Why don’t more people live close to friends?
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I had always known for a long time the "why" I didn't want to go out on weekends and such, but it wasn't until I watched some of those videos from "Not Just Bikes" that it really, really struck me. I literally dread finding parking more than I enjoy finding friends.
And suburban (and frankly disturbingly high percentages of urban) America IME is a strange cross between in constant proximity of others, and constant suspicion of others. Like there's just enough people around to not be alone, but not enough to feel safe for many.
There's another comment in this thread positing that the social closeness of the old days broke down because of more urbanization, but it's clear it's sprawl that's killing socialization.
The other day a friend and I were talking about cities since I complain a lot about this now, and we did a quick check: Houston is far, far LARGER than say, Zurich, but their population density is a fraction. Everyone lives in cars that don't talk to each other, going to little boxes that mostly don't talk to each other. And the parking lots required for people to travel to a restaurant or bar means that there's less restaurants and bars.
Incidentally, I've found a single combination pedestrian/bike trail near me, and it's busier than the other trails, and people there are so much friendlier. It's a joy to go, and I'm slowly realizing I may still be introverted, but being out and about without it being a chore actually alleviates a lot of my anxiety.
Worse of both world in my book. Unless you want to raise your kid in isolation.
My friend is an urban activist and he always complained that his childhood neighbourhood wasn't conducive to meeting people.
Recently I learned that we actually grew up just a few bus stops from each other. For me it was never an issue to hop into a bus/subway train and reach my friends - usually unannounced.
The only people my age in this new neighbourhood were bullies and/or juvenile delinquents, so I didn't make any friends there.
My closest circle currently is my class nerd group from middle school with one additional guy from a high school the two of those went together. The urban activist friend I met through another guy from this bunch, who introduced me into some extracurricular activities in his school which I could attend.
I also have college friends who, like me, didn't move cities to go there. One of them is actually a guy who my primary school friends met in their middle school and who went to my high school, but we only got to know each other better in college. We were all spread out over this 1.7mln city, but that was no problem since everyone had phones.
Idk, there are many cities outside the US where I wouldn't want to stay more than absolutely necessary, let alone raise children.
That said, US is a collection of regions with very different social setups and it is easy to move between them. It is common, as preferences change, for youngsters to live for a few years in one state, settle to raise children in another, then move as empty-nesters to third.
If safety is what one is after, one can find a place that is super safe, comparable on safety to anywhere in the world. Someone else would aim for nightlife instead. This flexibility is what makes US very livable for me. Just my 2c.
But I've got to admit that Maine looks pretty safe according to https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/charts-and-maps
Also, it sounds strange to me to look at guns as an inverse proxy for safety. I would, especially with kids, first look at drug prevalence and second at accidents on the roads (both cars and bikes). Which reinforces what I started with: the ability to select the place I want to live in based on my own preferences. Given a wide variety of options, both politically and socially, one can usually find a place they are happy in. My 2c.
The only barrier to buying a flat or house might be slightly reduced access to loans. I found in Denmark it is easier for a Dane to get a loan for 95% of the house value, but foreigners might only get 80%. EU citizens are somewhere in the middle, depending what the banks think.
Language is the main problem. If you aren't fluent in the new country's language, you can have problems with government bureaucracy, school/work, socialising, children's lives, doctors etc. If you speak English these are much reduced in countries with high English proficiency (IS/NO/SE/FI/DK/NL/LU/CY, obviously IE/MT). Or, if you are moving where there's already a significant community of people speaking your language.
Do kids from other countries tend to be accepted well in schools? I heard that at least in France schools can be very clique-ish and coming from the outside the kid can face significant hurdles. But I am just parroting what I heard elsewhere.
Not knowing/learning the language also works for some jobs like cleaning or agriculture, if so many workers are migrants that everyone speaks Romanian or English etc. Also postgraduate students.
Plenty of people from the north who move south when they retire (e.g. Netherlands to Spain, Germany to Greece) move before learning the language.
How quickly people learn the local language depends. Slowly in Denmark or the Netherlands where English is almost universal and work is often done in English, quickly in France or Italy where the opposite applies. Slowly if you're 65 and surrounded by other Dutch pensioners.
From what I know of France, a child from the other side of France can also be excluded, but this is from French emigrants teasing each other. I haven't heard of similar problems in Denmark.
Growing up in London I didn't even notice the European immigrants in my class and could hardly exclude the 40% of the class who were descendents of South Asian immigrants, but this varies significantly around the country.
I expect compared to the USA there's much more reluctance to move when a child is 14-18 years old, unless they can be certain of a place in the French school in Copenhagen etc. But this is primarily because of the difference in exams and language.
Some of us have family and friends here or simply can’t afford to live in or move to the EU if we wanted to.
I do sympathize though. I do not have kids (yet) but our move from TN > Maine is definitely partially motivated by the fact that I said I would absolutely never raise a child in the south due to gun culture and archaic legislation in general. For example most states in the south still allow school teachers and administrators to hit children- most of this happens in Mississippi and TN, then basically other states where lots of poverty, christianity, or mormonism are.
What is it about cities outside of America that make them better? Do you any any examples? Do you have any suggestions what we could do in America to emulate that?
I grew up in a wonderful neighborhood in a nice suburban area, but I was the youngest kid by about four years so I never walked to a friend’s house.
I also never realized I was missing anything until I moved to a non-US city in my twenties and found out how different life could be in a human-scale environment.
That's not specific to cities. My wife grew up on a farm, where neighbours lived a hundred meters away, and her brother had an entire chunk bitten out of his leg by a neighbour's dog. I grew up in a village, and I was terrified of some of the dogs there.
We live in a city now, and although we live in a street with a lot of dogs (to the dismay of my cynophobic kids), all dogs are very well behaved.
> The American suburbs are an excellent place to raise children.
I guess it varies. I've heard stories of American parents having CPS called on them merely for having their children play outside. Many American suburbs don't have the bike paths or even sidewalks necessary for kids to get around.
Then she lost her job and had to move away, which I definitely didn’t feel any sense of schadenfreude from. We ended up buying her an Apple Watch with cell service and the complaints stopped.
I think us letting our daughter roam free has changed the general mood of the neighborhood and I’ve noticed far more children playing outside. We’ve been the catalyst to get everyone to just chill out. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/06/04/fewer-kids-...
It may be social, in that letting kids roam on their own is not as acceptable and could get you in trouble with courts. Also, "cars" are more dangerous these days, ans they shift into more trucks and SUVs with massive blind spots and distracted drivers, and there have been many efforts to eliminate penalties for speeding, and the difference between 20mph and 30mph is literally a ton of death.
The number 1 thing I would love for my child is to live in a place where I was not in constant fear of cars when on the sidewalk or street. It wasn't like that when I was a kid in the suburbs in the 80s. And I will likely have to leave the US to find what I want.
Yep, that's exactly what I did. I'm in Tokyo now, and it's mostly what the "NotJustBikes" crowd is asking for: great public transit, walkability, lots of bike-riding, etc. I see kids walking or riding bikes by themselves all the time. I finally realized I was never going to be able to live in this kind of society in the US, so I found a place that had the lifestyle I wanted and moved there.
The helmet safety panic really crushed a lot of my enjoyment of life. Made riding a bike utterly miserable for me - both socially with my peer group at the time, as well as it being massively uncomfortable to wear. Not to mention getting in trouble dozens of times for leaving it at whatever location.
I usually would end up biking outside sight distance of the parents and ditch it under a bush for later retrieval. But once this rule was enforced on me, my biking was severely curtailed as it didn't have the same simple joy of freedom it had beforehand.
New England has counties and townships and cities, California and Texas only have counties and cities. Even a place that calls itself a town is still a city as far as their laws go, so advocating your position is going to run up against practical issues with people about why you’re saying their city isn’t a city.
We already have terms for this, and it’s called the suburbs.
Texan cities though, some of those cross into three counties.
* Proximity to (non-farm) work * Available public/private schools * Municipal amenities like parks and libraries * Basic retail services - groceries, clothing stores, etc. * Social activities/clubs
In short, other than needing a car to get around both places, they don’t have much in common at all.
Instead people have to get into their 7-11 -sized trucks and drive to a store with a parking lot that's larger than many European neighbourhoods.
As a pre-teen, I could go to any of my friend's houses to do tabletop roleplaying all by myself. If my mother needed a break from parenting, she had three different siblings living within a quarter mile. When your average building is 6 stories tall, and your typical street is 30 feet wide building to building, a quarter mile circle holds a lot of families! In comparison, my neighbor from across the street in the US suburbs is 60 feet away, door to door, and a quarter mile circle won't get me to 300 front doors, total.
Even just townhouses which are still "single family" buildings on their own land are roughly 4x denser than detached houses.
Someone walking through a six-story downtown is, by such a measurement, traveling faster than a car traveling at ~90 mph through suburbia.
(Of course, a car can't travel that quickly through suburbia.)
In the worst flat in these terms I ever had in a city over here was 10 minutes walk to the next grocery shop and this was a dirt cheap flat on a loud main road.
Even parts of the town where you have mostly residential housing will have the occasional small shop, grocery store, gas station or similar. If I understood zoning in the US correctly this kind of mixing is at times even forbidden?
To be fair this exists in many of areas in the US as well.
From my suburban single family home in a small town in California I can easily walk to all those things in a few minutes, including 24x7 supermarket, another nicer supermarket, plenty of restaurants, movies, stores of nearly all kinds, playgrounds, sports fields, etc.
People definitely call Ventura, CA “the city” and its 100k.
In the UK “city” status is conferred by being on the government’s list of cities and isn’t automatic based on size or presence of a Cathedral or anything else.
See: Tom Scott on YouTube “the town which forgot to be a city” - https://youtube.com/watch?v=kBaLb1C4WAg
The province of Friesland famously has 11 cities, but many of those are tiny, and it doesn't include several of the largest towns that are not technically cities.
> In Sweden, the concept of "city" was removed in 1971. Everything became just municipalities.
> This annoyed Stockholm, so in 1983, Stockholm municipality simply renamed itself "Stockholm Stad" (Stockholm City). That pissed Malmö and Göteborg off, and they also promptly renamed themselves to be cities. Today 14 municipalities n Sweden claim to be cities.
It has more to do with what services the city provides vs the size (cities provide trash pickup, etc).
