The New Old Home
yakcollective.org
yakcollective.org
Do any of these people actually live in the suburban household they assert will become more popular?
There isn't a single mention of the neighborhood... Mine was previously mostly emptied during much of the day, as people left to go to work or school. It is now full of pedestrians, bicyclists, and children in the afternoon. Front-yard conversations with neighbors is MUCH more common when everyone is working from home.
What will happen to community in this post-COVID environment?
I think a return to having a tightly connected neighborhood would do the US a lot of good. People may pay more attention to what's happening in their town and local politics which could help change things from the ground up.
Most importantly though, I think tighter neighborhoods would help people see those they don't agree with as actual people with more in common with them than not. As Thomas Jefferson said, "I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend."
As an aside, I have been thinking about how much I would love to be able to buy an empty lot in my neighborhood to open it up as a community space to bring people together outside of social networks.
One thing that felt unexplored is socialization, and in particular meeting new people, and in particular dating. I know that a lot of people use dating apps nowadays, but many (most?) use them only for first contact, and still prefer to meet in shared spaces like bars, which is harder to accomplish if these are scarcer and if people live much further away.
One of the effects of the move to concentrated coed spaces (factories and offices) and of the increase of housing prices in certain areas seems to have been an increase in the number of people who enter into a relationship with someone of the same economic class. But if your coworkers and colleagues all live two states away, and if more uniform land prices make it more likely for people of different incomes to live in the same area, there might a reversal of this change.