A somewhat modern feeling I have is also that it’s hard to make close friends as an adult. There’s less willingness to interact with strangers or even the possible idea of having a good interaction with someone that’s a stranger.
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
The paradox is that LOTs of people feel this way (me included), and lots of them would be willing to put some real effort into developing new friendships. Yet it still doesn't happen. Now, what could be behind that? (Not rhetorical, genuinely interested)
For me its mostly projecting my own insecurities onto others. Being in a space where you are guaranteed a shared interest with others (places hobbies get practiced at, volunteering gigs) is a great way to aleviate the fear of rejection, looking like a weirdo, creep or whatever.
"Friendship" doesn't happen in a vacuum. You need dependence and value exchange between two "friends." Technology has replaced most of our needs and dependence on other people, with great economic benefit. The downside is it eliminates the need for other humans, and consequently removes the potential for fulfilling relationships.
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.
This comment puts into words what I feel. For example, my parents generation immigrated to the US, and are very close as a diaspora/tribe. They can go to any city and visit a friend of a friend’s house and be considered friends themselves. But they all went through the same immigrant struggle of establishing themselves in a foreign nation, relying on their network to be able to vacation and travel since they did not have enough money to stay in hotels or eat out or fly.
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.
Counterpoint: my parents came to the US when I was a child and they have none of those things. Their family ties weren't strong enough to last. Their ties to family back home deteriorated. There is no diaspora of extended family in other cities. Their own relationship was toxic and abusive, and they divorced. They are now living out old age alienated, isolated, and alone. They're not rare, they're just not nearly as vocal as the "my big, fat Greek wedding"-type people.
I've always thought about the fact how it used to be super common to ask a stranger for directions somewhere, something that would be completely ridiculous today given the ability to find anything yourself. So now when I happens I recognize that they aren't strictly just looking to get somewhere, but to talk to someone.
I spent a few years running a startup that was tackling this very issue. Sadly getting $ for "solving social isolation in America's cities" was hard to do, but I am still confident that the approach the company was taking would have worked for at least a double digit % of people.
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.
An argument is that friendships are rarely planned, and involve a variety of unexpected, fortuitous encounters. It's easy to make friendships in high school or college, as you really get to see a bunch of people over and over again, and eventually a few will become your friends. A long enough tenure at a job can do something similar.
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.
Its unclear if you are talking about yourself or making a general observation about people around you, but in case its the latter: I believe this to be very much subject to strong confirmation bias. You dont open up because you believe thats just not what people do. But I find that to be false 9/10 times I break through the fear and show genuine interest.
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.
The issue with being friends is that it mostly works if it's actually present continuous, not present perfect.
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.)
This is all true but at the end of the day its on you to make that time. If you try and make it happen, people will try and make themselves available or try and reschedule. Especially if they have kids, they are probably chomping at the bit for excuses to hang out with adults.
I discovered that I can be instantly be close and talks about relatively deep subjects with most other foreign workers. ( I am too and it’s obvious )
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.
Having something (but not everything) in common is the root of most friendships. The common thing can be club membership, location, interest in weed, some hobby, or almost anything. Without something to connect over it’s hard to get past small talk.
It’s definitely harder after a certain age. Friends come ready made when you’re in school or college and to an extent when you’re young and in your first jobs.
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.
The last two people my partner has tried to make friends with have turned out to be utter scum.
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 have also fantasized about this recently. I also think it'd be great to live near people who are having children at the same time as I am having children. It seems pretty hard to coordinate however. I just bought a condo and my friends are still renting. That basically puts us in different zipcodes by default. As well housing is so touch (in the US) that when you find a good deal you're unlikely to move, even if you'd be closer to friends.
> I also think it'd be great to live near people who are having children at the same time as I am having children.
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.
Isn’t being friends with your neighbors a far more obvious answer to this? I thought that’s where this was going.
> 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.
Do you find yourself not having much in common with your neighbors, not liking them, etc? A large part of friendship is some circumstance that puts you in the same time and place (school, work, sports, etc.). There must be some pretty big barrier if you can’t make friends with most of your neighbors.
I don't know my current neighbors at all (I live in an apartment building with 150+ units) and I'm fine with that.
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.
Conflict with neighbors is a common theme. But also friendship with neighbors. Wilson Wilson Jr in Home Improvement. Lawrence in Office Space. All the guys in King of the Hill. Even in some which start off with frustrations about neighbors sometimes shows strong bonds between them later like Grand Torino or Family Matters or even The Simpsons.
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.
Statistically, five to six out of ten of my neighbors think my marriage shouldn't be allowed, so yeah, I'd say there's a pretty big barrier with the neighbors of happenstance. The ones who will deign to talk to us politely discourage us from attending the BBQs, "Oh you know, it'll be mainly families so it won't be of much interest to you."
I can only speak for myself but if you want to help change, come and get involved in people's lives. I partly live where I do so I can have a positive influence.
> Do you find yourself not having much in common with your neighbors, not liking them, etc
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 your neighbors a far more obvious answer to this
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.
My entire point is that, despite having a large social circle I have only ever made “a handful of close friends.” Adjusting my life to be closer to them, instead of trying to replace them to compromise on other aspects, was one of my smartest moves ever.
At the number of friends equal to Facebook friends, definitely, but when you are talking a small fraction of Dunbar's number (which is more than a dozen dozens), I'm not sure it applies.
Some of my closest friends growing up were neighbors so it’s not necessarily a trade off. I mean maybe you live near a bunch of people you really dislike but I think it’s a pretty modern phenomenon to have such little connection to the people around you.
In addition to what other have said, the definition of "friends" may change with time and context.
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?
> 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.
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.
> less superficially and more importantly, they would not be particularly honest or open or intimate with each other within the parameters of social norms
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.
This is probably a generational thing. I’m GenX. Growing up I never heard anyone talk about being depressed, having anxiety, etc. If someone today started trying to talk to me about mental health issues, I’d probably just have a deer in the headlights look since I have no clue how to respond to that sort of topic.
I attended a high school with 4,000 students and had lots of friends and even more acquaintances. I never heard anyone discuss anything mental health related. Ditto at college and graduate school. Ditto in the workplace until within the last decade or so.
Yup; definitely a cultural/generational component (as well as upbringing/personal preference/development); my dad's generation, born and lived in Eastern Europe, and all of them have a physical reaction to breaching certain topics - they will literally push back in their seat trying to physically run away from discussing mental health, inner feelings, social norms & progress, etc :-)
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 think my “regular friends” generally were still people I had significant differences in some ways with, and our initial connections were often something incidental like having nearby dorm rooms or enjoying televised football.
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.
> I think it's certainly possibly to establish such relationships with neighbours today, though it's hugely luck of the draw
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.
For what it's worth, as the rare suburbanite HNer, I fondly recall my family having the same sort of relationships with neighbors in the late 80's and 90's; unfortunately the same just doesn't seem to happen even in socioeconomically comparable suburbs today. Even just attempts to strike up small talk with a neighbor when we both happen to be outside at the same time are usually rebuffed, and the idea that anyone would invite neighbors to (eg) a barbecue seems frankly impossible. Even when neighborhood kids play together the dynamic is usually their parents keeping minimal contact with each other and not trusting each other to keep an eye on the kids. I wish I had more insight to offer into why things are like this nowadays, but it's frankly just baffling and depressing.
