Third places and neighborhood entrepreneurship (2024)
nber.org
nber.org
What are some examples of real third places in major US cities?
As a teetotaling atheist, I moved to Berlin for the universities and night clubs, as there are tons of social events associated with both.
The one and only social activity that has saved me from this road so far has been a few meetup groups that I frequent.
As we get older it’s more important than ever to avoid alcohol. We don’t have the organ margin we used to. All that bullshit about “a glass of wine a day is good for you” was fake.
Agree with you about the benefits of avoiding alcohol.
Also, separately, if the people you are hanging out with can’t take no for an answer, get better friends. Friends don’t pressure friends to poison themselves for camaraderie.
There is no pressure. I just tell people I come down to socialize - mostly with couples and guys who show up. I am married and no matter what it comes off as creepy to start conversations with women and often their husbands are around.
Since I am friends with bartender and people see me talking to him and it’s obvious that we know each other , it doesn’t come off the wrong way.
I keep hearing this and completely disagree.
I assert that within an hour of any location in the entire united states not so remote that supplies have to be delivered by airplane (so excluding rural Alaska and outlying territorial possessions) there are numerous third spaces.
As a benchmark I use the small town of 400 that you've never heard of abutting Hoosier National Forest in VERY rural southern Indiana that my grandparents lived in, which I spent every summer for over a decade in.
Within a 40-ish minute drive of that small town there are:
* two astronomy clubs: Evansville Astronomical Society and Louisville Astronomical Society
* two amateur radio clubs: Clark County Amateur Radio Club and Bullitt Amateur Radio Society
* four public libraries: Crawford, Paoli, Harrison County, Washington Carnegie. The closest library (15 minutes) has a makerspace with an Epilog laser, Brother Needle Embroidery Machine, Roland Large Format Printer, BambuLabs Carbon 3d Printer, Elegoo Saturn SLA 3d Printer, Cricut, Sewing machine, and Serger. If you're like me and didn't know what a Serger is, it is a machine that sews borders and embroidery onto things.
Plus an Anime & Manga club (in rural southern indiana!??!) scrapbooking, sewing, and multiple book clubs.
* five conservation clubs: Duff, Huntingburg, Mariah Hill, Livonia, and Schnellville (these are shooting, fishing, and hiking clubs in case you're not aware)
* too many to list civic organizations like rotary clubs, elks, masons, veterans, and other civic clubs
* a volunteer fire department in every county and most medium-sized towns (all of which need members ALL of the time)
There is even a small community-run performing arts center if you want to audition for plays, hold a performance, or be a volunteer crewmember: https://www.hayswoodtheatre.org/support-hayswood
All of this in rural, impoverished, isolated Southern Indiana where the Amish and Mennonites own all of the stores, the grain drying bins of neighboring farms keep you up at night, and cellphone coverage tapers off to a teasing and deceptive worse than nothing.
I am a middle-aged man.
I take the middle-aged man loneliness epidemic very seriously.
I am also a bit of a dick: get off your fucking phone and Xbox, quit bitching about the lack of "third places", and go out and do something.
There is a group, doing something, who wants you to join them in every county of every state of the entire United States.
You are not suffering from a lack of opportunities; you are suffering from a lack of imagination and motivation.
100% this (and it applies to 'the death of the internet' too).
> I am also a bit of a dick
With an attitude like this, you realize you're part of the male loneliness problem, right?
How many times do people show up to your clubs and organizations one time and then never show up again?
Think on it
A big part of the "male loneliness epidemic" is that a lot of men are huge assholes for no reason
I say this not to defend the self-confessed dick, but to encourage everyone else to show up to stuff. People are nicer when they're hanging out and doing something they love.
Tough love is something you can do when you love someone, when you are close to them and have their trust
It is not really an approach you can take with strangers. That will always make you just come across like an asshole
The world doesn’t really work that way anymore. Also this only works if you want to hang out in third places with retirees.
(For instance, amateur radio is dying out because most of the oldtimers are dying off and not being replaced because everyone uses the internet now. I got some great deals on equipment from estate sales as a result.)
Also, third places are places. You listed groups. Groups need places to gather, and people who want to go to third places need places that are always places, not just an hour or two on the third saturday of the month. That’s not enough for social cohesion.