I live in a small town of around 2000. Within 5-10 minutes walking I got: a restaurant, a cafe, a grocery store, pizzeria and kindergarten. Within 5-10 minutes of biking I have: public library, another grocery store, two bars and a restaurant. Public transport is readily available to take me to the neighbouring hustle-bustle (pop. 600'000) within 35 minutes. So my town is 50 times smaller than your Spanish example but it is perfectly possible to have all these services at this scale as well!
I live in a "mid sized" european city (500k), about 2km from the center, and the _only_ think I use my car for is getting out of the city. Within 10m walking I have pretty much everything I need, and within 20m of public transport (ironically, walking can be quicker for the short distances), I have pretty much everything I _want_!
It's right in the middle, close to the central district. It's got everything. From barbers to art galleries, from Portuguese cuisine to folklore shops, from luthiers to really good schools. A bustling art scene, clean streets. A huge shopping centre a nice park and an international transportation hub are all in in walking distance (<10 min), while the district itself manages to stay cozy and friendly.
I have friends who haven't left the borders of this "village" during Covid, it's really got everything. Part of a big city while being not part of it at the same time.
Also, I come from a 20k small town (so right between the two examples above) and had a very similar experience there, apart from everything the world has to offer being easily accessible once you decide to hop on a tram or your bike.
In the village I grew up in (then 40k, now 100k), every neighbourhood had a shopping mall with one or two supermarkets, a Chinese restaurant, a few other shops, surrounded by 3 primary schools (one public, one protestant, one catholic). The same everywhere. Don't expect any bars, though. Or restaurants other than Chinese. I believe the town had one disco that served several neighbouring towns as well.
I also live in a small town of around 2000 in rural Massachusetts. Within the same walking distance I have: full elementary school (kindergarten through 6th grade), public tennis and basketball courts, a public indoor gym, a grocery store, several restaurants, several bookstores, several banks, a pharmacy, a bowling alley and a few more misc stores. We also have public transport to the nearest big town but it is only a few times a day.
The only reason my town is dense and walkable is due to geography. It was settled 250 years ago and it is nestled on a river between two "mountains" (really just big hills) so once all the available space filled up 100 years ago it just stopped growing (my house is on the outskirts of town and was built 115 years ago).
In comparison I grew up in a sprawling small town in the US midwest which has embraced even more sprawl since I moved 30+ years ago and I hate going back. Its just souless and unwalkable as it has endless land to expand into and no plan to keep it human scale.
I went to school out there and have friends from the surrounding areas, it's nice if you're wanting something more rural but still near things. The key to it is a lot of the towns were built 100-200 or so years ago, when it actually was necessary to build close to each other in community.
Aye, but I bet GP's home town in Spain is much more pleasant to walk in from November to March ;-)
That aside, there are some real gems among Western Mass towns! I wonder, with all the empty land in this country (even in places very hospitable to human life), if it's possible to found new towns built in the "European" model of a central plaza surrounded by multifamily, mixed-use developments within walking distance? Were I a billionaire, this is the sort of stuff I would explore.
It's not geography, it's history. The only nice places in the US are places that were built before cars.
I guess to me, the real difference is density and how much there is to do. A city has a bar on almost every street corner, a village, no matter how big, does not.
In North Carolina there is a "city" called Brevard with a population of just under 8,000 but you also have the "town" of Cary with population 170,000.
Of course there is still the issue of how the words are commonly used vs their actual legal definition but if you ask 100 different people the difference between a city and town, you'll get 100 slightly different definitions. Someone that grew up in New York City will have a very different definition than someone that grew up in Wyoming 50 miles from the nearest gas station. At the end of the day, there's just some vague notion that cities are bigger than towns.
Although we can't trust the cognates, as 'stad' is related to English 'stead', which meant a settlement of any size.
... I suppose the modern equivalent is a CBD.
From the front door I can throw rocks at 2 more cafes, another restaurant, a launderette, a playground and a car dealer. There is a basket ball court out the back.
Nothing special about my 7 storey block, but when a certain density is reached things start to work really well
I def don't want my kids riding their bikes along the strode to the "corner" store.
Now. for playing. We have a 60km road, and a river. I can tell my kids to stay inside those and know that most cars traveling in there are local, so driving a bit slower.
I wish we had a community center/library around here. I'd love to meet my neighbours.
Transportation is for rural areas. If there is support for transporting people around beyond the capacity of their legs, I'm not sure that is really a city either. The hallmark of a city is the density for having everything you need to live out life right there, never, ever, needing to step into some kind of vehicle. Density but scattering life around over tens of miles or more, requiring travel to live out life, is just rural with nearby neighbours.
I also get the impression that a lot is expected of individuals in their social performances, and so for those who struggle to participate, there isn't as much support.
"This is the Free Market at work, and if you can't afford it, you're poor and should just stay home. Poor people are subhuman trash." - typical conservative American
Since the infinite funding stopped artificially holding prices low, I still found Uber cheaper generally speaking, and with a better experience. (I will say that my experience living in the UK does not hold the same; taxis here are generally better.)
If only there was a service where you can pay money to be driven somewhere... I heard Americans invented these smartphones with apps, Maybe they can even invent an app-based version of that paid ride service!
Thankfully with a functioning public transport network, it costs me $4
If going out with friends costs $20 a head instead of $45, more people will want to do it.
One thing I do in DC is ride bikeshare to the bar (where the amortized cost of the ride, with my annual membership, is basically $0) and then take metro back ($2).
And of course this is all moot if you can just walk, since it is always free, which is one major benefit of denser mixed use walkable neighborhoods.
Or even Wikipedia: "The American city of Baltimore, Maryland, is notorious for its crime rate, which ranks well above the national average. Violent crime spiked in 2015 after the death of Freddie Gray on April 19, 2015, which touched off riots and an increase in murders. The city recorded 348 homicides in 2019, a number second only to the number recorded in 1993 when the population was nearly 125,000 higher."
In context, the UK, with 65+ million people had like 700 for 2022, or around 60 times less per population...
Is it that my doctor told me that I have only a 50/50 chance of reaching the age of 30 that I see risks as a worthwhile thing to embark on. Or am I just stupid not wanting to waste my life with fear and not caring enough about becoming old?
Unlucky is being the victim of a random crime that leaves you crippled for life, not a clean death. I follow someone on social media like that, who was shot and left a paraplegic in a high-crime city.
Parts of Baltimore are objectively dangerous and it's not being dramatic to acknowledge that or want to avoid it. At some point it had a higher murder rate than the most murderous countries in the world, like El Salvador or Honduras; coincidentally, people from those countries are seeking a better life in the US, and I don't suppose you would say they should stay and have a burden-free life there?
Or you can spend your life in a safe, normal, environment, not just a crime ridden place, where crime of course doesn't end with homicides (those are the tip of the iceberg).
You know, so that you can have kids playing outside, cops not shooting first and asking questions later because of the crime rate, women not afraid of being raped or assaulted, and so on...
>Is it that my doctor told me that I have only a 50/50 chance of reaching the age of 30 that I see risks as a worthwhile thing to embark on. Or am I just stupid not wanting to waste my life with fear and not caring enough about becoming old?
You literally compared a crime ridden city to a terminal illness with big chances of dying before your time. Couldn't have put it better myself.
That people can still find joy in life or live their lives as best as they can, is orthogonal.
People can also find joy and love, and a purpose, while their country is at war, but that's not something we should tolerate as if "war/peace, it's all the same to me".
That’s not to say I’m totally disconnected from it. I know I’m one degree from someone who was murdered, and I’m sure if I knew all the two degree separations, it would be staggering, but again, in terms of my life, I don’t do drugs and I don’t live in a neighborhood with gang shootings, so I’ll be fine.
It's just that Americans in those cities have learned to normalize this violence all around them. They're OK with abnormally large rates of homicide, burglary, theft, rape, and acompanying ill like school shootings, police killings...
I lived in North Philadelphia throughout college and a couple years after. It isn’t a lie to say you are operating at a different level of vigilance. Your behaviors change. So no, Hollywood didn’t tell me anything about North Philly, my experience did.
It’s quite amusing how everyone is saying US cities are safe and great like Baltimore, while they’re also saying “if you mostly stay in the gentrified or well established areas”. Is that even Baltimore then? Or a bubble within Baltimore?
If it's in Baltimore, then yes, it's in Baltimore. Why wouldn't it count? If a foreigner says, "America is unsafe" and you say, "Well, my suburb is safe," can they say, "Oh, that's not America"?
My biggest problem, though, is the fact that schools are unsafe. The fact that schools need to practice shooter drills is heartbreaking.
Yes, people will get mugged in the "nicer" neighborhoods once in a while. It's not something to discount or ignore. But when you hear about yet another gang shooting over the weekend, it's unlikely to be someone walking home from the bar in Hampden or Fells Point. It's in one of the neighborhoods that has seen disinvestment and poverty (and the resulting gang, drug trade, and violent activity) for generations.
On one hand I would love to not have to worry about the crime stats where I live. I don't want to avoid other people because I worry about getting mugged walking home at night. But I also hate the idea that everyone follows the same "move out as soon as you have kids/can afford it/get to a certain age" plan. It's like a constant, slow urban flight where people who are well-off enough to contribute to the city leave and only the poorest and least privileged residents remain.
I love that I can walk to so many places. When the city shut down due to a blizzard, I was fine not driving for a week or two. When it's nice out, I can walk 3 blocks to a massive park and see live music or a cultural festival. I can drive, but I can also bike or bus to work if my car is in the shop. Waterfront is walking distance. Shopping, restaurants, pubs, and galleries too. Oh, and my house cost under $200k (although I bought it a few years before the current price spike).
Valet parking, paid garages, or Uber are all quite convenient but pricey.
Our current society is highly geared to making the maximum profit as much as possible. Oversights and externalities such as parking and traffic are never considered before a decision is made.
Rural towns are a mix because they can't reasonanly support everything a modern life needs, so you still use a car to go between towns or longer distances, and parking is easy so you do small trips too. But your essentials and community are nearby and the parking requirements are just the people in your town.
The suburban sprawl model is the worst of both worlds, nothing is nearby, even essentials, so you drive for everything. Because everyone from the burbs has to drive to the same place, parking sucks too. No community, no parking, no goods and services. Just houses and roads, intersected by busy highways.
A built in semi-mandatory third place seems pretty nifty as far as building social relationships goes.
I'm an atheist but I do remember building bonds this way in those heady pre-smartphone days. It's a shame the baby is stuck in the bathwater.
This is in contrast with dominant religions (including Christianity) in other countries.
