I am curious. Which country do you live in?
Among other things that have resulted from it:
One of our neighbors invites everyone over for 4th of July every year. We have a block party where we block off the street once or twice per year. Neighbors have been over for backyard parties, my wife goes to birthday lunches with the wives on the street, and there's a giant text thread where people ask for help/etc for things.
During the first year of covid, we did a special neighborhood Halloween, where everyone on the block put out bags of candy for neighborhood kids to go house to house and pick up.
Is this usual in the region, or perhaps did I misunderstand you? Don't the kids usually walk up to the doors and ring, and then you personally hand out candy to them?
So we arranged something in our immediate neighborhood - about 20 houses - to create a bag of candy for each kid in those houses. We left them on the lawn and each family with kids took their turn going around to each house to get their bag of candy.
So it was less "go to random people's houses" and more "let's get together and make sure halloween isn't cancelled".
Which is kinda funny as my wife hates it and wants to move because gardening here is really hard-to-impossible, but she doesn't want to give up our great neighborhood, so we're at an impasse.
But you can't do a "midwest" style garden.
Composting can be a great way to improve the soil, but it takes years to really get going. But if you're going to be there for years ...
And maybe you could even get "donations" from neighbors! I know one person who setup compost jars for her neighbors to get more compostables.
My wife for example likes to water for 5-10 seconds and that basically does nothing, you have to water significantly more as you need to put down 1/2" a day or more during the peak. It would take forever to do that with just a garden house and the pots you have can probably barely hold the water required to last a day. Reference https://earlywarning.usgs.gov/ssebop/modis for you area.
Also if you aren't buying compost by the truck load you probably aren't buying enough. For the first run you need like 6+ yards to fill up a couple beds, and the next year that will decompose to half and you will need to fill up again. Spend a bit more buy the good stuff (ask online whats good locally), the city waste compost is not great stuff has plastic and shit you will never get out plus it holds water poorly due to all the filler they add.