You could very well be right; I was just putting together a gut feeling about the HN community and anecdotal knowledge of where my coworkers in the industry live.
I've been working remotely since long before the pandemic; perhaps my experience at remote-friendly companies has skewed my experience, as only a minority of my coworkers are in the bay area. I'd say the mode for my coworkers is living in a smaller/cheaper (non-SF, non-NY) urban center. Could just be a fluke, though; it's not as though the sample size is particularly large.
I doubt most HNers actually grew up in large cities. I would guess most were in the burbs or smaller cities (although they may be in large cities now). Just given the demographic distribution of cities (younger, less kids) and the urbanization trends over time (was more distributed 20+ years ago).
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.
I'm into rural living myself. Spent enough time in cities & suburbs to appreciate wide open spaces without nosy neighbors & HOA rules. I also appreciate cars & the freedom they enable.
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.
Because so many of urbanite anti-car commenters are so strident that there’s very little point in engaging with them. (HN probably is younger which tends to correlate with more urban these days but it’s generally not worth trying to have certain discussions that will change no one’s mind.)
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.
Yeah you’re not wrong. It’s certainly part of a larger trend towards being less connected to your community. Some of that is obvious with large urban areas. Less personal space at home. No yard. Higher crime/distrust of strangers. You need tons of influence/power to be a leader in your community.
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.
> For what it's worth, as the rare suburbanite HNer, I fondly recall my family having the same sort of relationships with neighbors in the late 80's and 90's; unfortunately the same just doesn't seem to happen even in socioeconomically comparable suburbs today.
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.
> 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!
> It certainly does not intrinsically do so; this was absolutely not my experience growing up in suburbia,
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.
At the last house we lived in, we were renting. We got a constant stream of real estate agents knocking on our door asking if we’d be willing to let them sell it. So when we got a knock one morning I opened the door and kind of yelled at the person, “WHAT DO YOU WANT?” It was a new neighbor that had moved in a few doors down bringing us a bottle of wine and to let us know they were new to the neighborhood. I apologized for my boorish behavior, but they were apparently too shaken to get over it. Every time I saw them after that we’d wave at each other, but it was clear they wanted nothing to do with me. Until we decided to move out. Then they were very interested in the house and possibly buying it (I assume to flip it). The neighbor stopped me one day and said, “let us know as soon as you can when you’re moving out. We’d like to talk to the owners about buying it.” I never let them know. The entire act of bringing over a bottle of wine was just to try to get on our good side in case they ever wanted some favor from us. Meanwhile, the other neighbors we met there were great, and we still talk to them from time-to-time.
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.
> 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.
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.
That’s a fair point given what I’ve written above. However, there’s more to it that I didn’t get into. Suffice it to say that I’m not basing that solely on the two interactions described above.
I think it's at least as much to do with expectations.
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.
> IMHO something about 10,000 sqft yards and deep setbacks destroys any hope for communities.
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.
I'm also in the suburbs. A couple of thoughts there:
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.
I stopped being friends with my neighbours when I moved into an apartment.
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.
If your neighbors will allow you to be friends. Our next door neighbor moved in 2 years ago. We happened to be outside when they first arrived. A man for out of the car to open the garage door while a woman stayed in the car staring straight ahead. We tried to engage, but he ignored us, drove into the garage, and shut the door. Since then we have never spoken to them since. Sometimes we will see the man in the middle of the night walk to his mailbox. Occasionally we see the man coming and going in the car. But they (we are assuming there is a they, we’ve never seen the woman since that first day) never come outside during the day or evening hours. They never have any lights on inside the home (and we can see all of their windows from our house), ever. One time a tree on their property blew over into the street. We knocked and knocked on their door and waited a few days. Eventually we and another neighbor cut up the tree and left all the branches and logs on the side of the road. Little by little they’ve been disappearing in their yard debris bins (they do put out and take back in their garbage, recycling, and yard debris bins - though nobody has ever seen them do so). The main way we know they live there is seeing white vapor rising from their utility vents in the winter. Our current guesses are traffickers or witness protection program.
I live in a small town in Poland and when I was a kid, my whole street was a community. My parents were friends with all the neighbours (some less than others, but still). My mom used to host "coffee time" every other day around noon were women from the neighbourhood would gather for an hour or so to gossip around coffee - of course me, as a kid, just lingered around them.
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 :)
> Isn’t being friends with your neighbors a far more obvious answer to this?
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.
Back in the 50s generations were more in sync. A new neighborhood will be built and mostly GI families move in, so most kids have friends around their age. Fast forward to my experience growing up in those same neighborhoods in the 1990s, and most of my neighbors were elderly, part of that first wave and still there until they eventually pass. The whole neighborhood ends up desynchronized. Schools have closed because there aren’t nearly as many kids as in the 1950s to educate.
I personally live in the same zip code as my company’s water coolers. That’s where elders (C suite) say best collaboration and creativity (TM) happen and they won’t let me go remote. All my friends are disbursed all over the country located at the zip codes their company’s water coolers are at (read: remote work is not the norm). Some lucky ones are remote and they’re able to live in places that are best for them (near family, good surf etc).
People in HN threads should collectively start timing how long it takes for Gen Xers and boomers to come out of the woodwork to gatekeep something that has evolved past their tunnel-vision.
Access to friends is probably the biggest reason I prefer dense urban environments. There’s something magical about being able to step out your door and be within a 10-20 minute walk of close friends or family. It invites casual get togethers like Saturday afternoon coffee or an after work drink. Living an hour or two apart kills these opportunities.
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.
I'd far rather go for a long drive in a comfortable car with scenic views than go to a bar.
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.
Why not both? Except in the city, you can meet your friend and go together in the outdoors instead of 3 hour solo commute time, where there's no real interaction with them.
I get it, to a certain extent. But it’s not quite that simple. Many rural hobbies have pretty intense initial capital outlays, while urban ones tend to have higher running costs. Making tools that end up basically unused in suburban sheds is a big industry.
I don’t see how having to buy all the tools yourself is any less commercial.
In a hackspace you often get to access tools that you wouldn’t want to afford yourself.
With restricted access, at controlled hours, in a shared space subject to the whims of others. You're renting them.
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.
Maybe it’s just me but I quite like the community that’s built up around most makerspaces. People helping each other out, giving classes, showing off their projects. Seems absolutely worth the occasional misplaced tool.
So I'll caveat this with "every makerspace is different" so it's definitely a YMMV situation, however hackspaces or makerspaces that have properly gone all in on the "movement" are typically not-for-profit organizations. (not all of them by any means, hence the caveat) but in my experience (as a UK'er with a typical UK family home) very few people can afford the dedicated space even a modest wood workshop requires. Most (average sized) homes here barely have garages, let alone a shed bigger than 6'x 4'. the best I can hope for in those situations is a small collection of hand tools and a rickety folding workbench.
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.
It depends on the type of woodworking you do, but larger stationary tools like belt-fed drum sanders and 4'x8' capable CNC's take up a large amount of space. While they're extremely handy tools for some projects, it's hard to justify purchasing them unless you're running a decent business.
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.
That's kinda why I like living in the suburbs now. My commute into the city is ~30 by transit. But I have a garage to tinker in (recently added a 3d printer to the workbench), and I store my car there for driving beyond the reach of the transit system.
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.