Ironically, somewhat-third-place, seems to be most active in suburbs and rural areas. Where neighbours need to work together to solve various community issues. And that turns into partying together as well. It's common to have a community house where everybody can use the space for organising whatever, from playing table games to art classes to random lectures to movie nights. While densier cities seem to be less socializing outside of family&friends circles.
Berlin in particular has lots of parks, and people can go there with drinks, grills, frisbees etc. The sheer number of them means that most people are within walking distance from one. It’s great to meet without spending money. Again, those are almost absent in most of North America. You have to drive to them, so they’re inaccessible to kids. My hometown made loitering almost illegal in them anyway.
* My experience is not universal and is just that: my personal experience.
I love the idea of what cafes were supposed to be a century ago. But nowadays HN or some subreddits plays the same role. Now I can live in bum-fuck-nowhere and interact with other people from wherever. While saving on exorbitant rent just to be close to meeting points.
On other other hand, this kills the romanticised idea of the cities. But are we after „city life“ as a cargo cult? Or exchange of ideas? Internet enables later from even most remote points of the world. While former feels more like roleplaying nowadays.
Community building is slightly different from cafe culture though. Cafes culture is similar to social media bubbles. Community that connects people physically living in the same people allowing to solve practical problems of the day is needed one way or another.
Café culture simply means that you have a convenient place to meet with other people with some regularity. You really don't need to be judgemental and dismissive about it.
For me the most valuable part is the later. And interwebs do wonders in this space. Same conversions IRL may have been nicer, but there's no way I could have been part of them (or at least so many of them) otherwise. And if you're in a crowded cafe watching a famous person... It's not 1-on-1 conversation either, much closer to Reddit's AmA thread...
As for building local community... IMO Cafes are too restrictive. A decent community space wins all day any day.
> And if you're in a crowded cafe watching a famous person
You can go to another café
Another cafe wouldn’t have that famous person though. Which is fine. Just saying that many real life interactions ain’t deep 1-on-1 conversations.
In Germany, there is a park within walking distance, and usually a bike paths leading to it. You can also walk along numerous paths in the forest and along rivers.
In Canada, I would have to drive to them, or risk biking on busy roads. It boggles my mind that you have to drive to the place where you walk. These parks also tend to severely restrict what you can do, and when you can do it.
Sure, there is amazing nature if you can drive to it, but daily access to green spaces is sorely missing.
Not to mention grocery delivery apps and such. Just speaking personally, it's perhaps a little too easy to never leave my home. Doing so now requires a deliberate decision.
So we’ll all try to have our own cars and drive on huge suburban streets and put our kids in private schools and build fences around our yards and vote down zoning laws that would promote density. And we’ll wonder why the people in that cute little European town we visited that one time seemed so much happier.
It's quite possible that we're in a vicious cycle where low contentiousness causes people to be more isolated and more cynical and that in turn may cause some people to be less considerate of others, but if that's true it's still a systemic problem and at an individual level looking for more isolation is the only reasonable solution.
Wild. My experience has been if you live in the city long enough you don't even notice the noise. I've lived downtown for 10+ years in different major cities. There's a building being built directly behind me right now and I hear them all day long and it doesn't even phase me anymore. I'm also on a major drag where people drink all week long and walk around shouting at each other.
I kind of like it over the creepiness of being in a quiet empty house with nobody nearby..
I notice gunshots for sure but haven't heard many (any?) of those in Denver vs Dallas.
I've been living in a big European city for more than ten years now. I can kinda forget about the noises surrounding me, but I always tend to feel less tense when I leave for the countryside. And when I get back, sure enough, I hear all the random noises again. Upstairs neighbor dragging a chair when sitting at the table. Other neighbor taking a piss. Neighbor from across, blasting his TV or his kid crying for whatever reason.
There is never a moment of respite in the city. You wake up, you got your neighbors doign their thing. On your way to the office / park / groceries, you got the traffic noise. At the office: the AC hum and useless office chat. On the way home, traffic again. Back home? Neighbors are back, too.
I grew up just outside a decent-sized city in Canada, now living in Texas...both places, on septic. Its not rare.
I live on 3.5 acres and have a water treatment system and part of the reason is that there's a shortage of homes I _actually_ wanted, which are decent flats in the city where my kids can bike to school, so they're very expensive.
except they don't think that
the Americans nod politely and whisper to each other "can you imagine living that close to your neighbors? nooooo thank you!"
HN needs to just drop this notion that anyone opposed to density is a caveman. I love the fact that my neighbors can't see me and I can't see them. Everyone is one an acre minimum. We like it like that and we're not even Literal Nazis!
I totally agree with that. I've been a city dweller (in Europe) for 45 years or so and hated every second of it. I then lived in suburbia for 5 years and liked it much better.
I then just spent one year in the countryside in a very remote area and loved it. I knew my neighbors (but we all had big plots so it's not as if we could see each other) and already have made friends there.
Now I'm back to european city life and not one of the worst city (Luxemburg) and yet I hate it already. Shitty miserable apartment life, stacked on top of each others like ants "because density".
Just fuck that.
I'm going back to the country side as soon as I can.
My favorite, but less practical, choice is also countryside. :p
Suburbs are a compromise for sure, but instead I'd call them a combination of some of the best of both worlds.
Personally now as an adult I'd rather live in a much more rural area to have more land and space to do things, but for children that's kind of boring. So this suburban area gives convenient walkable access to activities, places and friends for kids while still at least having a bit of space and land for the adults.
When I lived in San Jose I trusted my immediate neighbors but someone on the street was basically a neighborhood watchdog for unkept lawns and cars that were parked too long. The neighborhood was mostly rentals, so landlords were responsible for lawn maintenance but of course these watchdog folks like to take their frustrations out on other renters. Our neighborhood never got together, just immediate neighbors, and people that lived close enough would Uber.
In contrast, when I lived in one of the poorer areas of Fort Worth and now living in the more working class area of Portland my trust for my entire street is sky high. We have friends, people help out and look out for each other. We have block parties, if there's disputes people talk it out, etc
All three are walkable places, and I live most of my life inside 5 city blocks. I'm not sure what factors make a successful community on a given street, but there are certain people that can make the entire experience miserable through seemingly insignificant actions (to them).
Try it out.
Not if you get killed by a car. That's his point.
Bikes are great, but much more so in a society that recognises the benefits of bikes than in a society that sees than as alien and as targets.
It does help when more people start to bike. There is safety in numbers, not to mention more understanding and recognition. Netherland has the advantage that we've never really gotten rid of our bikes; as soon as cars were about to take over in the 1960s, people started to fight back. People here have been fighting for bikes and against cars for more than 50 years. In the US, that fight doesn't even have remotely the kind of momentum that it had in Netherland 50 years ago, so there's quite a lot of distance to catch up there.
I used to live in downtown of my 600k city. Moved back to outskirts of the same city. Driving is the smallest issue to meet.
Reading those discussions from afar, it feels like Americans are using urban sprawl as a scapegoat. While it's a problem everywhere else too. Even if you take away urban sprawl and driving, the problem will be there.
I could say the same about my socialising now and a decade ago. But in reality a lot of other things happened - kids, parents getting old, mortgages and housing to take care of, stable jobs with more responsibilities, more resources (both time and money) spent on healthcare... It all adds up.
For anyone that's curious about numbers on this, every western country has a long-running social survey that asks how many close friends the respondent has. This data is usually freely available.
Dutch stereotype is to be 'friendly' outward but always keep people who you aren't close to at a distance. That attitude comes back to bite you when you move away past your early 20s or use your work life as your social lifeline in today's work environment. If it wasn't for social services, the consequences would be far worse. But those social services are also contributing to what keeps the majority from staying close together in the first place.
If anything it’s, probably irrationally, turning me off to urbanism concepts. I think that when something becomes so trendy and so dogmatic, I subconsciously start to feel an aversion to it and assume it’s snake oil, whether that’s true or not.
The other benefits of the higher density living does work though. More small businesses and shops nearby, hobby points of interest in the 15-30 minutes distance on foot or bus/tram, better infrastructure, etc.
In a suburb many of my friends would be 15+ minutes away by car. In the city I live in now (almost entirely apartments/multi-household buildings), almost all of my friends are within a 15 minute walk. It has been a massive improvement to my social life, mostly due to the ease at which gatherings can spontaneously/easily occur.
I think that might perhaps be the biggest issue in the US. There seems to be a massive amount of distrust separating people. And some groups are eagerly amplifying that distrust with their culture war nonsense.
There might not be a way out for the US until that issue is solved.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/how-urb...
> Four-in-ten rural residents say they know all or most of their neighbors; the shares are smaller among those living in urban (24%) and suburban (28%) areas.
That was not the case earlier where people who were related lived fairly close to each other. This is particularly true in places like Asia, Africa and parts of Europe even today.
Staying close together requires adjustment and also requires people to value the close proximity of others.. This is sadly something which has largely disappeared particularly in North America
I recall walking through Vienna one weeknight evening and being amazed how the Austrians would be gathered around tables just enjoying a drink and conversation. These in-person casual interactions are what life is made of. America’s car centric zoning policy and outright bans of denser types of housing makes this lifestyle all but impossible.
My closest (in both meanings of the word) friend is three hours away through a scenic mountain pass and when we go there its for an entire weekend. This gives time to help with things like building a shed or swapping an engine in a car.
I live in a city and more and more I feel this.
The whole idea behind urbanism seems to be - give up the outdoors, give up hobbies that require tools and space.
Go to the bar. Or a "makerspace" where you can have controlled use of someone else's tools. Rent this, rent that, take an uber here and there.
It's just so commercialised.
There are very few tools I can think of at least woodworking wise that I wouldn't "want" to afford myself. Particularly in the context that an urban home costs hundreds of thousands more than a suburban or rural one.
Metalworking or something like that, maybe, I wouldn't know.
In contrast to that I have a local makerspace that has more facilities than I could ever afford to own, along with actual space to DO the work on projects I want to do with <GASP!> actual solid workbenches and fixed tools like pillar drills (press), table saw/router, band saws. and that's just on the wood side. They also have a CNC router, metal and wood lathes, welding kit/space, [FRICKEN] laser cutter, 3D printers, electronics workbench with a 'scope more expensive than my car. A whole host of things I would never be able to afford either the cost or space to host.
And they have a phase of membership which permits 247 access (not extra cost, just a bit of familiarity) which by design also means it's a social space, so bringing back to the context of the OP, has meant good friendships are formed as new skills are acquired/shared.
