Scholars increasingly ask how place shapes citizens’ attitudes and behavior. Despite growing interest in place-based politics, recent work engages with only a subset of the potential roles for place in politics. In this paper, we take up three questions that are crucial in understanding how a place might affect its residents’ behavior: what does it mean for a person to feel attached to a place, how can such place attachment be measured, and how does it influence political engagement? We develop a concept of place attachments and present a flexible measure that can capture strength of attachment to a variety of places. We present evidence from the United States and Germany that many people feel attached to the place where they live, that this attachment is distinct from an identity formed around the place, and that the strength of this attachment is related to how they engage with politics.