I grew up in the boonies. I didn't care for the outdoors, and in exchange I had no access to computer groups, accelerated learning opportunities, and other nerdy things that I did want. In fact, I would wager a guess that different people like and prioritize different things.
Making cities better and healthier and happier will not prevent you from living in the boonies and enjoying ATVs and hunting and nature walks.
There's plenty of opportunity to live towards the edge of a city (or even in the city) and drive out to the mountains at the weekend.
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.
> outright bans of denser types of housing makes this lifestyle all but impossible.
I'm confused by this take. Most American urban cities are unnecessarily dense - Manhattan, SF, Chicago all squeezed into high rises 1000 occupant buildings.
We must have seen different versions of New York. The one I remember had a few high rises at Manhattan, a lot of lower buildings at the central areas and suburbs of individual houses that extended tens of kilometers to every direction. The difference to for example Hong Kong is huge.
I find it hard to believe that there’s some agenda against friends out there. What I find much easier to believe is the auto industry lobbying against public transport and for urban sprawl.
Agree; I'd actually theorize that the parent's comment has cause and effect backwards - when church is something you're compelled to attend, you overcome the heavy lift of having to load the family up into the car, drive, find somewhere to park, and attend services. And once you're there, conveniently, you're surrounded by people with at least one thing in common.
>I find it hard to believe that there’s some agenda against friends out there
Freedom of assembly / association is not something that's neutral, politically. In certain regimes, it has been explicitly banned to gather in groups. It others, it has been recognized as an essential human right, and law has been made to recognize this.
So if you take this into account, there could very well be an agenda. But I don't think so either - I think isolation is just a byproduct currently. But I also think that it's a still a useful one - isolated people are easier to control, and unhappiness drives business.
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.
I consider everything longer than 15 minutes a lot. 80 minutes away by car is enormous, that's 160 minutes to your friend and back, even 40 minutes is a lot. It just kills spontaneity and increases work. I don't want travel for 40 minutes after an exhausting day, I want to meet a friend in a 5 to 10 minutes time, 20 max, and complain about how stupid my day was while enjoying the last rays of sunshine (at least in the summer...).
In 40 minutes I could have already met a friend after 10 minutes and talked 30 minutes and start to head home again!
At least in my country, no one calls ahead before dropping by to meet you in smaller cities. They just show up and hang out.
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.
This is how things were for the majority of the human timeline. Before mobile phones, people would stop by others homes and just knock and see if they were around.
I understand there wasn't much choice before any kind of phones, but I remember my parents using fixed phone line just fine to arrange visits with friends.
There are (unmentioned) norms here specific to your friend group. If your friends always come hang on Thursday night, that is about when they will show next week. They probably aren't going to pop by at 6am on Tuesday.
It was a lot of fun when I was younger and didn’t have any responsibilities. You never even needed to go anywhere or spend any money.
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.
Or just live in a small town where all of your friends and needs are 5 minutes away.
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.
I fail to see how cars are the problem since cities like Tokyo function with similar road layouts and hardly any pedestrian-only roads. (Source: I'm temporarily living in Tokyo right now)
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.
Have you actually been to Tokyo? It's insanely crowded everywhere. Just walking across intersections and navigating train stations is insane. Hotels are the size of your closet and apartments are the size of your closet. Japan has one of the higher depression rates. If anything this proves high density cities are unhealthy.
Small towns are almost always in rural areas which at least in American means some amount of trouble if you're non religious, non white, or non heterosexual.
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.
> means some amount of trouble if you're non religious, non white, or non heterosexual.
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.
Just because you have a good experience, doesn’t mean everyone will. There’s plenty of history in America to defend the assumption that minorities will have a worse experience in rural towns. You seem to live in a very diverse town which is great. That’s not most towns in America.
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.
> Just because you have a good experience, doesn’t mean everyone will.
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.
Uprooting your life and moving is a big commitment. If you’re a minority, it’s a lot safer bet that you won’t have issues in a big city than a small town. It’s risk mitigation.
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.
It has nothing to do with "car centric" zoning or bans on density. It's poor zoning policies that split sections by use case. Walk through a more "residential" are in Vienna and there are still commercial/restaurants throughout the neighborhood. Do the same in Chicago and besides a few strips of the neighborhood you won't find anything besides residential. The problem is zoning in American cities tend to be more segmented into different sections by use case which creates a different atmosphere.
Well it’s not “nothing to do with” cars or density. The only reason American cities attempted (really, converted) into Euclidean zoning is because cars made it seem easy enough to transit zone to zone to live your daily life.
Walking 8 miles to the grocery store is clearly untenable, so never would’ve happened without widespread cars.
But the issue also exists in dense areas of Chicago where things aren't far, they are just laid out in a way that doesn't really allow for the same environment as traditional European cities
This type of zoning (Euclidian; zoned by purpose) was very new and only tested in SCOTUS in 1926, suspiciously 18 years after the Model T was introduced. I don’t know if the US pioneered it but it doesn’t seem to have taken hold in Europe til recently too.
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.
Cause we have an economy that has atomized everyone to where you have to fight for your own survival - constantly.
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.
It is a nice set of problems to have though, diversity of neighborhood or living with millionaires. Choosing to work somewhere you can do something you love for executive wages, or move to another city, with a move that costs pocket change so that you can find love.
Comes with a different set of problems - tbh. The women I'm looking for need to be single and in a similar socioeconomic bracket. Those two things are basically impossible to find together.
Your first sentence makes me wonder how much "taking work home" has compromised our social lives. On any given night trying to catch up with friends, it's likely that at least one will have a deadline they're working to, or trying not to fall behind on workload in general. If you come up against that a couple of times, or have your own work pressures, I find that you're less likely to initiate anything.
Yup, this describes NYC pretty well.
If you are in the HN crowd, and moved to a hood you consider desirable with a good commute to where our offices are..
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 mean, don't many people in the demographics mentioned, 20-40s university educated city dwellers, already do this? Sharing a flat is very common in my social circle. I've always lived with people and not only is it less isolated but you save a lot of money splitting rent, electricity and food bills. And having roomates during the pandemic was really good for my mental health. Having to live completely alone through all the lockdowns was awful for a lot of people.
I've been wondering how related these feelings of distance and isolation in the middle of society are to how the area is designed.
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.
This is a bit of an unconventional POV, but I don't consider large areas of suburban sprawl to be cities but just really big towns. This covers Houston, swaths of Atlanta, lots of Southern California. There are lots of people living there compared to rural areas, to be sure, but without the density to support usable public transportation (once-an-hour buses don't count), it's really not a city at all. It's endless suburban sprawl, and many people do appreciate that. Just don't call it a city when it's really not.
How? My eight year old daughter gets to roam free and has seven or eight different kids she plays with on a weekly basis. A few of them daily. We’re not worried about her getting carried off because the area is super safe. We lived in the city before and it was dangerous and the neighbor had a crazy pitbull chained up that’d break out all the time so we couldn’t let her out of the house. It’s also very diverse, her friends parents are from Ukraine, India, Jordan, Vietnam, China, and those are just the people I’ve met. The American suburbs are an excellent place to raise children.
I've found that it's more about the person than the area.
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.
Some people want to be forced to socialize - others find ways to socialize with those around them. And others only want to socialize with copies of themselves.
Easy to meet people, and easy to hop on public transport to visit existing friends, are two very distinct things. How did you meet these people who were not within walking distance?