Yes it's a monthly cost, but even if I added up the total cost since I've been a member, it doesn't add up to how much even one of the major tools would set me back. Even taking all that into account, it's given me an opportunity to learn things I would never have considered doing on my own. I joined for the 3D printing and stayed for the laser cutting, CNC milling, PCB designing/surface mount soldering, microcontroller learning, welding and friendships.
That isn't renting, that is sharing
Cam at Blacktail Studio, who has a successful business and an impressive collection of quality tools, still rents time on the large machines at a different company. I'm not saying makerspaces are perfect, but unless you have a full size shop with 480V power there's always going to be some tools that make more sense to rent.
Though I will admit, I do miss being able to walk downstairs to one of many bars, have a few drinks, maybe end up at the local greasy spoon, and walk home. Can't have it all, I suppose.
- Way more time in and with nature
- New hobbies, lot of space to try things
- Plenty of tools. My 'Makerspace' is what takes up most of my house at this point
Making cities better and healthier and happier will not prevent you from living in the boonies and enjoying ATVs and hunting and nature walks.
I like hiking, so I often choose to take a train out (sometimes followed by a bus), since then I'm not restricted to walking a circular route. I can also be utterly exhausted (far too tired to drive) on the way home. However, there are a lot more options when driving.
I'm confused by this take. Most American urban cities are unnecessarily dense - Manhattan, SF, Chicago all squeezed into high rises 1000 occupant buildings.
When I was little all my friends were in a radius of 10 minutes walking time.
When I grew up but I was still living with my parents that expanded to about one hour walking or public transport, or bicycle, or car for the very few friends I had outside my city.
That didn't change when I moved to my own place. Most of my friends were between 40 and 60 minutes away. The closest ones, within 5 minutes, were new friends I met in places further away.
I live outside a city now and my friends are between 40 to 80 minutes away, by car.
The number of people I meet is about the same, some are new friends some are old ones.
In 40 minutes I could have already met a friend after 10 minutes and talked 30 minutes and start to head home again!
In the big cities, of course, everyone plans ahead. Which is great for productivity but pretty awful for socializing.
Urban culture revolves around productivity, while in smaller towns here, everyone seems happy being non-productive if it means keeping their social life.
I consider myself pretty sociable, but holly shit that sounds like a nightmare.
Definitely not a system that produces introverted city coders though
I wouldn’t want that now but my school friends always say that if they ever manage to retire early, they’ll all move back to our hometown and do that random hanging out thing all over again.
I see no point to overpopulated cities with remote work so prevalent nowadays.
Cars aren't the problem, overpopulated cities are.
I can walk my town end to end in 15 minutes, there's a coop, grocery store, hospital, entertainment, etc. You can drive to another town if you want, or drive and park anywhere without paying, or walk, or bike. This is common for most small towns that I know of.
Tokyo is extremely overcrowded, but its services and zoning are somewhat able to handle it, if you're okay with living in a 100sqm box and being squeezed into the train like a sardine and shove through the sidewalks / crossings during rush hour.
There's a reason why the Japanese government is always trying to incentivize people to move out to it's rural areas.
That being said, American cities cannot even handle a fraction of those population levels. It's not the cars that are the problem, it's the mismanagement of public resources and city planning that leads to lack of GOOD public transportation and zoning.
So until those US city leaders can figure out their shit, I'd suggest living in a small town, it has the wishlist everyone is always wanting here. Walkable end-to-end, bikeable, co-ops, fresh air, etc. Luckily we already did the hard work to connect these towns together and we have a LOT of land.
Problem with cities isn't overpopulation, it's housing. People want to live there but there isn't enough accommodations, and there totally could be if zoning and infrastructure were properly prioritized.
No it doesn't. Stop generalizing and stereotyping. From my experience people in small towns are nicer than people in cities, regardless of race or whatever. The small town I grew up in was 1/3rd hispanic, 1/3rd black, 1/3rd white and everyone got along. Don't believe what the media tries to racebait you with.
> Problem with cities isn't overpopulation, it's housing. People want to live there but there isn't enough accommodations, and there totally could be if zoning and infrastructure were properly prioritized.
Yes, zoning is somewhat the issue, in the fact that stores and restaurants should be more distributed. But many cities have plenty of apt buildings and short of squeezing people in smaller boxes, there's not much you can do. Also people shouldn't live in small boxes.
As a counter example, someone has called me a slur in almost every area I’ve spent time in besides big cities. Like driving by me on a sidewalk, in a bar, whatever, it always happens.
So you stereotype, generalize, and assume the worse just in case your pre-judgement is right?
> There’s plenty of history in America to defend the assumption that minorities will have a worse experience in rural towns.
And what is that? What in "history" specifically makes you think people in rural towns are worse than people in cities?
Either way, that's not a good excuse to stereotype people. I don't think every person in the city is a gangster or a mobster because of cities bad history of them.
> You seem to live in a very diverse town which is great. That’s not most towns in America.
You have no idea what you are talking about, many towns are very diverse.
https://theweek.com/articles/692098/rural-america-more-diver...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/44331/10597_pa...
When I say history I don’t mean the history book a generation ago. I mean the news stations, social media, people’s modern lived experience . There’s a lot more people discussing issues with small towns than big cities, especially when accounting for population differences.
Your articles only tell half a story. They show that a chunk of counties have >25% non white. But none have significant Asian populations, nor LGBTQ, etc. “Not blindingly white” isn’t the same as diversity for many people. Will it have restaurants of the cuisine of your home culture? Mosques/temples of your religion, etc. Will gay people be able to find dates? There’s so much more to diversity.
Walking 8 miles to the grocery store is clearly untenable, so never would’ve happened without widespread cars.
I’d suspect very old (pre-car) and historically-preserved parts of Chicago, like Boston, DC, and New York, have a much less Euclidian setup.
> Sometime during the pandemic lockdowns, I began to nurture a fantasy,” Adrienne Matei writes. “What if I were neighbors with all of my friends? Every day, as I took long walks through North Vancouver that were still nowhere near long enough to land me at a single pal’s doorstep, I would reflect on the potential joys of a physically closer network.
My family was close friends with our neighbors, because they were neighbors. Many of my friends were close with their neighbors. I imagine it was far more true in the 50s and 60s. It certainly was based off personal anecdotes I’ve heard from the let friends and relatives.
It was a city block in a small/medium sized city. Neighborhood picnics, barbecues, kids running around. Perhaps this breaks down with more urbanization.
you don't get to choose your neighbors...
However, when I was in a house... I met some. They were often the worst kind of people. The most NIMBY neolib white-flight our-neighborhood-is-going-to-hell 60+ year old assholes you could imagine. The one we thought was nice apparently would beat one of his kids and make him sleep outside the house. That was the nice one!
I can't say I know many good stories about neighbors. Look at movies - conflict with neighbors is a constant theme.
I think a lot of TV shows and movies show a lot of different perspectives of neighbors, and I'm not convinced it's mostly negative. Lots show some amount of strife with neighbors, but even a romance movie will often show some amount of conflict between the protagonists.
Many of my neighbors are older and have lived in the homes since they were built. Mostly they just gripe that I don't behave the same way as the last guy.
Others are parents around my age who I don't have much common ground with because their kids are their whole lives basically, and I don't have kids and don't want them.
I think there's more to friendship than just proximity.
Being friends with neighbours prioritises the home by making social interactions subservient to it. Being neighbours with your friends prioritises those people by deprecating where you live to it. There isn't a single answer. But speaking as someone with many acquaintances, including very good ones, but a handful of close friends (and maybe a dozen or two, at most, friend friends), it's easier to change where you live than whom you love.
and most importantly, the people.
you can try to make friends with neighbors, but you can’t make neighbors be friends.
it isn’t always such a positive combination.
but sometimes it is.
Like yourself, my family was super "close" to our neighbours when I was growing up. But they weren't even remotely "friends" in the sense that I might use the word today - there were zero common interests; significantly different backgrounds, world perspectives, priorities, lifestyles; they had little to talk about other than the prosaic; less superficially and more importantly, they would not be particularly honest or open or intimate with each other within the parameters of social norms. But what they were was utterly dependable to each other - both households knew that they'd support each other - through the winter and power outages and minor and major inconveniences that comes in life.
There's certainly huge value in that and I think it's certainly possibly to establish such relationships with neighbours today, though it's hugely luck of the draw; but will that satisfy the need we (or at least some of us) have for close friends with open, honest and sharing relationships, partaking of interesting discussion and activities, and relationships surviving through geographical & lifestyle changes?
That’s a valid distinction. But if they had that level of care for each other, I would argue the major reason they didn’t share dinner together, play lawn games, or watch football on sundays was because they didn’t want to. But the author of the article does cite that interest.
This is more of a product of the time. My parents weren’t that open with close friends either back in the 70s when I was growing up.
Fast forward to today and my friends are all quite open about personal things. And the one I know who is friends with his neighbor is just as open with the neighbor.
Back then it was just socially unacceptable to talk about lots of mental health stuff or anything near it.
I too was born in Eastern Europe but live in Canada now (and for majority of my adulthood). Took me, dunno, 10-15 years to change some of the subtly ingrained cultural perspectives and open up.
(I still get a deer in headlights look sometimes, but that's just me and my social awkwardness:)
I now live in a small village in rural New Mexico, and your 2nd paragraph precisely describes things here. We love our neighbors - not as people to bare our hearts to, but as people we can rely on (and they can rely on us). Yes, I do miss the sense of a deeper connection, especially since I've been fortunate to find a few (remote) friends in life where that happened from day one. But you know what, sometimes you just have to grow that over time.
Before this location, I lived on an amazing block in suburban Philadelphia, where the middle of the block had five families/households (us among them) who were similarly "utterly dependable". But over time, we became closer to some of them (amidst the christmas round-robin dinners and block parties and standing around outside while raking leaves), and so last summer we were invited to a the daughter's wedding, and next month one of them might join me on a 1600 bike ride from Santa Fe to Seattle.
I do like meeting people that I just immediately click with, but we should not discount the merits of long, long neighborly relationships that deepen and ripen over many years to become a different, but similarly valuable sort of friendship.
It's something that is often critized as ghettoization, but that's why I think it's important to pick a neighborhood where you will find like minded-people.
Usually it comes naturally as you're guided by your budget, and will naturally like the same neighborhood as your peers, but it can be tempting to get a bigger house for the same budget in a "less fancy" neighborhood that you would match better for you.
