How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult | Hacker News Reader

How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

vox.com

33 pointsjseliger11 comments

tl;dr studies show friendships form from unplanned proximity; cities are no longer human sized; hence, we are (more likely) lonely and should invest in walkable, noncommercial spaces.

Yep many a times our fried group has discussed how nice it would be if we had college like proximity again with adult level accommodations.

Coincidentally I think Tony Hsieh went for that arrangement with his friends in the early 2000s, urging his friends to live in the new condo building built in SF wherein he owned the penthouse.

I wonder if changing housing would make any difference. Whenever I'm around strangers they're all flipping through apps on their smartphones, ignoring everyone around them.

The first picture shows a place that I would hate to live in. All those almost identical boxes! I'm glad I live in an area where every house is different. Even those built at the same time by the same builder have accreted idiosyncratic additions and even when they were new were just a small number of similar buildings surrounded by others of various ages, sizes, and details.

For the same price, many people would rather have a newer house hooked into newer infrastructure and more space.

I've seen this reaction before and it always puzzles me. I can understand why it's (marginally) more interesting to walk down a street with varied houses than uniform ones, but not why it's better to live in such a street. If you moved to the next house along every few days specifically to get a new environment I could see the problem, but since you're only living in one house in the long term it makes little difference what the others are like when you're inside (or when you're in the hypothetical shared social space), which is almost all of the time.

For the same reason that The Stepford Wives was a creepy movie? There's a place near my town where they clear cut all the tree off the top of a mountain. Then, they built hundreds of houses and townhouses that all look exactly the same. Every time I drive through there I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone. The entire place makes the hair on my neck stand on end just due to the sterile and fake nature of the entire place. It feels planned by committee, abnormal, and out of place, not like a place that grew up naturally over time.

Nobody forces anybody to start a family, though. The author talks about it as if it was mandatory, and then puts it as some chore.

The author is describing a general trend of domicile in American life, which is statistically[0] accurate. Most people who are in a stage of life where they can afford a detached home or mindset to buy one also have or are starting a family. I'm sure there's data to back up my claim somewhere.

[0]: http://www.nmhc.org/Content.aspx?id=4708, see the table "State Distribution of Apartment Residents, 2015", which shows that most US residents live in non-apartment homes.

Your comment implies that you have started a family, and want to state that you don't regret it. That's great. What does that have to do with where you live, which is what the article is about?

Not OP, but:

"But when we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find ourselves tied to those houses."

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