived in the next street...and your Gran was up the road!"
That is a very good and interesting point but it will definitely not get better if people are pushed out of their houses unwillingly to make space for someone with more money.
I have moved from my own country to UK and quite a lot around different parts of UK (slowly moved my way up from London to Manchester) and I think the community sense depends a lot of where one lives and how one portrays themselves.
In each places I lived in the sense of community was somehow different. I also believe to be part of a larger community you have to start by being part of smaller ones and establish yourself comfortably within them. For example when I first moved in the North West, I was only confident with people from the street I moved in who had been welcoming from the start. Then my Dcs started school and my community extended to that as well. When I started feeling more confident I started my own toddler group so that joined my community. later I joined a nearby mosque (I am Muslim but the actual area I live is not very Muslim populated ) so that enlarged my community even more and I feel really at home here because I have a sense that I now fit in, pretty much everywhere(within my town).
I do not quite know how to explain that but I think community is something you invest in at your own pace and is indeed a wonderful thing but above all I think it comes from personal little steps and cannot be "imposed" overnight by a government, it takes time.
To go back to the library example I had in a previous post, I cannot start to imagimne how I would feel if I was working in one to feed my familly and told one day that indeed I should just come and do the very same job for nothing to invest in my community. Awfull, unless the community is also prepared to give my family something to live on, ie benefits, and we get a catch 22 situation where people do actually physically work but still depend on other taxpayers or where people will find a job somewhere else and libraries (Which are, IMHO, a very focal point of a community)will just become a thing of the past. And so will most services who need to become forcibly "voluntary".
Every bone of my "community oriented" body tells me that this plan is wrong and will indeed do all but serve said community.