Also, it depends on the country but it's important to pick a neighborhood where you'll be confident to send your kids to the local public school instead of having them go to a school further away. This way you ensure your kids live close to their friends.
I bet that's pretty wrong.
I’ve seen countless threads and front page articles about more bike-friendly, anti-car city development, as well as how suburban and rural cities requiring cars and more driving is definitely not a good thing.
It’s very hard to find anyone coming to defense of the allure of smaller, more open developments with actual land between your neighbors.
If you want to find rural or suburban folks, HN is not the community to engage with.
Re: anti-car people, one thing that is not acknowledged about America is that America is very large & people like having their own land. Public transportation is not a feasible option for mountain communities, low population density areas, & quiet areas with nature.
I was also attacked, though I got away, while riding my bike from BART in Hayward coming home from work. Havn't rode much public transportation since that experience. Public transportation is often in high crime areas.
Car accidents do happen, so there's danger there as well. I only had accidents in urban areas. Stressful conditions coupled with bad driving practices I suppose.
As a peer commented if you live in Silicon Valley, among other places, you live in the suburbs even if you can maybe walk to a few places.
But the suburb example is less obvious. Perhaps connecting with the world through your computer/smartphone more than 1:1 is one reason. Although not all suburbs are the same. In larger cities the population is high enough that they fit the same profile I described above for the city proper.
I used to live in a townhome in Kirkland Washington, ~10 minutes from Microsoft's main campus.
One year my wife and I made Christmas cookies and went door to door to hand them out. The vast majority of people shut their doors on us without saying a word, including some of my (at the time) fellow MS employees still wearing their badges from work that day.
A couple years ago I moved to Seattle proper. When we moved in, neighbors brought us over cookies.
The difference is astounding. People here talk to each other with quite a bit of frequency, neighborhoods organize block parties, BBQs, and other such events.
It isn't like the demographics of the people around me have changed, it is still largely engineers!
Edit: When looking at houses in Seattle, we went and visited this one house 3 times in quick succession, and on the 3rd visit neighbors came by and talked to us and told us about the neighborhood and said how much they'd love to have a young new family move in. Another couple with a young child across the street from the house went over to talk to us and described what it was like raising a family in that area of the city (all pleasant things, the house was in Magnolia for anyone who knows Seattle!)
I have a good friend who live in a suburb north of Seattle, he is one of the most outgoing and social people I know. Even he doesn't know his neighbors.
IMHO something about 10,000 sqft yards and deep setbacks destroys any hope for communities.
It certainly does not intrinsically do so; this was absolutely not my experience growing up in suburbia, and I don't appear to be alone in that. I'm glad you've had a better experience in Seattle proper, though; perhaps there is just some sort of urban/suburban culturual inversion at play!
None of my suburban friends report knowing their neighbors.
OK, so, in Seattle, I can walk to 3 different, large, parks. In the morning, I can choose which of the 2 local bakeries I want to walk to if I want to buy some fresh bread.
No big surprise, with all that walking going on, you see the same people day after day, and eventually you say hi. You pet their dog, you talk about how gardening is going, you invite people over for board games outside on the patio in the summer.
Meanwhile my friends outside the city have to drive to their "local" park and drive to their "local" stores. They don't know their neighbors because their lives consist of house->car->destination.
And while they are driving, I've stopped to pick berries from the tree hanging out of my neighbors yard (he doesn't mind, he loses more berries than he could ever pick himself) on the way to the grocery store to pick up whatever I need to cook for dinner that night.
Don't get me wrong, I spent over a dozen years living in Seattle's suburbs, there are advantages (40MPH speed limits! Get everywhere fast! The police are legit super nice to you if your driver's license has a local address on it!), but I feel more connected to people in the city.
I can easily see your neighbors in Kirkland assuming you were either real estate agents, sales people, or trying to convert them to another religion or something like that.
Edited for clarity.
Given that I had lived there for 6+ months, they should in the very least have recognized me!
It wasn't like we had just moved in or anything.
We actually found that a lot of the renters there were more friendly than the owners, and over time we made friends with some of the neighbors, largely those who had moved in from overseas.
Weirdly cynical assumption. Sounds like you alienated your neighbors and then retroactively made them the villains.
The small village in rural NM where I live generally has larger properties than you're describing, and people are really not "on top" of each other to any real extent. But for reasons that are hard to pin down, there's an expectation here that people will be neighborly - it's an expectation that is frequently broken, but persists anyway. We have community breakfasts, village cleanups, dinner gatherings, communal dog-walking schedules, book clubs and more.
By contrast, just 15 miles away in a geographically similar place, someone I know remarks with amazement at any description of life in our village. They say "just about everyone who lives here came here to be private. Nobody wants anything to do with anyone else".
So I think that some of what you're describing can be the result of a semi-self-sustaining culture of a place (a place as small as a block, sometimes). Although I'm a big believer in designing urban (and really, any residential) areas for better neighborhoods, I think that part of the equation is really independent of the physical nature of the place.
I doubt it's the case. I moved to outskirts from the city. Even with lower density and fewer people, 2 years in, I already know more people than I knew after 7 years in the same apartment. I also talk to and hang out with my neighbours much more. Community events are a thing here. Local FB groups are friendly and supportive, which is probably the biggest difference.
HOA's are far more common than they were in the 80's/90's (Google says they went from ~20% of homes in 1990ish to ~50% now). It really changes the risk/reward of friendship when your neighbors can arbitrarily force you to spend a whole weekend doing something dumb to please the HOA. It has happened, and I'd rather not repeat it.
The explosion of culture the internet brought on has also fragmented us. Shared interests are fairly uncommon because everyone is watching something different on Netflix, doing different hobbies because they can, etc. That's not totally a bad thing, but it does tend to make smalltalk bland.
Income inequality has also changed demographics. My neighbors are substantially older than me. There aren't even that many children in the neighborhood, a lot of them are retirees that presumably bought when the neighborhood was cheaper. Again, not totally a bad thing, but it means we don't even share nostalgia.
Of course, for a lot of them, I only know their dog's name, not the person's. /s
No, it's not enough, but it's sure better than not knowing the neighbors at all.
When I was a kid I was friends with my neighbours because we’d be out doing things and you had to run into them.
Now I can literally see movers move people into the apartment next to me. And a couple years later see them move them out and I’ll never have bumped into them.
The first rule of Witness Protection Club is: don't talk about Witness Protection Club.
All the kids on the street hang out together, playing games, kicking some soccer ball, going to the woods, etc. People on the street were so close together that it was possible to organize "cleaning the street" events from time to time where everyone would gather up with their gardening tools etc and we would just go through the whole street, cleaning up overgrowing grass, cutting out weeds on the forest border, etc.
I must say, looking back, this was a wonderful time and a GREAT environment to be raised in. I think that being a part of a small community like that is really important for mental wellbeing.
Unfortunately, all of that pretty much died along with my mother and grandmother. Other elderly people on the street died as well, the community loosened up, new people moved in and I rarely see them or know their names, they are not interested in random chatter on the street (at the rare occassion you ever meet them outside the house) and I don't have the courage to pick up my mother's wonderful idea of "coffee time". A bit of a shame, but I'm still trying to get to know the people around my place. The way things are going here in Poland, I might need to pick up Duolingo and launch some Ukrainian course though :)
Anyway, just venting
Fortunately, it's right now.
It's great when it turns out your neighbors are good people. I live in a rural area, on a 1/4 mile driveway up a wooded hill, and I'm very lucky that the other two families living up on the hill with us are great folks. We all hang out together, celebrate holidays together, share each other's properties like it is one big compound, and raised each other's kids. We've basically become one big family. It was a huge benefit in fighting off loneliness during covid to be able to be one big 'pod'.
But the last place I lived, the neighbors were kind of jerks, and after trying to be friendly with them for a while I just gave up. As they were the only neighbors around, I was kind of stuck until I moved.
""" The Screen and the Job have displaced almost everything else is our lives. Loneliness is just a primary symptom.
The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in things like SitComs on TV (just a bunch of friends or family hanging out) or Social Media on phones. It’s very easy to fill the social needs of right now with a Screen. But under even a minuscule amount of self reflection these are revealed as hollow substitutes for real human interaction.
The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. The average person has to consider all options in the light of both the current employer and the specter of tomorrow’s. Moving across the country for a high paying job? Great! Moving to be closer to friends? That’s a career killer.
No wonder we are lonely. We make choices in the short term that optimize happiness, often at the expense of our relationships. Ghosting is not just for dates now. Then turn around and make choices in the long term that optimize employability at the expense of all else. """
Perhaps digital world is a new kind of quazi-religion?
I know there's something better out there, but I have to look things up, make plans, get dressed, get there. It will make me happier, but it's hard to beat instant gratification.
Zoning calls them "single family homes" but it doesn't call it "nuclear family homes" or anything like that. Single family homes are more about American individualism[0] and not wanting to share anything if you don't absolutely have to. That's why, outside of at most a couple aberrations like NYC (where multi-generational families live in condos all together or else fragmented around a neighborhood but still within walking/subway distance of each other), we have a fetishized (less so in recent decades) car and road culture and insane density-averse zoning policy instead of shared infrastructure and dense, affordable housing.
[0] or at least, as idolized by those who made the zoning rules so long ago. so... go change them! Get into local office. Get into state office. I'm no iconoclast, but there are definitely some long-standing norms and "traditions" in our society that could stand to go.
I don’t know if this is an American quality specifically. It could just be that Americans can (or used to be able to) afford it, whereas most other people in most other societies never could.
For example, what young married couple would want to live in their parents house if they can afford their own? All of my extended family grew up in intergenerational households because they were poor immigrants who had to make do, but all the cousins became doctors/lawyers/engineers/etc and got their own house.
That is not to say that my cousins would not let their elderly parents stay with them if the need arises, but being financially independent does allow people to do what they want.
Anyone who has kids and sometimes wants a break.
> All of my extended family grew up in intergenerational households because they were poor immigrants who had to make do, but all the cousins became doctors/lawyers/engineers/etc and got their own house.
How much of that is just unconsciously going along with American culture? America is structurally set up to fragment your social relationships, especially among higher achieving, professional people. You go to school and seek jobs across the country, etc.
