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Comment by lannisterstark | Hacker News Reader

>My neighborhood

I have a question. What kind of place do you live in? Is it houses that are apart by some distance -lawns/treelines separating y'all etc-, is it houses that are built next to each other, is it duplexes/townhomes etc?

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Excellent question. I live in a neighborhood where each house has 1 acre of land, so a couple hundred feet between houses? Maybe 100-150 houses in the neighborhood. Perfectly flat, few to no big trees or shrubs that would obscure a house - it's in a desert, after all.

What's funny is I picked it because I was tired of having bad neighbors in my previous city. I told my wife this way, I can have bad neighbors, but at least they'll be bad neighbors way over there (pointing). Nearly everyone I've met in this neighborhood said that they picked it for the same reason. And they are the best neighbors I've ever had. So...try to find a neighborhood full of people who want to be away from neighbors?

In a typical evening, how many neighbors walk by?

I used to live in a suburb with literally 10x the density, and the only time I ever saw my immediate neighbors was if we both happened to be walking from our front doors to our cars at the same time.

As it gets very hot here, people generally only go out for walks at two times of day, which makes it easier - early morning, and evening. In a typical evening, we'd probably see 10-15 people go by. Most walking a dog or pushing a stroller around. We don't have sidewalks here - there's so little traffic everyone just walks in the street.

This question alludes to thoughts about front-yard design space. As houses get closer together, residents still want both connection and privacy. A raised area (porch, patio, etc), frequently provides this. With a raised porch that goes right to the sidewalk, a resident could move their chair close to the edge to talk to pedestrians or move chair away from sidewalk toward house for less talking.

The playborhood people did a similar thing to GP: "Mike also made another simple-but-radical move: In a neighborhood in which front yards are for admiration only, Mike installed a picnic table, close to the sidewalk, where he and his family often sat, so that people walking by would have to talk to them." https://archive.is/uLa77#selection-749.0-749.254

Maybe I'm inferring a subtext here, but I think you're asking about how environment facilitates this. It's definitely true that homes with lawns make this easier than say apartments. Part of this is that you're more likely to spend time outside owning a home as you need to simply work on the yard. But the main causal factor is likely just seeing people frequently. Like one reason it was easier to make friends in school was simply because you sat next to people and see them every day. That builds relationships. The same thing happens with work, you spend 8+ hrs a day there with the same people. Some businesses try to curb this, which is curbing natural human interactions and others encourage it too much which feels forced. Weirdly the most significant factor to building relationships is spending time with people. More so than things like religion (correlates because time in church), politics, or other things that we think are major barriers and encourages us to turn to bubbles.

Right, I currently live in a townhouse and as the other posters posted, the only time we see our neighbors is when they get out of the car and go inside.

On the other hand, when I used to live in a single-floor-only apartment complex (more 'two apartments in a single building' built together), I used to interact with my neighbors quite a lot.

I do eventually want to move to a State where there is less brown and more green (arizona rn - so the prospect of sitting outside isn't that great during summer evenings), and where places are a bit more spaced apart. I like my privacy, but would still like to have okay-ish relationship with neighbors.

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