School mostly - my family moved to the other side of the district when I was in 6th grade, but I already had an urban card and the right to go out whenever I pleased as long as was back by 7pm, so we stayed in touch, even though I went to a different middle school where in turn I met more people living closer to my new neighbourhood.
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.
There's a lot of dangerous cities in the world. Lots of countries have weak governments unable to keep the peace, with social life disrupted by crime, strife, unrest, distrust. But there are also lots of countries that are much, much safer than the US.
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.
Definitely this. I grew up outside Baltimore and went on to live in Boulder CO, Orange County CA, moved back home and then to LA on a whim. Finished school in Nashville, TN and my wife and I are about to get out and move to Maine. Zero red tape whatsoever- the flexibility and ease of traversing and moving around the USA is definitely awesome and rarely discussed in terms of the benefits of living here. There’s something for pretty much everyone and the culture varies greatly from region to region, city to city.
First of all, I am not bashing EU or Europe -- great countries, great history, etc. But I would pretty strongly disagree on "just as easy to move around the EU" part. From what I understand it is super smooth for vacations, but not nearly as frictionless to move around semi-permanently. For example, someone graduating in Norway, moving to Spain for 3 years, then on to Germany would see friction in renting a flat, sending children to school or buying a house. If this is not the case, I would love to be corrected.
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.
For school you may have language barriers, depending what language(s) your children speak. They're entitled to a place at school though.
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.
Good to know, thank you! Totally fair on language, I assumed that a person moving to a country will have to learn (or, better, already know) a 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.
Highly skilled professionals in some fields (engineers, scientists, software developers, very senior managers etc) can often find a job with only English. These people are more likely to send their children to a foreign-language school, even if they have to pay for it, as they might not plan on staying forever.
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.
Depends on the school of course. The school of my children has plenty of foreign kids, or kids with foreign parents at least, and that's not a problem at all. But Amsterdam is a bit more cosmopolitan than most places, of course. It might be harder for the only foreign kid in a small village. Or not. It all depends.
Not sure if there was much need for snark, I was simply stating some positive aspects of living in the U.S. (becoming increasingly difficult) - would be nice to not have the violence piece thrown in my face. There are also plenty of cities with “culture” and low levels of gun violence here. San Diego, Denver, Portland, Austin for example of bigger cities.
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.
It's not snark. Safety is a serious issue for me when it comes to my kids. An issue that I don't have to worry about here, but I'd feel quite a bit different if we lived in an area where you have to take the possibility of school shootings into account. It's good to know that's not an issue everywhere in the US, but I honestly wouldn't know in what part of the US it's not an issue; from the outside, it seems they can happen anywhere.
cool. just saying- consider yourself fortunate as I was born in one of the most violent cities in the world (Baltimore) to an over-bearing mother who had a very hard time with me leaving despite the riots, corruption, and nightly gunplay I could hear ring out from my row home. We are quite close but she didn't speak with me for months when I moved.
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.
I grew up in an American suburb and now live in Boston. I like that the city is more walkable, but still not very walkable. Transport is a hassle. The city streets are also often unclean, and there are some folk on the streets who most people would rather not associate with, e.g., homeless, vulgar, etc.
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?
Any American city of sufficient size has many parts, some better than others. Much of Baltimore is unpleasant or dangerous, but the Mount Washington area looks suburban and is pleasant. There are dangerous and unpleasant parts of Washington, DC, and there are parts that are fine. There are some troubled places in suburbs, as well.
I think this is a very rare situation in the US and depends heavily on either luck or targeted buying to land the right neighborhood at the right time.
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.
> We lived in the city before and it was dangerous and the neighbor had a crazy pitbull chained up that’d break out all the time so we couldn’t let her out of the house.
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.
Oh yeah CPS came and determined we weren’t neglecting our children when some busybody called on us. It was annoying.
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.
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.
>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.
Helmet rules are a key part to that, it encourages the incorrect belief that riding a bike is dangerous (not to mention being something else to deal with), thus fewer do it
I was an extremely active kid, biking everywhere until the street lights came on pretty much every day.
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.
I had the same experience. My memory of first grade until high school is getting home from school and hopping on my bike to ride to a friends house. I hope my kids can experience the same.
Sure, that’s a defensible argument on the merits against the colloquial usage of the word city as applied to some of these places but you’re running up against the fact that the term “city” has been eroded to near meaninglessness in North America.
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.
And a few places like Virginia, you have Cities and Counties, and you can only be in one or the other. Sort of a Vatican City/Italy situation, except the same country.
I omitted it for simplicity, but San Francisco is basically that: a consolidated City and County, the only one in the State. I mean in legal effect it washes out to a charter county that is also called a city, we have a Board of Supervisors and a Mayor but no city council, and we employ both a Police Department and a Sheriffs Department.
Texan cities though, some of those cross into three counties.
I don't think it's that unconventional. I'm a published critic of American-style automobile sprawl, and I've argued that 90% of what notionally passes for a metro area in Middle America should be reclassified as a rural area in the eyes of most reasonable people from elsewhere in the world.
In the UK you would barely even have neighbours if that were the case, it would be properly rural, US 'suburban sprawl' needs a different word IMO, it's a housing estate basically (though that implies social housing) but a spectacularly isolated/car-assuming one.
Yeah. In other countries, suburbs are essentially just less dense parts of the town, but still has most of what makes a town a town. Suburban US is not much different from desolate rural areas minus the farms.
I grew up in a rural area and currently live in a suburb… They are worlds apart in terms of:
* 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.
I would say suburbs are smaller communities next to a major city. Most inhabitants usually work in the city, and the suburb is clustered around a center with the town-hall, activities like an ice-cream shop, and a mass-transit connection to the city center. They also have an easy connection to a major road/highway taking you to the city. The connection to the city is easy and commuting expected. The suburb is similar to a town in a sense that it is self-sufficient with a school, pharmacy and one, two restaurants, but with few cultural activities due to the competition from the city. Inhabitants spend most of their time in the suburb and children grow up there, but due to easy access to the city people living in the suburb often go into the city to shop, go into a cinema, meet friends or into a museum/theatre. The symbiosis with the city differentiate the suburb to an adjacent smaller town.
It's the idiotic American zoning laws. If an are is zoned for single family homes, you can't even put up a 7-11 in there. Even though it'd have booming business 24/7 just from people grabbing stuff ad-hoc that they forgot during their grocery run...
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.
Rural doesn't seem quite right--in rural areas you can actually buy food at a roadside food stand. NA sprawl is effectively 'housing desert' where the only thing is housing.
If anything, you are being too nice to US suburbs: It's perfectly possible to have towns that are much denser than any US suburb. My Spanish home town has about 100K inhabitants: You'd not call that a city anywhere in the US. And yet, It's basically a circle with a one mile radius: Yes, just one mile. In that situation, one can walk everywhere, and public transportation is limited to the elderly, people carrying heavy things, and the impatient that live in the outskirts of town.
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.
> 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!
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.)
How much use you can pull out of that depends on how it is zoned. In European cities it is not uncommon to have grocery stores, pubs, cafes, bakeries and such within walking distance of your home. My next grocery store is 2 minutes by foot. The next 24/7 store where I can get beer 5 minutes, the next park 8 minutes.
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?