I’m also an immigrant and I followed the same trajectory. Came to America, was already disconnected from family. Went to school hundreds of miles away, etc. Kind of by accident, I ended up living 10 minutes from my parents, in a neighborhood where most people don’t have a college degree. We’re over at my parents several times a week. And multiple families in my neighborhood have parents in the neighborhood or rent a house from their parents who live nearby.
But that does not require living in the same house. Having grandparents a few doors down (my preference) or a few minutes away is good enough for this purpose. Living under the same roof involves a ton more tradeoffs.
I am quite confident that occasionally having someone watch my kid would not offset the extent to which my parents (or my in-laws) and I would begin to grate on each other.
And then there is the lack of privacy. Your parents who came from a different generation trying to tell you how to live your life (ie my parents are very religiously conservative). I would have to deal with my mom and my wife walking on eggshells to not offend each other. I would have to deal with my dad wondering why I would waste money paying people to cut my lawn, etc.
That can't be the problem that comes to mind when dealing with a parent. I love my parents, but if that's the extent of your annoyance, you got off real real easy.
Did I mention the whole religious conservative thing and how they would probably grit their teeth when my wife and I would just casually talk about going out to dinner with “her friend and his husband”?
I find it harder and harder to relate to Americans the older I get. I was at my cousin’s wedding recently, and a friend of their family has hassling me for being in a mixed marriage (we’re Bangladeshi, and my wife is an American). I sucked it up and was polite because I put on my big boy pants that day. Blood, and community are more important than abstract ideological debates.
But guess what your anecdote says? You grinned and put up with it for a day and you went home. Now imagine dealing with that everyday.
But guess how long I would “put up with” anyone - including my parents or any other relatives - questioning who I marry? Yes, I checked my parents for questioning “our choice of friends” - ie a same sex couple
I find it crazy how many people sacrifice their own happiness trying to make their extended family (ie anyone who is not their spouse or minor children) happy.
There is also a reason there is such a brain drain in the US from small towns to larger cities once you go to college and get exposed to the wider world.
1. Childcare is a lot easier with multiple people
2. Experience makes child care much easier
3. Principal-agent problem for child care is absent with grandparents. Grandparents obey parents' choices in broad strokes while providing a high degree of attention.
4. Fulfilling for grandparents
Overall, I'm in my mid 30s and watching the experience of my cousins, part of my desire to get going on the kids thing is that I want my parents to be able to help before they are too old.
Taking each of these and creating a “suburban neighborhood” area, a retirement home, a shopping complex, and a school complex and making each of them require a personal vehicle to get to is solely responsible for fucking up America and other Anglosphere countries to a degree.
Hell is other people.
I way prefer to live in low density areas and I do. If I can see my neighbours house, that's too close (my neighbours are actually wonderful). I live on the edge of a suburb with a goal to push out further into the rural areas. Where I'm trying to get to is a more commune style property where those that are closest to us can come and stay or live, with shared spaces.
You shouldn't try and push your extroverted views on other people. You can go and live in high density areas with all the potential zombies if you want, but don't make me do that please.
The situation is currently reversed in much of the USA. Building dense housing is forbidden by regulation.
People like you have forced your preference on everyone else.
No one's making you do anything. So sick and tired of seeing this persecution complex, mainly from conservatives. "They're forcing me to eat the bugs! They're forcing me never to own a car! They're forcing me into a pod!" It's the only response you can muster when others with different opinions from yourself discuss different ways of living. Get a life, seriously.
Of course, the drawbacks to personal health and well-being and societal stability are immense. But it’s really nice, too. Like, sitting in a massive basement with three TV’s while the grill is going is nice. Not bringing groceries in from the rain is nice. Having a fenced back yard for a dog is nice. Having guest space and individual rooms for both kids and a walk-in closet is nice.
As advocates for better cities, we need to spend a lot more time helping people see the possibilities of thoughtful urban living. A lot of people simply can’t imagine what it would be like to “give up” the luxuries of their sprawl in order to get more proximity to, well, friends.
I think the vast swaths of single family homes have much more to do with restrictive single-family zoning rather than just because there's demand for it. In many areas, there is clearly demand for more high density housing as well, but often mixed use developments are not available under restrictive zoning laws.
I hope someone more qualified than I could expand on how the FHA influenced the development of single family homes, along with the history of redlining.
People like what they like, stop telling them they're wrong for liking it! We're not all able-bodied extroverts that are unbothered by noise.
Here all the new developments suck. No parks, no shops, so close to each other that they might as well be underground…
If anything, single home units are on the edge of the city and usually don't have any public transportation, and yet people still build a lot there.
Zero supporting infrastructure (anything I've mentioned in the previous comment), and the design of the streets sucks as well. You get into a case similar to US suburbia, where if you want to reach an apartment building 10m across from another you need to go around half a mile because no one thought of building pedestrian access from one street to another.
Also most new development isn't "single family homes", it's "10 story cheaply built human concrete farms" because that's the most profitable (and also the mayor is in cahoots with the real estate mafia).
There is a lot more to talk about the corruption of Romanian cities but I'll leave it here.
We paid about the same price that we paid for our house. In return, we pay one CDD fee that covers all utilities, minor maintenance access to three pools, restaurants and convenience stores on site, a gym, and a lake.
Before we had to do all that ourselves - including maintenance of my home gym with cardio equipment.
We got rid of our cars and we literally live out of four suitcases. One suitcase holds “work clothes” since I do travel to client sites occasionally.
We are at home five months out of the year and we fly around the US staying in midrange extended stay hotels the rest of the year.
It is so freeing to have a “decontented” life. Our spending really hasn’t gone up, just reallocated.
I have to say I'm envious of anyone that "downsizes" to a 120m² home.
Sure, I'd like that too.
But also, how about 3000 square feet apartment with top-notch sound insulation and a balcony, with an underground garage?
That sounds like it would have most of the benefits, I would actually prefer it, as I don't care about yards. And with 10-20 story buildings, you could still have quite a large population density, with cafes, grocery stores etc. on the ground floor.
But that was nice construction. Very solid. Good sound insulation.
Lived in America since, and I think local construction just doesn't have that standard to it. It's not that British construction is great. It's not. But there's range. Higher end places are better.
In San Francisco, by comparison, lots of so-called luxury is rubbish.
Amusingly, there is an old mental hospital being revamped into apartments which has 1.5 foot thick concrete walls.
It may be the first truly soundproof apartment complex. :)
That's not helpful and it's woefully ignorant of people's opinions.
That's the picture that needs painting. One of town life. Not necessarily apartment life.
Savannah, Asheville, old streetcar suburbs in general, small college towns ...
Those are the kind of urban environment that are an easy sell. Calm traffic, safe mobility options, diverse mixed housing options, ... Lot's of existing cities can move in that direction. Nothing too crazy or extreme.
Most people seem to optimize living near their parents or adult children, which probably also makes them happier: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...
I'd love having some of my friends be my neighbors. But I had to move cross country just to find a partner because living in Silicon Valley was going to leave me an incel. (No surprise - I leave and I've had far more partners than I ever did in SV) I'll move back eventually with a partner in tow but the same issues will arise.
My professor friends can't afford a $2-3m house. My friends who work as nanny, acoustics engineer, events manager, local government staff, IT at local school, etc. also cannot afford the suburb I would be living in where the average home is $2.5m. They instead leave the area, live in apartments, or live with their parents. The few who are still in these professions but aren't shackled by these issues are over 50 years old and come from old money. (We're not particularly close)
Now, I'm in NYC and shockingly - I have quite a few friends who aren't too far away (some are only 2-3 blocks!) but we are all painfully similar. We work in high paid jobs, we're single men, and we have similar interests. It's not the worst thing but I'm getting a very homogenous group of friends while living here.
Why though? What is the appeal of SV when you could live anywhere?
You can have friends nearby if you make them after you move in and are happy with a social circle comprised of people almost entirely in the same field, with a few trust funders mixed in.
If you live in an older hood like UWS/UES there will also be some old timers mixed in who bought/secured a lease in the 80s~90s and maybe from other fields. Or more often than not, they are lawyers and doctors or other high paying but not-quite banking/consulting/software.
Growing up outside the city, my friends dads were, in no particular order - teacher, principal, engineer, auto mechanic, IT, roofer, etc.
I'm in my thirties now and sometimes it feels like there's plenty of time to figure this out. But most of my closest friends are somewhat older than me. Almost none of them have started a family in the traditional sense. Most of the people they were friends with drifted of in their own little family worlds over time. Another good chunk of former friends pursued professional/academic careers which led them to move quite some distances.
And I can really understand their fear that the younger people they befriended (like me) will do the same (which I and my long-term partner are ruling out but they heard a lot of people saying that before doing it anyway).
I find it comforting that we talk about this from time to time and try to reassure each other that there will be a shared future as we get all older together.And I sometimes think this wouldn't happen if we were all the same age. It kind of helps getting the perspective of older friends which have lost track of a whole lot of people during their lifes. At my current age I can feel the impacts getting closer. It's oftentimes a really short way from "friends for life" to "acquaintances from the past".
And I wouldn't mind at all if the roomate analogy of the author would be literally that shared future:
> It’s not dissimilar to a big house with lots of roommates, or even a college dorm — it’s just that the living areas are separated by a few blocks instead of a few feet.
On the other end, I've also dealt with many long-term couples without kids who have gone through messy breakups after 5-15 years of relationship, which often left all of their friendships in tatters, if if they didn't move away entirely and cut all contact.
Add to that that many of the single folks I'm friends with are increasingly desperately trying to find a partner and sacrificing time with their friends to make that happen.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm now in a zone where I don't want to move because I don't have somewhere to move to that has more than a couple people I know, and I wouldn't want to lean on them so hard to be my social connection, but increasingly the folks I know where I live now are leaving, physically or emotionally, to make their own life without me.
It's understandable but consistently brutal how fast you can go from someone's best friend to someone they haven't remembered to respond to in months as soon as they have a family of their own.
Priorities also change over a lifetime. I used to be the perpetual single person always losing friends that start a family -- now I am the person starting a family and losing what I have in common with the singles. It isn't that I don't enjoy their company; its that priorities change, family comes first, and there's hardly any time left to keep those friendships alive. Families are black-holes for free time, especially as societal expectations have evolved for what is expected of both men and women in the family.
Having been on both sides of this fence, I've had to adapt and continue making new friends. When I was single, I found new single friends that had time for hanging out, video games, bars and parties. With a family now, I make friends that are similarly time-constrained, that can do stuff like double dates or kid hangouts.
