Hacker News Reader

Comment by antonymoose | Hacker News Reader

I’ll endorse this heavily.

We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low crime, the dream.

No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age ranges. In fact, I’ve loosely associate with exactly one neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we head too many heads on our shoulders.

Despite a heavy presence of children, no one here celebrate Halloween despite it being a beloved night growing up around here. Our first year we invested heavily in decorations and spent hundreds on the King size candy bars.

Society feels… dead compared to me as an early 90s child.

View on HN

That's really rough. We bought into a neighborhood in an older college town, and I think that's helped things a bit for us. Smaller houses and yards, so people hang out around the neighborhood or in parks. Everyone's out walking their dogs all the time, and pretty much everyone is happy to stop and chat. I think it's just about getting lucky and finding places where people prioritize the community rather than having giant houses, giant yards with swingsets, and giant cars so they never need to talk to anyone.

Have you thought maybe its your environment? I think the "nice suburban communities" have always been filled with antisocial people (as someone who grew it in them). People go to the suburbs for quiet and to be left alone.

I barely knew anyone in the neighborhood when I was living with my parents in the suburbs. My friends were all from school and required a car to hang out.

In contrast, now as an adult, I live in a dense major city (that's supposedly filled with crime according right wing news) and I see kids all the time walking around. I have a young kid and he interacts with his neighbors a lot more. My mailman knows of my kid and when we moved across the street.

Our closest couple's friend is a 5 minute walk away and its nice to randomly run into them on a weekend when taking a walk.

We regularly have wine and food on Fridays with one of my neighbors who have a kid close to our age and its easy and without friction.

It’s not a suburb/urban thing (though that could be correlated).

It’s an area thing. I think the biggest thing that leads to it is age stratification in a neighborhood - when every family is in the exact same “place” something weird happens.

But looking at a neighborhood on Halloween might be a great way to check.

While I don't deny there are pockets of abnormality like you suggest, having grown up on a dirt road in rural America and spent most of my adult life in cities, suburbia comes across as the antithesis of community. It was founded on the very promise of insularity. Obviously, that's not everyone's agenda, but it's beyond debate that its defining principle was segregation (followed by uniformity and convenience). I want to be sympathetic but I don't understand how people buy into it without accepting this. We've made some progress as a society, but having visited a lot of suburban neighborhoods all over the U.S., the remnants of the original mindset still come across loud and clear.

I think a key component is that “suburb” has multiple meanings - and which one comes to mind when it’s mentioned depends on where you were raised/lived.

Some suburbs are the stereotypical miles and miles of identical homes with no sidewalks.

Others are actual older rural towns that have been consumed by the nearby metropolis - and these ones feel quite different.

There’s a kind of “suburb” that is usually quite lively - the rural suburb, often a pocket of relatively dense homes in a sea of wheat.

One of my indicators is lemonade stands. If they appear regularly, the area is alive.

That’s tough. We also bought a house in a nice suburban community right outside of NYC and it’s been amazing. We know all the neighbors, exchange gifts during holidays, and a ton of kids come out for Halloween. What I really liked about the neighborhood when house hunting was seeing kids ride their bikes around on the streets unsupervised. I don’t know if it had any correlation, but the vibe felt right.

"Vibe" should be a top criterion when house-hunting.

i wish that was a search filter...

TBH this kind of fuzzy criteria could be a nice AI application.

>No one knows any neighbors.

Why would you know them? If this were 1965, you were going to live in that house the rest of your life, and they were going to live in that house the rest of their lives right next door and so it only made sense to get to know them. But today, both you and they are only here temporarily until it becomes time to move away in 4 years when you job-hop for that raise. Will you even live in the same state afterwards? Maybe at the next place you'll settle down and stay long enough to put forth the effort, but for now you're as much a migrant as any Dust Bowl Okie.

Even just 6 or 7 years ago younger coworkers were adamant that renting was the way to go, because they didn't want to be tied down to a house that they'd have to sell in a hurry when they inevitably moved away for a new job.

Americans are moving less frequently now than they were in 1965:

Overall, when looking at both migration between U.S. states and within them, fewer Americans are moving each year. In 1948, the first year on record with the Census Bureau, more than 20 percent of the population moved in the past year. This had decreased to just 8.7 percent in 2022. While the share of Americans moving across state lines remained more stable, those moving within their state became much fewer, from between 15-17 percent of Americans per year in the 1950s and 1960s to results in the single digits in the new millennium.

https://www.statista.com/chart/32135/share-of-movers-and-non...

Perhaps fewer move. But they definitely perceive it differently, especially the younger demographics. There are fewer young people each year too, as our population ages, so I'm not sure your statistics are particularly relevant to the group we're talking about... unless you were under the impression that all the nonagenarians were party animals or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com