> In European cities it is not uncommon to have grocery stores, pubs, cafes, bakeries and such within walking distance of your home. My next grocery store is 2 minutes by foot. The next 24/7 store where I can get beer 5 minutes, the next park 8 minutes.
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.
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.
In Netherland it traditionally means the place has city rights. But Den Haag (The Hague) never had city rights (being the seat of the count of Holland), so despite being 500k large, it's technically not a city. Though in all other aspects it really is. A much younger city, Almere (200k+), a fairly new suburb of Amsterdam but now the 5th largest city in the country, is far too young for such city rights. But we also have "cities" that have only a few hundred inhabitants.
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.
One thing I learned from the comments of that video (Lennart Regebro):
> 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.
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!
The 2k town often/usually only has one of a cafe/restaurant/grocery store. Sounds like you've got a good town though!
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_!
I live in an area in one of the major European cities (Budapest) that locals just call "the village".
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.
I grew up in a 50k "small city", and I hated it personally. It was big enough to have "everything you wanted", but small enough to feel like there was no escape, no anonymity, no privacy. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone knew everyone's business. The larger city with a smaller neighbourhood (which is a good description of most european cities that I've spent time in) are a great compromise I think.
I live in Amsterdam (800k), not in the center, but within 2 km walk I have half a dozen supermarkets, untold numbers of restaurants, at least 2 hardware stores, several bakeries, pharmacists, half a dozen primary schools, a secondary (high) school.
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.
There are a lot of small towns like that in western massachusetts, which are in proximity to the five colleges, but aren't in them. Places like Montague or Shelburne Falls have areas of density in town that you can walk around in and get to things, and then you can drive 20-30 minutes into Amherst or Northampton or another larger town, closer to the universities.
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.
I don't think that's a sufficient condition. I too am from a New England town that was incorporated more than 200 years ago. But it doesn't have the density or the amenities that you're describing. (I wish that it did!)
Yeah that's fair, it's never just one thing and not all old towns are going to be like that, but it's pretty common in at least Massachusetts, particularly if you're in proximity to a larger town. It's also a much denser state in general than Vermont/Maine/New Hampshire, from what I remember growing up there.
Yes, we have more Art Museums than anything we need in our daily lives. What I like about it is the lack of access to high consumption. What is bad is that the large chain stores killed the local businesses and then realized the market is too small to really care. Jbullock35 how about some clues about your town so we can try to guess.
More or less the same demographics and same experience. The North Western Mass town I'm in was founded as the gateway to the west. It is nestled in low land between three mountain ranges. Our side of one range drains to the Atlantic through Hudson River the other side drains to the Long Island Sound.
The public transportation is tough for us if you want to leave town. We are so mobile that I find it an odd expectation to live close to your friends.
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.
I really do love New England towns in general. I went to undergrad at a small Vermont college and being walkable or bikeable to restaurants, bars, grocery stores, etc. but also being immersed in nature was one of the greatest experiences I've ever had.
> 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).
It's not geography, it's history. The only nice places in the US are places that were built before cars.
I always struggle with the difference between a town and a city, because Dutch has only one word for them: stad. A stad (plural "steden" is something that in the middle ages had city rights (or is it town rights?), a dorp (village) does not. And this has lead Netherland to have some steden of only a few hundred inhabitants, while some villages have more than 100,000, which of course makes no sense. The place I grew up in even has "dorp" in its name, so I will always consider it a village (besides, there's nothing to do there, but I guess that goes with suburbs), but it has about 100k inhabitants by now.
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.
Cities and towns sound pretty similar to your steden and dorp. The US can get complicated because every state defines things their own way but generally there are different legal requirements and rights for cities vs towns.
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.
In my Portuguese apartment block I have 2 restaurants, a cafe, a hairdresser, a phone shop and some other commercial I haven't quite identified.
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
This sounds really weird to me. Where I’m from, suburbs try to distinct themselves from the city by using arbitrary landmarks, like railroads. When they gain this distinction, they are able to separate even more using taxes and schooling to create a deeper division. From my point of view, including these suburbs into the city is practically better than the trend of segregation.
I tend to disagree here. The isolation reduced travel between, which could in turn cause those burbs, to build their own stores and libraries.
My closest gym is 8km away. My closest corner store is about 5km. I have a McDonalds at the 1km mark, but that's about it.
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.
On that note, being able to walk to places would disqualify most, if not all, US suburbs from being towns or cities. Other than the occasional developer created, faux "town centers" (that you laughably need to drive to), they don't even have anything in the way of a downtown or central square.
> but without the density to support usable public transportation (once-an-hour buses don't count), it's really not a city
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.
This is an extreme take but IMO New York is the only real American city. Maybe Boston and Chicago. Everything else is a glorified suburb. I wish we had good, small cities in this country, but we just don’t.
I think work expectations and schooling play a bigger role in that than the city planning, but it may also be suffering from it's own success in some ways. An abundance of choice can sometimes make commitment difficult, dating apps are one example. It's easy to stay non-commited to a social regulationship when it feels like they are a dime a dozen.
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 exactly it. People are very busy with work, and work too much, and then there's so much choice socially, so they end up making plans for their free time several weeks in advance.
Just wanted to throw this in: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...
because recently I was talking to some friends and they were very much under the stereotype that in Japan you work some horrendous amount of hours - that is not true. IIRC data is both self reported and from companies.
The real reason is the same in Japan as it is in Europe and America: even controlling for hours worked, low wages, high cost of living, and other economic costs associated with having a child, women are choosing not the have children because it would require them to end their careers in their prime. It is extremely difficult to have a child and a career at the same time as a woman, and many never return to the workforce. Even women who make good money and can afford to have children decide not to because it would require them to stop working
Here’s another thing no one talks about because it’s taboo: drink driving. Right up until the mid 70s, it was completely socially acceptable to drink and drive. Now I agree that it was probably a good thing that’s it’s been banned, but having to pay for and organise transportation to go to whatever event it is you want to go to adds another substantial layer of friction to socialising. Not to mention the fact that the alcohol itself meant people were probably more sociable. It seems that due to all our technological and cultural change since the 70s we’re living physically healthier and safer lives but at the cost of poorer social and mental health.
Not in rural areas. Maybe for suburbs. At least in SF ppl Uber a fair bit, but I suspect most trips on a night out are not replacing someone driving their own car.
"If you can't afford that price for a ride, plus a $50 tip on top for the hard-working driver, you're a piece of scum and you should just stay home."
- typical liberal American
"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
At least it still beats the experience of taxis in Brisbane. Before Uber were allowed at the airport, I had multiple trips where drivers assumed I was a visitor and tried to take me on circuitous routes to increase their fares, and the experience after nights out was no better.
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.)
I agree. A DUI costs easily $10K regardless of outcome. Lost opportunity cost of not networking (job opportunity, friend opportunity, happiness, therapy) easily has the same cost over just a few years. Uber is very cheap in comparison… many people don’t make the comparison.
This is why I love living in a city with a reliable train network. So many times I have left a party completely drunk late at night, and been perfectly able to manage my way back home. Seems like Americans are left with the choice to either risk killing someone/themselves driving home or just not going out.
> Seems like Americans are left with the choice to either risk killing someone/themselves driving home or just not going out.
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!
Taxis are incredibly cumbersome to hail, if not impossible, in less dense areas. Uber is also relatively new on the scene in the grand scheme of it. You didn't always have that option.