The hardest part is actually making new friends, but it is a critical skill if these sorts of things bother you. If you can make new friends, you can move anywhere. I do a lot of volunteer work which naturally leads to 1) meeting a lot of new people and 2) meeting "regulars", which has been a great source of new friendships for myself. It took me a long time to get to this point though -- I spent most of my 20s and early 30s just watching my existing friend group slowly die off, wasting time replacing it with online interactions instead of just going out and finding new friendships.
Maybe you were best friends with a guy 10 years ago. But gradually, the guy has changed fundamentally as a person, and you may not be as confortable with the guy as you used to be.
Hopelessly trying to continue the relationship would serve no purpose.
I'm grateful being around people who know whom I was 10-20 years ago. Some of them know me almost half of my life. And it can sometimes help being reminded of that past-self by other people.
Everything is designed around cars. Cars require lots of space, particularly at the destination (parking). So everything is built spread out (sprawl). Now you can choose between living in a tiny apartment or something bigger, but far away from everything. When you are younger, enough of your friends might choose the apartment and you can live near friends. This is for many what makes the college experience special. As you grow older, more will choose (perhaps including yourself!) to live far away. One day you realise that you have no proximate friends.
Cars, man.
- Live outside of dense urban environments while still working in one
- Travel to visit friends and family not living down the street
- Not be dependent on shaky public transport infrastructure (US)
- Travel where public transport isn't available
Everyone owning a car might not be the most efficient or pleasant solution, but certainly there are more productive attitudes to have than "cars are bad and I hate cars because they're bad".
Cars are bad and I hate cars because they're the worst idea humanity ever had.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/people-wh...
> In LGBTQ circles, placing a high value on friendship has long been common. Carroll, Rivera, and several other people I interviewed for this story, absorbed the idea of “chosen family”—that those besides blood can decide to become kin—from this community. Though he and Rivera never considered dating, Carroll had already learned to be at ease with nonsexual intimate relationships with men. In other words, he had come to appreciate something that was once widely understood—as Godbeer, the historian, puts it, that “we can love without lusting.”
In my own experience as part of one, these relationships can have a sexual character, but usually only as a part of it, not the core. I myself plan to move closer to my friends once the opportunity is available.
This would force them to actively seek out friends (perhaps facing a similar situation to them) and value them more due to them already knowing what it is like to be without them.
I think that would also help alleviate the problem significantly is if we were able to meet people in safe spaces somewhat randomly without people feeling like it’s an affront or something
Just two example out of millions: Uber reduces the need to have friends drive you to the airport. ChatGPT reduces the need to ask your friends about their areas of expertise.
However, ALL the kids of that generation have none of that connection to each other. We would feel like we are imposing if we called a cousin’s friend in a different city to hang out or stay over. We prefer to stay in nice hotels, and fly to exotic destinations. And I don’t think we can re-create the type of relationships our parents had with their extended tribe, no matter what, since we are all very independent.
tl;dr friendship is formed when there is alignment of values/personality (but not in the way people always expect), and also when a lot of time it put in.
The time thing is powers of 10. IIRC, 10 hours to get to know someone as an acquittance, 100 hours is a casual friend, 1000 hours is a good friend, and 10,000 hours is a lifelong friend you can really depend on.
The way to fast track this process is to create a shared feeling of oppression. Military boot camps rely on this technique to rapidly form group bonds. It is the same idea behind quite a few team building outings as well. It is also why college dormmates can form long lasting relationships, lots of time spent together during a period of high stress.
Same goes for people working at high pressure startups together.
But look at how we have life set up in a US suburb, where all our travel is in an environment where we cannot talk to anyone, most of our commerce is done in places designed to get you in and out as fast as possible, and where employees rotate often enough it might not be all so easy to ever make them register as people, much less build relationships with you. Stopping anywhere is inconvenient enough that that few people spend a significant amount of time lounging anywhere other than their home. So where are you, exactly, supposed to make friends? You have to be trying pretty hard.
People's best bets is to pick up a hobby where people meet regularly, like an exercise class, or a boardgame meetup. Then you have enough people that the probabilities of finding someone compatible go up.
Safe spaces would include anywhere people that share a common interest gather, for me thats a climbing gym I go to regularly. Volunteering is also great in regards to meeting people that share similar values.
That is, to be friends means to be able to find time and interesting stuff for each other with some regularity, on a scale of weeks, not years. Adult life often leaves little time for that, especially now that various forms of easy-to-reach entertainment compete with friendships. Another obvious bottleneck is having (young) kids. To open up is actually a non-zero effort and a noticeable time expenditure; plus you have to allocate time to listen to your friend, too :) Without regular nurture a friendship withers. (Ask me how I know.)
Kids just have so much more time in their hands. (Unless they are also overloaded like tiny adults, then they also have trouble finding friends and, importantly, hanging out with them.)
Being severed from your own culture create a link.
And with people sharing a language, it’s even quicker.
A common ice breaker is to gently make fun of American.
Interesting point: I would probably never have talked with those folks back home. And they would have not either. It’s actually refreshing. We see each other back home as well.
—-
My actual point: when I come home, I started to behave the same way. And .. it kinda works.
The idea of safe spaces implies that the existence of unsafe spaces. If you’ll excuse me pontificating for a moment, it might be useful to try to reframe this outlook; if you wait to feel safe before taking chances with people you’ll miss out on many potential interactions and relationships.
I also seem to attract utter scum, I had to tow some crack heads off the local beach and tow them to work, I got their number and could have been friends with them but who wants to be friends with crackheads?
The other people my partner could be friends are in completely different stages of their lives (e.g. gonna be grandmas soon).
At this stage in my life (36) I've become weary of humans.
I think one problem is that in the recent 50-100 years (at least in the "west") we messed up what family means.
In the past it was a non small support group, consisting of old and young people, people you are related to _and people you are not related to_ but which where "like family" for you and other family members.
But today the picture of family (as a support net) is often parents + children, maybe grant parent/grant children if they exist and that's it. I have seen enough situations where even the long term spouse of a child wasn't seen anymore as part of the family.
To make matters worse the internet is fully of people trying to spread hate and division, telling you to not accept at all anyone doing anything you don't agree with. But family isn't about accepting or finding it good what they do it's about being there to help them if they really need help, and in turn them being also there for you if needed.
I'm trying on Bumble BFF mode, but not having tons of luck.
This came automatically for us as our kids got old enough to go to school. You naturally meet lots of parents in your community with kids the same ages as yours, through school activities and extracurriculars.
That not only influences your ability to leave near friends you have already made, but also opportunities to make new friends by finding events or groups that match your interests.
I just make friends with whoever is nearby. People I work with. Neighbours. People from the Curling club. I don't really feel anything about it, positive or negative. If someone puts effort into preserving the friendship, I commit equal effort... though as adults with kids, it rarely works out.
I guess for me, the actual individuals I'm friends with is not the invariant.
I would frame this that I have much love for these people, but that we are on different paths for awhile. Several times our paths have come back together and I have cherished the renewed connection. Sometimes the paths never cross again.
I recently learned of two mentors and friends who were very important to me passing away. Our time together was 10 and 20 years ago respectively and we hadn’t kept in touch. I have regretful feelings about this, but also acceptance that our lives were only going to be parallel for a limited time.
when I first moved out of my home town and was single, there would be stretches of days without seeing a smiling face or having a live conversation, but I have somehow gotten used to that - until a visited home when I saw my buddies smile it suddenly reminded me how sad my life was in the new city. but when I live close by to my friends, we wouldn't get together often neither, despite the intense trust we have with each other.
i think the alienation/loneliness is the result of being exposed to so much information; minute differences in a persons ability to absorb information (thus pick up new values/hobbies/interests) used to result in very little practical change in someone's day to day life. nowadays, time i spend with old friends (in whom i still place the greatest trust and care) often consist of reminiscing about the past. if I want to talk about new interest or hobbies of mine, I have to find new friends.
A few of us moved into 3 apartments in the same apartment complex, and it's really great. Other close friends have a place that's 20 minutes walk away, so we frequently do things together.
Of course, we live in the Bay Area where the housing market is shit, so we recognize how lucky we are to afford our situation.
It was much easier for me when I lived in a small city in Europe. The population density and walkability of the place made it.
(Incentivize more building! Abolish CA Prop 13!)
Here are a few interesting things to read on the topic of community design that promotes social interaction and cohesion:
The Making of Columbia, MD and Reston, VA (https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...)
Jane Jacob’s on the importance of neighborhoods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs) (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-death-and-life-of-great...)
Greenbelt, MD (https://www.greenbeltmuseum.org/greenbelt-history)
I wish our model would have caught on. We do a lot of things right here.
> I’m not talking about crime, don’t be ridiculous. I am talking about states that have criminalized or significantly curtailed gender-affirming care and body autonomy.
This is an interesting question, but you're not going to get the answer from a terminally-online culture-war-addled substacker who thinks that gender-affirming care has a bigger impact on where "marginalized people" choose to live than crime.
Worrying about crime is "ridiculous?" For marginalized people -- who are the principal victims of crime, who bear the brunt of criminality in the United States, who express in poll after poll that it's of primary concern to them? No, surely it is a lack of access to gender-affirming care that's motivating the black exodus from North St. Louis.
This is simply not serious.
Violent crime affects 100% of the residents of North St. Louis, I assure you, and is constantly front of mind.
And there are far more poor African Americans living in high-crime neighborhoods than there are people worried about gender-affirming care. Frankly, it’s not even close and it’s a sign of something very goofy and broken that this is even a question.
And crucially, even if this weren’t true, it’s no justification for pooh-poohing concerns about crime. It’s evidence we’re dealing with a culture-war-poisoned weirdo who believes concern about crime is some kind of fake right-wing issue, when poll after poll show that it is a primary concern of marginalized people living in high-crime cities.
It doesn’t mean those other things aren’t important; it just means that this was written by somebody who doesn’t understand the relative prevalence/importance of these issues within literally orders of magnitude. So how could they possibly make reasonable inferences about the causes of related social issues?
At our previous house, we were also very good friends with our neighbours. Our kids played together a lot, we had dinner together frequently. But our house was getting too small, so we moved somewhere else in the same neighbourhood, and immediately after, they moved to a completely different town.
I'd love to have my friends as neighbours. I'd love to become friends with my neighbours. I'd love to live in some sort of community group where we do lots of things together. But that's not a common thing apparently, and I'm way too introverted to make it happen.