Euclidean zoning is the obvious thing to do if you're planning from a 30,000 foot view, but planning should be done at the level at which humans exist!
The problem with that is that the "rich enough to have no real problems" people know that for every upscale coffee shop they like there will be five people doing heavier economic activity that they don't like and because they're the only ones with the free time to care they drive the conversation and they limit it to light consumer businesses which of course can't work because that hypothetical coffee shop or sandwich shop needs the foot traffic from all the other business (that doesn't exist, because it's not allowed) in order to actually turn a profit without insane prices. And so then nothing actually gets developed in the up-zoned area and it's still a glorified bedroom community.
The people who could actually provide the political will for a proper removal or liberalization of the zoning don't get involved, because they all have other shit going on that's more important.
But in 2024, Brian Niccols pitched the "Back to Starbucks" plan, with point 3 of his 4 point focus being, "Reestablishing Starbucks as the community coffeehouse."[1] He said, "Our stores will be inviting places to linger, with comfortable seating, thoughtful design and a clear distinction between “to-go” and “for-here” service."
Whether or not that's working is another story[2]. Long story short is that Scooters, Dutch Bros. and other brands are doing drive-thru better, and cafe attendance is down 22% since before the pandemic.
Consumer tastes have shifted. And given Gen Z's preference for online interaction over in-person, I'm not sure if Starbucks will be able to steer the ship.
If I were Starbucks, I'd strongly consider splitting the branding on the cafes and drive-thrus. Keep the Starbucks brand with the drive-thrus, then try opening a few new cafes as a new brand. Worst case scenario, you rebrand those cafes as Starbucks. I bet they've talked about it.
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/10/new-starbucks-ceo-brian-nicc... 2: https://intelligence.coffee/2025/05/back-to-starbucks-long-o...
What a load of corporate bullshit. Unlike any other community coffee house, this one made almost $10b in profit last year. I wonder how much the "community" really benefits from this.
That's around $60k per store. That sounds like a very reasonable number for an absentee coffee shop owner (which is basically what the shareholders are).
Hard to extol the virtues of profit when it results in this. I'm sure the owner love it tho.
Currently markets are not maximizing value for all participants, only the wealthiest and owners, so frankly I don't think anyone should give a damn about them
"Labour Buyers" should be counting their blessings if workers just unionize right now
The first politician to offer $1 trillion in federal assistance to middle/lower classes (free healthcare, free university/vocational training, public housing, public jobs) will absolutely control the electorate at both sides of the aisles.
Remember that redistribution of wealth are very popular American activities. It swings both ways.
There maybe is an old European style of coffeehouses but nut sure that's been hit on beyond a very local level.
I used to sit at cafes pretty late with a laptop — buying multiple ( >= 2 ) cups of coffee, often salads and sandwiches — in the countries I lived in, but there’s none of that in Ireland. Most non-chain cafes are not open past 17; and chains go on until 20.
Germany I find even worse though. It's kind of ironic since they seem to have a more robust nightclubbing culture compared to the Brits.
Where though?
West coast and Gulf Coast where Ive lived have very few.
You see them not necessarily in places like wall street, but more in places with strong intellectual culture like universities and artsy neighborhoods.
I can use the existence of a country club as a useful signal about a place without being a member, or having any interest in it.
Also points towards local labor law and market.
In some countries, low cost of human labor enables staffing of low-volume businesses, including opening hours with low traffic.
I don't think it's a concern, first of all. Second, store owners will kick out non-paying customers as they have since time immemorial. You might as well ask how someone deals with pan handlers at the intersection on the way to their drive-through Starbucks. If the person is just sitting in a corner not bothering anyone, maybe someone will buy them a coffee, or maybe they'll be annoyed that it's too loud and leave, or perhaps they just look homeless but they're just mistaken for your run of the mill startup founder?
There are also lots of homeless people in other parts of the world. How do people in Paris or London deal with them? I don't understand why this exists an American-centric view here for such a general concern. Homelessness isn't unique to the United States, yet virtually every country on the planet has coffee shops you can walk into.