Yes, you can see I costed out a non-car round trip at $5. In NYC on the MTA it would be $5.50; in DC, between $4 and $8.
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.
Move to Baltimore, my friend. There are at least six bars within five blocks of my house. You’d have to get pretty sloshed to not be able to make the walk back.
Yeah, it's just Fox. Not official crime statistics.
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...
I don't understand why people like to bath in drama like this. Yes, there are statistics... But, to be a bit cynic, you can spend your whole life being afraid of everything. But you can not spend the rest of your death being sorry about the decision that led to your demise. IOW, I'd much rather have a burden-free life where I might be a little unlucky and die before I reach the average lifespan... Instead of being careful and afraid the whole time but very old and bored.
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?
> a burden-free life where I might be a little unlucky and die
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?
>I don't understand why people like to bath in drama like this. Yes, there are statistics... But, to be a bit cynic, you can spend your whole life being afraid of everything.
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".
Go to https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2022. Only 10 white people and 1 Asian were murdered in Baltimore last year. 210 African Americans were. It sucks, and it’s unacceptable socially and politically, but in terms of my own personal safety, it would be absurd for me to fear being murdered more than I fear getting hit by a car or whatever else.
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.
For reference, 348 homicides in one year for a city of half a million people is the same risk (using the micromort) as base jumping twice in the same year, or driving 175k miles, or 85ish skydives.
People used to live in a relatively much safer country (which makes for all of the western world, western europe, UK, Australia, Japan, etc.) should be afraid of most American cities - especially certain areas and hours.
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...
All major cities have areas and neighborhoods that are higher risk and not “safe”. You wouldn’t let your kid there, your partner or yourself go there typically.
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?
> 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"?
Those unsafe places are also America. I don't think anyone is arguing that there aren't some places in the US that are safe, but that on the whole, it's a lot more dangerous than Europe. The fact that some Americans have the means to shield themselves from it while others don't just emphasises the inequality.
My biggest problem, though, is the fact that schools are unsafe. The fact that schools need to practice shooter drills is heartbreaking.
When I was younger and went out drinking more often, I walked home from bars in Baltimore all the time. What the stats leave out is that (not getting into the deep politics of redlining and gentrification) the vast majority of violent crime just doesn't involve the pub districts and less neglected residential areas.
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).
Yeah, I maintained https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com for a while. Sad but true, there are one or two high profile murders in Fells Point per year, but if you're white or Asian, you are very unlikely to be murdered. It's almost all African Americans in the butterfly. I mean, it's a goddamn tragedy. You can see parts of Cherry Hill where every single block has a victim on it. Just heartbreaking stuff. But for me living in my neighborhood, murder is basically not a factor. Obviously any city you'll have to worry about muggings, but that's city life.
In another discussion about birth rate, somebody wrote something like this here in HN. "It's a lot safer on the street since we drink less and drive. So this saves many lives. But since we drink less, we meet less people and we make fewer children. But this "never born" children are in no statistic."
I did not say "does not matter / it's the same". It was more like a point, how one thing (less alcohol) might does influece something else (fewer children).
> Parking is never a problem in rural or less dense areas. Downtown and trendy areas tend to be a parking nightmare but you can solve this with money.
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.
You rather not need to park at all, because you walked there. It is hard to imagine if you are used to the car megalopolis but living near everything you need should be the goal of good mixed use cities.
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.
I've found that suburbs are a lot more sociable and friendly than cities. Its impossible to make friends in a new city, and it seems like none of your neighbors are interested either. You have to be the one to go out of your way to meet new people
My personal theory is that suburban sprawl killed the "third place" in modern society. If you have to drive to a place to socialize (which probably involve drinking), then you're probably not going.
My hypothesis is it's connected to the decline in religion, or, more specifically, the mandatory church on Sunday type of religion, no matter what flavor it took.
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.
Religious buildings can be third places, but the kind Christian churches that have faded out of American public life fail the “neutral ground” condition: there’s usually strong social and community pressure to make appearances, meaning that individuals can’t come and go as they please.
This is in contrast with dominant religions (including Christianity) in other countries.
Suicide rates in men are highest in rural areas, which also have highest Church attendance. Does not track. From experience, going to church doesn't necessarily mean you'll connect with other families. At most I've seen extended family co-mingling at a family member's place or resto after service. Living in the city, there is no shortage of ways to connect with others on the physical plane, should one choose to do so. Though it's hampered by zoning and the convenience of the virtualization of all experiences.
I don't think so. I'm not in US, but here „third place“ was not a thing regardless of density. In fact, now climbing out of ex-soviet past (read poverty and totalitarian regime preventing the third place as well as urban sprawl), we got both urban sprawl and growth of the „third place“. Well, little growth from next-to-none. Which is hitting a low ceiling of rather intraverted culture that is caught up in TV and interwebs. Why go to bars if everybody is sitting in tight groups-of-friends and scrolling together...
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.
I just came back from Vietnam and I noticed that many Western countries lack low intensity socialising. There are tea carts everywhere. People sit, sip tea or some other light beverage and just do nothing. They’re close to others who are also doing nothing with whom they may or may not engage with.
Bars and clubs are too intense, too expensive and unappealing if you don’t drink alcohol. At libraries and coffeeshops people are often busy.
Most of Europe has a café culture. It is sorely missing from North America. You just sit outside and watch the world go by.
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.
Illegal to 'loiter' in a park? What does legal use of it look like? Moving through at a swift pace with eyes straight ahead and a stamped permit that it's the most efficient path to your destination?
My personal* experience is that in areas of the US where real estate is highly valued, there's a low level resentment of anybody existing without having an intent to spend money. Parks are tolerated, but the expectation is that they're purely cosmetic, to be walked through at the very most.
* My experience is not universal and is just that: my personal experience.
It's a delayed vestige of the "stranger danger" panic of the 80's and 90's. Being in a park without kids is considered suspicious in some places now. Fortunately, not where I live.
It’s also a subtle way to punish poor people. Obviously it impacts the homeless, but even poorer people without yards or adequate access to private space to play/relax will be forced to loiter in public to get out of the house.
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.
If you think that meeting someone over drinks is equivalent to exchanging a few comments asynchronously, one of us is blissfully unware that they're missing out.
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.
I see two faces of it. One is meeting local people as in building local community and fulfilling socialising bar for yourself. Another is collaborating on ideas long-term. Those are very different.
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.
I'm saying that most of Europe has access to such spaces, and that they serve an important purpose. It's a good place for loosely planned social encounters. Whether or not you personally like them is irrelevant.
> And if you're in a crowded cafe watching a famous person
Born, raised and living in Europe, it seems to me to be a myth of days long gone. I love the idea in theory. But I just don’t see it playing out in real life. They do play a role. But I do see similar, if not better, scenarios happening in different settings.
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.
I feel like parks in most of the U.S. are dominated by activities. Sports, jungle gyms, etc. Often times there’s not a great place to just sit down and socialize.
But there's also the sprinklers that go off every minute to keep the grass looking healthy so no one can sit on it. Or the grass is part of the baseball field. Plenty of good parks in the US for hanging out but wayyy more bad ones where just socializing seems like an afterthought, or not a thought at all.