It's the same as people saying they need a car, they can't move because they bought a house, they don't have time because they have kids, they don't have money because their loan and alemony is taking everything.
They prioritized some things without thinking about the consequences. Or they didn't even prioritized, they just stumble upon it and went with it.
We have a group of friends in the city which for the last 10 years actively moved in the same district to stay close to each others.
This has a price as well.
But we decided on it, it didn't happen by mistake than 10 people rented, or even bought, in less a mile radius.
Some have children, some are around 50, some travel, some are poor... There is always something.
But they designed their life.
Otherwise, I'll echo the others around here who talked about the suspicion of others that gets in the way. I live in an area where if I go to a coffee shop at any given time, the chances of seeing someone I know -- other than the barista, of course -- is fractionally small, much less running into someone enough times to form a genuine friendship. It's hectic.
I read the Atomic Habits & Tiny Habits few years back and one thing I learned from there is to remove resistances from the habits that one would want to build. Distance is a resistance in building/maintaining relationships. If one want to build better relationships, reducing the physical distance between friends does help.
The best parks you get are Central Park in Manhattan, or Prospect Park in Brooklyn, but they get pretty busy in the summer.. SNL had a pretty on-the-nose skit about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZhjIyGmrRQ
By contrast, European cities seem to have farms/parks/countryside much more in reach.
Further, in terms of "living near friends", spending almost 2 decades in NYC.. it's no more true than in the suburbs I grew up or the countryside I escape to on weekends. NYC is so sprawling, expensive, and transit so commute-oriented.. that outside a few years in your 20s.. your friends end up 30-90min away in all directions.
My wife's best friend lives in the same borough, and is a 40min drive from us. Worse by train, as we have to go back into Manhattan and transfer trains to get to her.
The closest any of our friends lived was 10 years ago when we were a 20min walk in UWS from my wife's other best friend.
Even for friends we made in the city at say the gym, we'd all live 20 blocks apart. And of course work friends were commuting from all directions within and without the city.
Interestingly, college friends who I no longer live near are my most sustainable and closest friends. I still largely believe that the strength of a friendship is largely a function of how long you spent with that person, via your own volition involved in a mutual struggle.
This is why IMO making friends as an adult is hard, because you're either forced to be around them at work (and work relationships are notoriously transactional / forced) or generally if you meet a mutual friend you're trading on some kind of mutual similarity in work / hobbies or because they offer you something in return.
For now, I'll keep living where I want. Who ever wrote this seems to have never lived with a friend as a roommate only to realize that spending too much time with a friend can lead to resentment or the end of the friendship entirely.
And I'm not sure it's THAT new -- seems more like in the past, people befriended those they lived near, rather than necessarily moving near people they were already friends with. Institutions like churches and other community programs facilitated this. Meanwhile, a crumbling or defunding of such programs or just lack of interest (thinking "community house" activities from my youth), coupled with the divisive effect of social media, seem to have had a real chilling effect on this community building. That, and sheer density. Anyone that went from a small school to a big school knows that sometimes it's easier to feel all alone on a campus of 40,000 than it is on a campus of 300 (unless you're just totally ostracized at the small school).
> When we talk about limited mobility, we have to talk about states that are actively and legislatively hostile to marginalized people.
And then proceeds to frame the choice of "where to live?" as solely within a person's control, "What’s holding you back, and what conversations do you have with yourself about when and whether that will change?"
> And so, a prompt for discussion: What would have to change, for you to move closer to the people who nourish you, who support you, who make your life better and easier in so many ways?
I'm getting fatigued with seeing/hearing this meaningless virtue signaling. It usually takes the form of, "We see you," "We acknowledge particular challenges for certain people," and then proceeding to make a point that either completely disregards or directly contradicts (in this case) the speaker's/writer's acknowledgement of racism/hostility/lack of safety/etc.
This article is some privileged person nonsense.
Something like that.
Chances are thus that most friendships will be separated over time. That's not even considering relationships that start remotely in the first place.
For a childhood friendship to survive locality, their parents must not move, both you and the friend must not go to college anywhere, both you and the friend must not move anywhere else for a job, you must both live in the same part of the city and/or take jobs in the same part of the city, and for the entire duration up to the present, economic and family matters must not move both of you.
I imagine most people can list off their childhood friendships and see how each one eventually succumbs to something above. By the time you are middle-aged, your old friends (and many times family) will be split up all over the country or even the world. Most people I know that maintain a close-knit friend group are very much in the group that are born and raised in some tiny rural town and never leave or they have transitioned to long-distance e-friendships.
Unfortunately, the current form factor of affordable units (sub $500 standalone units like the quest2) intimidates nearly everyone including techies on HN; most people refuse to even try it. Of the few brave people willing to try it, most don’t go beyond 10-15 minutes.
The other major problem is affordability. While it isn’t a problem for many people in our bubble, most people will balk at spending $2000 or more on bleeding edge tech.
AR and VR currently are at the same stage of personal computers in the late 1970s, only a few die hard techies like me can see its current and future potential
Anyhoo.. anyone that wants advice about making friends locally my only offering is go volunteer at a local community organization, help run the local community hall or skating rink, you'll meet interesting people with pro-social views. If you find people like that to be around what you find is that being their friends is pretty easy.
Hard to take an author who states something like this as a serious commentator.
>I’m not talking about crime, don’t be ridiculous.
While gender-affirming care and bodily autonomy is (obviously) a critical point, I am very much also talking about factoring in crime. There is no way I'd live in SFO/LA/NYC/SEA.
When we talk about limited mobility, we have to talk about places where that kind of physical interaction has undue risk attached.
When we need to/want to get together, we do. We live 15 mins drive of each other, even in a sprawled city. It's fine. In fact, it's ideal.
Just make friends wherever you live. Everywhere my wife and I have moved, we’ve just intentionally done things to meet people in our neighborhood. (I.e. Going for lots of walks in the evenings, attending community events, etc)
We always manage to make a few good friends that we organically hang out with the way the author describes.
I think living communally is cool, and if you can get that worked out, all the more power to you. But it’s very difficult to do for the most part due to the societal norms that dictate how most live their lives.
What I'm saying is that it goes the other direction sometimes: physical proximity can create friendship when you make a commitment to a place and make a concerted effort to take care of your neighbors.
I think the article also doesn't consider another possibility that I would toss in there: your friends and you may not have as much in common as you used to.
We probably chanced across our close friends one day because we were living or doing something nearby. And introduced ourselves. And sometimes friendships spark.
The article is great but I feel it could also recognize the birds in hand nearby.
"And if you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with." -Steven Stills.
That would mean people can stay in their neighborhoods and get to know people over time.
Really though? Anecdotally I feel the opposite... Proximity tends to breed opportunities for conflict. Personally, I really appreciate the distinction between neighbors that you have a more "professional" relationship with versus friends who maybe you have fewer day-to-day contact with but can be more intimate emotionally...
There might be folks that like high density living, but please understand that there are others that prefer the opposite. It might be due to personality type or stage of life but there is no one size fits all.
What you seek is the benefits of relationship without any of the drawbacks. But they come as a package deal.
The original title of this post was "You'd Be Happier Living Closer to Friends." which I disagree with. It has since been changed to "Why don’t more people live close to friends?" which feels like a much more reasonable inquiry.
The matter of fact is not everyone wants to be social and connected all the time. While it might be interesting to discuss how the modern world limits people who do enjoy being more close to their friends, my point is that it is critical to also recognize that, no, sometimes you'd be less happy living closer to friends.
Less formalized relationships like friendships have less defined obligations, so it may be hard to negotiate who makes the effort of moving to bring the friends' residences in geographical proximity.
Of course, perspective. I'm in a "big city" right now, smaller than Reno, and it is the biggest city I've lived in.
Salt Lake City is even smaller by that metric, with only 200k people. What gives?
Well, that's why we measure metropolitan areas instead of cities themselves. If your metro area is in the top 100 in the US, then it's bigger than Reno/Sparks by a considerable margin.
Now, "big city" is 180-200k. I wouldn't know about where it ranks in the US, as the reason I went to a "big city" was because I moved out of the US.
The basic premise of the article is fine, living within a reasonable distance of friends makes a lot of sense, but some parts of it are extreme. Most people wouldn't buy a house with a friend because they have a wife, husband or significant other with whom they either currently live, or are working towards living with.
What the _hell_ does that mean? That is extremely racist.
Materially life sucked; but less shit to worry about, and you had the stuff that mattered: relationships. Couldn't get anywhere in that sort of world without them -- so everyone made an effort to cultivate friends, or atleast many acquaintances.
Now? You don't need friends -- you have money. Neither are you willing to suffer through another's perceived faults. Everyone is quick to turn others into persona non gratas because of silly things like political views, or a certain character quirk that drives the neurotic insane, or the way they dress, speak, or act.
Doesn't help that it starts at the familial level. If your family isn't large or your family hasn't made the effort to cultivate relationships, then you're less likely to be exposed to other people, and build your own from there. +1 to how most American families are tiny, and most aren't intimate with their extended family. No one knows how to get along with other people. Everyone has to be a perfect piece of furniture to be allowed a place in the dining room of one's life.
And who has the time? There's so much shit to do. Gotta spend all my free time building up my career. My neighbours? Why would I waste a perfectly good evening drinking and talking about life, when I could go to my company's happy hour to schmooze with my colleagues... or better yet: get a good night's rest so I can give my 100% to my company's: shareholders/c-suite/founders/whatever. My neighbours aren't gonna get me that promotion -- so fuck em.
Shit, my house needs renovations. I gotta bring my kids to piano recital. I gotta get a repair man for the washer. I gotta buy new clothes, because my old ones are starting to fall apart. I gotta bring my car for maintenance. I gotta watch entertainment because I'm so fucking exhausted from selling my mind for the privilege of being able to stay alive. Gotta set up a doctor's appointment because I got RSI in my hands. Gotta call up my insurance company because they denied another fucking claim.
Material prosperity is a pox on the human soul.
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a...
Just because you know a big word doesn’t mean you have to use it.
Nuclear families are just what’s left after stripping away larger families which have been the norm throughout human history.
I've tried but it's just impossible to make this sort of idea work unless you're terminally solipsistic or everyone you care about already comes from a very small social circle. The second-order effects kill it.
In my view this illustrates one of the great advantages of pair bonding: You only have to coordinate your decisions with one person.
But in all seriousness, living near your friends isn’t a mathematical impossibility. People commonly did this simply out of virtue of never leaving the villages that they were born into.