Kicking people out of anywhere, regardless of their housing status, is a relatively extreme conflict, compared to the normal happenings at a diner, cafe, or bar. Panhandlers aren't a good comparison because no one's trying to hang out at the intersection.
As to your question about the difference between America and Europe: If there even is much of a difference, I suspect it is influenced by socialized medicine and the significant differences in involuntary commitment[1]. In America you can be severely mentally ill, sleeping rough, and disruptive to the community, but unless you break a pretty serious law, no one can make you get help. And that's if you survive contact with the police.
Maybe in practice, it's not that different over there, but it seems like they have more tools and resources to handle mental health crises, which would lessen the rest of the population's assumption that unhoused = dangerous.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_commitment_by_coun...
Bringing up something doesn't mean it's a valid concern, or maybe better put it doesn't mean it's a concern worth discussing.
> Kicking people out of anywhere, regardless of their housing status, is a relatively extreme conflict, compared to the normal happenings at a diner, cafe, or bar. Panhandlers aren't a good comparison because no one's trying to hang out at the intersection.
I don't disagree that the interactions are different, but maybe you haven't had a pan handler toss a drink on your car or bang on your window or scream at you in your face? In terms of concern, they are pretty close.
The problem with this conversation is that the OP is framing the conversation as "how do we deal with this random and rare hypothetical situation that only applies to urban environments" to cast doubt on the creation or continued support of people getting together in these third places. So just as much as they are worried about that, I'm worried about the pan handlers bothering me and throwing stuff at my car at the highway intersection. :)
Calling it an American-centric problem doesn't make sense either.
> As to your question about the difference between America and Europe...
It was a bit of a rhetorical question. There aren't any substantial differences in "how we handle the homeless" with respect to coffee shops in a city or whatever the "concern" is here.
> Maybe in practice, it's not that different over there, but it seems like they have more tools and resources to handle mental health crises, which would lessen the rest of the population's assumption that unhoused = dangerous.
It would be hard to really qualify but in my experience it's about the same, though I think homeless people* in the United States tend to be more aggressive with their pan handling or escalation toward violence. Some are on drugs shipped in from somewhere and even though we do provide services (perhaps they are inadequate?) to help, it doesn't appear to be enough. Part of the reason people believe that homeless == dangerous tends to be because of a few negative interactions, which can be quite scary and intimidating and make you avoid a place.
Ultimately, "uh oh what if a homeless person comes to the Third Place" is not a concern because those rare potential interactions don't get to dictate how everyone lives their lives and it's not a strong enough of a concern to matter in this conversation context.
* Homelessness exists in many forms, many of those hidden from us in day-to-day view and I think we should continue to provide support to people to help ensure they don't become homeless in the first place. But at the same time we can recognize the anti-social behavior of some and address that. In the context of this conversation there's no "worry" about a homeless person walking in to a coffee shop - mind your own business, but the worry is one who is aggressive or belligerent, or disturbing others who have a right to peace regardless of the situation someone else finds themselves in.
We do have coffee shops, but as others have pointed out, many are getting rid of seating. I think a membership route is the only way to enforce something more exclusive.
Why would you kick out a paying customer? If they're being disruptive though it doesn't matter if they bought a coffee. Businesses can deny services and request that you leave the premises. There is very little potential for litigation for discrimination.
> 2. Minimum wage employees shouldn't have to play the role of enforcers. A mentally-ill/drug-addled person can snap and cause a dangerous scene. Getting the cops involved is possible, but time-consuming and a pain.
That's just life. There's no other answer here. You deal with uncomfortable situations and that's all there is to it.
> It's America-centric because we don't have a social safety net for people. In the UK, for example, the NHS has avenues for people to get treated. The homeless you do run into tend to pose a much lower risk, anecdotally.
It would be nice if you knew more about the social services that we do offer people in the United States before claiming something like this. Turn off the news and social media and do your own research instead.
Now that isn't to say (and I honestly don't know one way or the other) that social services in the United States couldn't be better, but that's tangential to the conversation in my opinion.
> We do have coffee shops, but as others have pointed out, many are getting rid of seating. I think a membership route is the only way to enforce something more exclusive.