Nah there's still plenty of "An area that's mostly nature and you can just walk through and enjoy it" but the vast majority of them were set up a hundred years ago so the reality is that most of them aren't even remotely close to population centers anymore. This means if you want to walk in a park, first you must drive there. Also in many places, staying past sundown is not allowed, as in the cops drive in (like they will actually drive around on the grass if they physically can!!) and sass you.
Yeah obviously the US is huge and there’s plenty of nature to be found, but somehow we’ve just forgotten to integrate that into our communities and walkable areas completely.
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.
Work-from-home (as much as I love it) has also killed the "second place" for a lot of people.
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.
Americans are friendly but when it comes to the decisions that matter (voting and the votes with our wallets) the preference is for the private over the public. People are scared to depend on each other or to be forced to interact with strangers.
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.
I think "scared" is the wrong word for it. People in the US tend to have very low levels of contentiousness, and that in turn makes people want to avoid strangers. The most obvious recent example is the push back against masking. In a high population density urban setting, even a few people who aren't adhering to masking raises the general risk level for people substantially. In less population dense areas it doesn't matter as much, because you're going to encounter fewer people. Another example is noise pollution. One of the primary reasons my spouse and I decided to leave the city for a more suburban area (and one of the reasons we're thinking about moving to an even more rural area) is to escape the constant presence of unnecessarily loud noise. Loud music is the major culprit. Between unbearably loud car stereos and loud neighbors (especially when living in an apartment building), low contentiousness means that even in a moderately dense area it's nearly impossible to find a moment of quiet.
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.
All mask rules should have been lifted the second the vaccine was available without a wait. But the government kept it for another year. Of course we pushed back on that nonsense. Of course we don't trust those government people.
> it's nearly impossible to find a moment of quiet.
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.
Well one example is infrastructure...if a formerly-rural area gets a gradual accumulation of homes, chances are they are all on septic systems...so people are using their property for waste water recycling, and there is a limit to how dense this type of living can be.
I grew up just outside a decent-sized city in Canada, now living in Texas...both places, on septic. Its not rare.
Right, but that's one of the reasons to make it easier to build infill development, which is largely illegal due to zoning, parking minimums, height maximums, etc.
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.
> And we’ll wonder why the people in that cute little European town we visited that one time seemed so much happier.
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!
> HN needs to just drop this notion that anyone opposed to density is a caveman.
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.
I classify myself as an extremophile; suburbs are the worst of both worlds in that you're crammed in with a bunch of people but on a sprawling 2D plane -- large enough to have little privacy and low access to stuff, but just close enough for possible social friction. Ug.
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.
Often however the denser the urban core the easier it is for people to choose to live a short distance away in sparsely populated areas and still have ready access to urban amenities like good hospitals. In other words, those who dislike dense cities the most, should be promoting urban density as it increase options for those who like city living and for those who prefer the countryside.
> 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
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).
Cars are awful. I was fantasizing about an e-bike after reading a thread on HN, but in Phoenix, I'd die for sure. I do not feel safe around other cars in my car much less a bike. I really wish the US weren't so all in on cars. It's only getting worse with the oversized death-machine trucks saturating the roads. My in-laws are blind as bats and drive something that should require a commercial license.
Getting around on an electric bike will prolong your life. I bike on good infrastructure and it makes all the difference, you see kids bicycle 7km to soccer practice. Two months every year I go to an area such as you describe and while it feels dangerous it really isn't that bad. The stress can be bad if you let it, but as long as you accept it and try to see everything nice that happens you are ok.
> Getting around on an electric bike will prolong your life.
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.
Not just bikes makes it feel like the solution to everything is to be like the Netherlands. In that sense it's a fraud. To some extent yes you should be more like us and offload some of that traffic onto a bike path. To the extent that works and is efficient. But... I have lived here all my life. It is not a solution to anything else. It turns out, bikes do not talk to each other very much either.
But after arriving at destination, people can talk, no? You also dont get bothered with parking and everything is much closer, so less time in traffic, so much less thinking about how to get to destination and more about how nice it will be spending time with friends.
But imo trains are better, even less thinking about commute. Living in Zurich for a bit was eye-opening. I took a breakfast with my friends in train, like in restaurant, when we went to mountains. And trains were fast and frequent, like one in 15-30min towards our destination
You still need people to talk and time slot to meet. Same scheduling issues.
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.
Well, idk, in my case it was really the transport. In the past I've lived in same area with my friends and we occasionally went to shop, walk together. In covid, I've moved in the opposite part of the city, with bus it'll take me 30 mins to arrive to them, with car, maybe 15-20, but taxi is expensive and I don't own a car+ the hassle to find parking. As result we met only on special occasions like bday or at some specific places in between but it's also not that frequent.
Did nothing else really changed in your or your friends' life?
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.
No, literally nothing else changed, no kids, no other job(except me, but i would say I more time free after switch). We are about~25yo each so, yeah the distance is the only thing that changed. In the past we lived in 10 min walking distance, now 30 mins on bus that doesn't have dedicated lanes and is getting pretty full pretty often. Like we are still friends and we try to meet on some occasions, but imagine in the past- 'lets go for a walk after work'-'yeah, no prob, meet in 5 mins'. Now it's -'im so tired, i don't think i want today(20-30 mins to destination+ the same to be back home), maybe next time' just thinking about how tiring it is to spend 40 mins total on transport is already killing the will to meet
Trains are great if they go where you need to go. But of course their high infrastructure requirements mean they won't always. Still to visit my friends i usually take the car as they don't live in the same city and housing near the station isn't cheap.
I was about to reply something similar. The Netherlands is also experiencing a loneliness epidemic, so just density and bikeability are not sufficient answers.
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.
You can't deny that residential communities here in NL are quite different to those even in other European countries, let alone the main Anglosphere countries (US/UK/Canada/AU/NZ). The bikes help a lot sure, but there's more things here than the bikes that contribute to the sense of community, and it does work. (It's obviously not perfect)
Nothing is showcasing it works. We are on the downward path just as much as every other country, being more and more atomized and pulled away from friends and family due to social and economic incentives.
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.
Yes, I have this problem with a lot of the “urbanism” community. I totally understand that there are significant issues with American urban design, but urbanists seem to suffer from the “when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” syndrome, with increased density and walkability seemingly being the solution to all of the world’s problems.
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.
While I also like "Not Just Bikes" and this idea in general, I must say that urbanists sometimes make this mistake - living right next to a dozen of people next door and a hundred more in the same building doesn't mean that you will talk to them. I've lived in the apartment for all my life and changed it last year. I have no idea who are the people next door to me, I don't know their names and the whole social interaction with them is limited to "have a nice day" once every few weeks when we accidentally meet in the corridor.
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.
I lived on 2nd Ave NYC for a while which matched your observations on interacting with neighbours. However there's an interesting urbanist video [1] that suggests that even in a higher density neighbourhood with appartment buildings, the amount of traffic on the road affects both how many friends you have and how much you socialise with neighbours in your building. Ie in a car lite environment, everyone is friendlier.
The benefit isn't so much that you can be friends with your neighbours, but that the density makes all distances shorter and by extension your friends are still much closer.
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.
It seems vastly harder to make friends in a city, to me. When I lived in the suburbs, it was really simple to make friends. In the city, I dont know anyone. I agree that its nice to live so close to friends, but it seems impossible to MAKE any in the city.
The suburbs suck because people don't have porches anymore. Even if they did people are highly suspicious of one another. It is a lose-lose situation all around.
