Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a couple of stories on small towns working hard to attract new families by building new houses.

In Loup City (pop. 1,000), the city government is working as the developer for the town’s first new housing subdivision in decades: It owns the land, is developing and paying for the infrastructure, and is crafting incentives to bring in people to build houses.

In Giltner (pop. 400), a group of families is offering the first lot of their new subdivision for free if the family can finish building a house there by October 2011.

They’re both examples of towns that think the rural life has something to offer young families — and are willing to be proactive in attracting them to small towns. It’s hard work to overcome the cultural pull toward the suburbs and cities, and towns like Loup City and Giltner are investing a lot of time and money in that struggle.

The same week, I also ran across an Associated Press story about a family that moved into a small North Dakota town that was offering a housing bargain like Loup City or Giltner. The family moved from Miami, bought a house and opened a bistro in town.

What they got for their trouble, the couple said, were cold shoulders, stereotypes and rumors, and even a competing business owner driving by their house shouting obscenities.

The article prompted a fascinating conversation on the Center for Rural Affairs’ Facebook page, and while this couple’s troubles are probably far from typical, I think it’s an instructive example of the necessity of the other side of recruiting new families: Welcoming them once they get there.

I see a lot of towns focusing on bringing in new families with incentives and promotions, but the work doesn’t stop with the people you’d like to see in your town; it has to include the people who are already there. Now, many of the towns I’ve covered have shown great kindness and hospitality toward people who are new, and I would venture to say that that kind of behavior is probably the norm.

But I also know that small towns have a real susceptibility to cliquishness, to wariness of outsiders, and that’s something that has to be overcome if they are to attract new people to live there. I know it because I saw my family experience it firsthand after we moved from Wisconsin to a small Nebraska town when I was 13. My parents lived there for about a decade, were active in their church and community, and even put four children through the high school — each one involved in loads of activities along the way.

They had plenty of friends and generally enjoyed their time in that town, yet even after 10 years there, they still felt distinctly like outsiders. It was communicated to them explicitly and implicitly in innumerable ways over the years. It wasn’t an outright resentment of them being there, but rather a continual reminder that this wasn’t really their hometown.

It wasn’t anything nearly so serious and “culture-shocking” as this couple in North Dakota describes, and as I mentioned earlier, situations are rarely as bad as the Miami couple’s. But it was the same type of thing that goes on in countless small towns across Nebraska and the Midwest. I’ve interviewed plenty of people who initially refer to themselves as being new in their small town — only to find out later they’ve lived there for a decade or two. That’s because the towns they live in are still subtly reinforcing the “you’re new here” message.

It’s a cultural phenomenon that new small-town residents need to be prepared for, but it’s also something of a blind spot in the Midwestern kindness that Nebraskans pride themselves on. If small towns are serious about attracting new residents, it’s something they need to work on just as hard as their housing developments and marketing campaigns.