I emphatically say fuck that. I will go to a coffee shop, buy coffee, sit down and enjoy the coffee, preferably with some friends, and if someone wants to come in and be belligerent and threatening then we'll call the cops or participate in physically kicking them out if the employees can't handle it. I will not live in a world where others are going to disrupt normal everyday experiences and ruin everyone else's lives just because they're assholes or drugged out. Nope. Not me and not the town where I live.
Yes there is. Management. It is the manager's job to do the unpleasant duties
What a naive dreamer am I. The less you are paid, the more unpleasant the task
There’s no magical distinction between a coffee shop manager and barista.
I’m not suggesting that a barista or even the manager have some sort of moral or legal obligation to kick some asshole out of a store. They don’t have to do it. There are options. But generally speaking we all experience uncomfortable situations and you just deal with them like an adult in the best way you know how.
2. Coffee shops are probably my favorite Third Place in general. Here in northern Europe, I've heard of some attempts at Costco-like coffee shops where you pay a yearly membership fee, somewhere between $50-100, for the ability to purchase coffee from there, but the coffee itself is quite cheap. You can usually bring some number of friends or colleagues as well. I'd really like to see this model take off, if they can solve some of the adversarial concerns with it (e.g. it probably shouldn't become a replacement for a full time office, but regular 2-3 hour work sessions seem ideal).
I originally mistook the site as an ad-website because of how it's designed, which lead to me leaving. The neat part, is that's pretty easy for you to fix, so best of luck.
Plus, isn't the claim literally that there is correlational evidence here? That lightly suggests your model of how the world works in this area is off.
And yes, i don't do any networking at all, literally never met any person i did business with, in 25 years of career.
Or maybe, that is my European perspective? Because i probably never seen people doing that. There is an old observation that "networking" is American only cultural phenomenon and it doesn't exist in Europe - maybe it's one of the ways it manifests itself?
It isn't like they are bugging people, its more like they overhear a conversation or see something of interest and find a way to jump in, in a way that isn't intrusive. "I can't help having overheard, but are you planning to open a Taco truck on 5th?" That kind of thing.
As usual the direction of causation is a bit difficult to tease out
Even if you do manage to tease out causation tech and other "sophisticated" industry startups are also just the tip of the entrepreneurship iceberg.
The bulk of the area under the curve of a city's wealth is the long tail of blue collar people who wouldn't voluntarily associate with the kind of people who go to Starbucks starting and making moves to grow businesses that HN snobs don't even notice.
If you read the article, you see that the effect was pronounced in lower income areas where a natural experiment was effectively run with Magic Johnson's intervention. Which kind of goes directly against what you are saying.
Not long after, this Ithaca company
opened up a shop in Brooklyn and won an award for best coffee in the city, half because they have great coffee, half because they had no competition. It is better now, but the standard for gas station coffee is vastly higher thanks to things like
https://concordiacoffee.com/products-tag/convenience-stores/
[1] An astonishing hotbed of conformity. Sitting out in front of the headquarters of Fox News I was told that my wife and I were the freakiest looking people they'd seen in NYC and we only had matching costumes of t-shirts, jeans, ALICE packs and boonie caps with plastic flowers.
"...tracts that received a Starbucks saw an increase in the number of startups of 9.1% to 18% (or 2.9 to 5.7 firms) per year, over the subsequent 7 years. A partnership between Starbucks and Magic Johnson focused on underprivileged neighborhoods produced larger effects."
Seems like third places have strong effects here.
For instance, what if Starbucks only decides to move into neighborhoods that have reached a certain level of economic growth (ie number of households, number of business, etc…)? Neighborhood economic growth would likely attract entrepreneurs as well, and we wouldn’t be able to conclude that Starbucks had anything to do with entrepreneurship growth.
Said a different way, would adding Starbucks in the middle of the Atacama desert grow Peruvian entrepreneurs? I mean come on it’d be the only third space around!
I can’t read the full paper because I don’t have a subscription, but the fact that they don’t call this out in the abstract makes me doubt it’s a meaningful conclusion.
To be fair, a proper 3rd place really can't be a company proper, since there's always the pressure of 'buy or leave'.
Even malls aren't sufficient, since many of them are incredibly hostile to under-18. I instead look at public libraries as the gold standard here.
It makes much more sense for cities to run the actual 3rd place, and businesses rent around the 3rd place. That way, coffee shops, restaurants, and the like can comingle as can the people.
Outside the USA, we see more of that in various areas. But folks here would likely howl socialism with a 3rd place run by the city. One can wish for better community, but alas.
It is not socialism, the problem is the lack of that.
My city does a good job of running a 3rd place as part of their library, it is right outside the library in a big seating area meant for phone calls & talking in general.
But they have 3 full-time security staff, the police station is across the street and the social case workers have an office in the same building.
Outside of a decent coffee, the place has everything for me to walk in with my kids in the summer and work while they roam the hallways as if it was their own, meeting other kids from the same school district. There's even a no-cars allowed trail connecting the place for kids to cycle safely to.
However, take away the constant enforcement by security + social case worker hovering, this falls apart because it'll have the etiquette of a subway car.
The homeless are there btw, but they tend to be non-disruptive and mostly there to get help with something (like a cancelled EBT card).
I think you're talking about a public library, there's typically plenty of rooms and tables to sit down at and talk with others.
But I didn't get into that discussion, but even that system was borne out of Carnegie, an earlier hypercapitalist. That's probably the only reason why libraries are publicly accepted. And in reality, many Republican jurisdictions, they aren't accepted and are being actively defunded.
Well, what I was getting to was more of a European piazza style open area with businesses surrounding it so that people can attend somewhere ever to whatever.
Does Starbucks even exist?
This is a terrible control group cuz it probably means that the cities that rejected starbucks have idiotic zoning and permit policies that impact entrepreneurship. Like SF, any restaurant that has over 7 locations requires special permitting and can be easily blocked.
turns out he's building vision for offline-first retail. he's got no frontend, just a python backend. i scribble something on a napkin about fast-booting wasm modules from disk cache. 3 weeks later he pings me on telegram saying they got boot time down from 14s to 2.8s using a variant of that.
never met him again. never even learned his startup's name. but that entire bottleneck cleared because two people overheard a swear word near a bad socket.
we maynot recreate that on a discord channel. there's no incentive to overshare when you're not spatially co-located. bangalore 2023 worked because entropy was high and friction was low
Go a whole decade+ back, it was the Leela coffee shop which opened till 1 AM.
> we maynot recreate that on a discord channel.
IRC + freenode did the same decades ago, back in the day when the computers wouldn't fit in a backpack - people would just lurk socially and not really join a channel for a purpose.
Most of #linux-india was a third place after midnight, though not a physical one.
There's also an undesirable side to coworking cafe low-OPSEC.
Funny anecdote about that...
I was meeting up with a startups friend, at one of the cafes that's popular for techbros.
Before we met up, friend mentioned this guy from the startups scene, who sometimes lurks at that cafe, to steal ideas.
So friend and I are talking at the cafe about an application domain we both know. And how we're surprised no one is doing X for it, because then you could do A, B, C, etc.
I look over, and some guy has moved from his table, to sit on the floor, close to us, and just has a cat-that-got-the-canary beaming look on his face. Yes, it was the noted lurker-stealer guy.
Shortly after, an organization he's affiliated with announced a big initiative/group to do X for that application domain. Maybe just a funny coincidence.
Ideas are useless without execution
The anecdote is a funny way to raise awareness about OPSEC.
There's reasons that most companies don't air all their internal discussions and work publicly.
In a cafe, it can be easy to forget that.
And there really are people who actively exploit that.
Edit: This comment was made when the post pointed to an audio form of the main article. I'll leave it here none the less as feedback to the audio sites maker.
edit: thank you, mods, for changing the link.
Can't believe this has to be asked on a front page article.
edit: thank you, mods, for changing the link.
> Third space" redirects here. For the postcolonial term, see Third Space Theory. For the concept of informal shared public space in community planning, see Third place.
There’s a bookstore in Seattle called Third Place Books. Rarely did I encounter someone who knew why it was called that.
- Church/temple/mosque/etc: worship - Bar: drinking alcoholic drinks - Gym/sport: physical exercise - Volunteering: whatever you're volunteering for - Coffee shop: coffee? Reading, working?
All these have "a thing you do other than socializing and meeting people". You could (and do) go there specifically for the activity without socializing and meeting people (just like church).
Spaces that are "social-only" are pretty rare. Coffee shops are maybe closer to that as you're probably not going to consume many coffees, but people stay to read, work... it's a bit less structured than other third spaces (and personally I find that it makes it more difficult to socialise there)
Also a feature of some churches - parties in the church hall, the university chapel I used to go to that had a church run bar in the same building!
More seriously, bars are primarily places to socialise that happen serve drinks so I think they are similar to coffee shops that way.
That may be good or bad depending on what you’re looking for, but my point is I don’t think they’re as comparable as you do.
I went to church as a kid and know what you mean. However, the shared belief usually implies a narrower heterogeneity, if that makes sense (in a way that’s proportional to how orthodox the beliefs are).
In a secular shared space it’s far more common to be exposed to people with radically different beliefs, sexual orientation (or even preferences), and political views, to mention a few examples.
I think it’s very important that people have places where they can be surrounded by others that, while different as you say, all share a very important core belief, but it’s also very important for a healthy society to have spaces where radically different people can coexist peacefully and even work towards some goal together (e.g., a “repair” meetup where people go get something fixed or help others fix things).
In the churches I have been to over the years (all Catholic or Anglican) I have met people with different sexual orientations and a very wide range of political views (everything except far right, as far left as outright communist).
> I think it’s very important that people have places where they can be surrounded by others that, while different as you say, all share a very important core belief, but it’s also very important for a healthy society to have spaces where radically different people can coexist peacefully and even work towards some goal together
I agree. It does happen at work anyway though so I put less importance on this as a requirement for third spaces.
Yeah, it was similar for me (only Catholic churches in my case), though politics were usually homogeneous per church (what I mean is: whether you leaned left or right, you'd find a Catholic community to welcome you, but I'm not sure it'd be easy to find one that would comfortably welcome wide political views). As for sexual orientation, this was not common at all, but bear in mind the last time I attended Church was in the early 90s so things may have changed.
> I agree. It does happen at work anyway though so I put less importance on this as a requirement for third spaces.
I think the main difference of a third space vs work is that, at work, we're forced to "put up" with people we wouldn't normally engage with, because we all have the common goal of making a living, while in a third space, even in one with a common goal like the repair meetups I mentioned, you go there voluntarily and not because otherwise you can't put food on the table.
Catholic churches, politically, pretty similar to the rest of society where the church was, with a left wing tilt.
Sexual orientation also varies with church. Obviously a gay friendly church (e.g. St Patrick's Soho a few decades ago, Farm Street now - both in Catholic London). For Anglican churches I would say St martin in the Fields where David Monteith ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Monteith ) was one of our parish priests.
> I think the main difference of a third space vs work is that, at work, we're forced to "put up" with people we wouldn't normally engage with, because we all have the common goal of making a living
I agree, but by putting up with people you can come to like them, particularly if you are avoiding people because of things such as a stereotyped view of a group.
I might be very misinformed about how church works, but I think that coffee shops fill a very different niche. History kinda supports this: coffee shops became valuable places of business and occupied the 'third place' role even in extremely religious places and times (I'm thinking of Lloyd's specifically, and 17th and 18th century coffee shop culture as a locus for business ventures in the Netherlands and England).
Some do. Do people people go to sufficiently sociable cafés daily? Most people go with and talk to people they already know.
>and hold business meetings in church? Do religious people go to a church to do a casual date
Not in church, but with people they meet in church.
> or catch up with friends and associates
A lot of churches do have some socialising after services. Just serving coffee or something afterwards
Even without that people chat on the way out.
> on weekdays?
If you go to church on weekdays
I would like to add what many non-religious people (and some "out to lunch" evangelicals) do ot understand about churches (I guess this applies to mosque and synagogue too).
The role of a church is social, not religious. There are religious elements of course, but churches would not be required if it were not for the communities they foster
I assume this is referring to churches in the US? I have never encountered this in Europe
"House of worship" does not deserve the primacy you assign it. First came "third places" and human relations, and then came organized religion.
You're putting the cart of Churches before the horse of human interaction.