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.
I have found that the suburbs are far friendlier than cities. In the suburbs, I knew a lots of my neighbors, and making friends was very easy. In the city, nobody talks to anybody. City people are just unfriendly or theyre sick of other people or something
> 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.
Our block is extremely friendly, but this is honestly that all the kids in the block play together and it brings their parents out to socialize while watching the children. Other blocks in the neighborhood don't seem to be outside at all, and the people who socialize seem to come to this block to do it. Much of it is one specific family who is just outside all the time and are friendly and so they catch a lot of people and get them talking.
Part of the reason is also that people are now more mindful of "private" space and "personal" space than ever before and so they are not used to having people living close enough where they have to interact with them on a regular basis.
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
Eh, it's part of it, but not the whole story. Utah is a pretty close place and it has a lot of sprawl (traffic isn't too bad though). So many things have changed in the last half-century or so that I don't think you can point to any one thing as the cause. Even in a city with a lot of sprawl you likely have a lot more people you are within a 10 minute walk of than someone in a mid-size town is within a 10 minute drive of, it's just hard to meet those people because most people stay within their existing bubbles unless some event shakes up their life (breakup, job change, moving, etc.)
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...
Thanks for providing this POV. Many of the responses here seem to think that density is a good thing. I feel the completely opposite way -> I need space. I need space away from my neighbors. I like not having other people park their cars next to my home. I like not hearing my neighbors have an argument or a party. I like not sharing the walls of my home with others. I like walking on a path by myself sometimes.
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.
Yea, I also definitely feel this. I was roommates in a large house with 3 good friends for a few years and I definitely feel like I'm better friends with all of them now that we don't live together.
By the same logic, boundaries and distance are also part of a healthy relationship, and there's no point to forcing proximity when it is not desired.
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.
In most of the US it's kinda hard to live genuinely close to a large number of people. And close doesn't have to be just physical distance, things like convenient public transit can put a lot of people and amenities within a 15-minute radius.
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.
The author laments a long walk, passing so many neighbours and potentially unmet friends along the way. Looking for close friends who aren't around anymore.
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.
I've had some success with sites such as Facebook Groups or Meetup. They organize events to connect strangers with a shared common interest, in my case casual hiking and board games.
To not feel isolated friendship is something that will have to be done in meatspace. Take up a hobby or interest shared by others and participate in events or outings together. It will give you something in common to talk about and take the edge off striking up a conversation. Just becoming a regular at a busy coffee shop is a step in the right direction.
To me Meetup seems like a much more natural model. There's some activity I have an interest in and I can meet other people who also want to do it. The Bumble BFF thing like... OK, we have nothing in common except we want to make friends? Seems odd.
One way to do it is through hobby groups which meet IRL. You can make friends in the hobby-space there, and then gradually start inviting them to things that are not related to the hobby (becoming more of a true friend).
As a 36 year old that recently moved yet again to a new city (the third time in my adult life), I've had decent luck joining recreational sports leagues. Lots of leagues will have options to sign up as a "free agent", which usually means you'll get placed on a team with other free agents, which tend to be others in the same boat of trying to meet new people. If you aren't necessarily the athletic type, bowling and kickball are pretty good options. I've found that most of these leagues (especially if you sign up for the novice/recreational level) are NOT very competitive, and most people are just out to have fun, meet friends, possibly have some drinks, etc.
> why don’t we do this? The fetishization of the nuclear family, of course, as well as the building and zoning codes that facilitate that fetishization.
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.
> about American individualism[0] and not wanting to share anything if you don't absolutely have to.
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.
Well it's great that America tested that out so the rest of the world can see how miserable it is. Europe paid attention. Verdict is still out on China and India.
> For example, what young married couple would want to live in their parents house if they can afford their own?
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.
> Anyone who has kids and sometimes wants a break.
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.
> Anyone who has kids and sometimes wants a break.
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.
> I would have to deal with my dad wondering why I would waste money paying people to cut my lawn
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.
That’s an example of someone who doesn’t believe in “wasting money on things you can do yourself” and constantly judging our decisions?
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.
Why should I have to? I made enough money in 1996 when I was making $10/hour as a computer operator so I could move out on my own without dealing with every move I make being judged and asked Sunday morning why am I not going to church.
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.
This is quite interesting, actually. Perhaps it is cultural. My cousins had kids and the grandparents spent all the time with them. My other friends also did the same, once immigration concerns were handled. The positives I can see from the outside are:
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.
Single family homes aren’t the problem, it’s lack of density and mixed-use. Ideally you have single family homes mixed in with condos and apartments, coffee shops, grocery stores, etc. and then you mix in various sizes and configurations so the wealthy CEO is walking their dog at the park and saying hello to the student living in a studio apartment, and they all say hi to the elderly couple sitting on the porch when they bring their kids to school to their neighbor, the teacher.
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.
Exactly, even the areas with the most density in America don't feel the same because of poor zoning laws mostly prohibiting mixed-use areas. The problem with the US is urban planners(is there a single new walkable city since urban planners became a thing?) not density.
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.
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.
But they always do make you do it eventually, don't they? Govt never gets smaller. Only bigger. They never get rid of laws, only add new ones. Govt never wants less power, only more.
I can attest to the value of living close to 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.
I lived with the same three guys from the time I was 18 to about 31. It was pretty great, our gfs hated it and I eventually got married and started a family but it was fun while it lasted.
There is another answer to living close by. If VR and AR one day meet the promises of old sci-fi, distance will be less of an issue. It will be a dramatic improvement over phone calls and FaceTime / zoom.
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
It's a shame that the whole "walkable city" concept has become a bit of a meme in the US - it truly should be a thing that we all strive to create - to nurture in-person relationships through the physical design of the space.
>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.
The city centers in the areas you mentioned are definitely off my list as well for the same reason. There are nice suburbs in those areas but there goes the "walkable city" aspect.
"The fetishization of the nuclear family" mentioned in this article feels unnecessarily provocative, as if the author isn't well socialized (perhaps overly associating with minority subcultures that don't recognize traditional norms?)
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.
We talked about this in my friend group. The issue is you have to optimize multiple distances: work, spouse's work, kids school, parents, friends, etc.
It'd be easier if I had local friends, honestly! I made a lot of friends in the last 10 years, and over time, they've all moved away from where I live to other places. My best friends are 500, 1700 and 2000 miles away, respectively, and if I want to see them, someone has to book a flight. So I just Zoom and have to be satisfied with that.
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 always get pushback for this but I think the idea that adults 'hang out with friends' is a meme from sitcoms. I think people grew up absorbing sitcom premises as representing life. I look at my parents and grandparents they don't have many friends - there's one or two people they see once or twice a year. That's normal. Having 3-5 people who you catch up with regularly through the week and hang out like teenagers, is a premise for a comedy with dynamics. It's not real life after 30.
That’s definitely true if you have a family which your parents and grandparents did by definition. My wife and I have just a few friends we see irl regularly (couple times
a month) but that’s about it. I still keep up with my college friends but it’s over iMessage as we’ve kinda scattered geographically over the years. Between my wife and kids I feel pretty socialized and don’t feel the need to seek out anyone else.
The Soviet Bloc is calling: after work, you would drop in to eat and drink with your friends; or your friends would drop by and eat and drink with you -- everyday.
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.
I agree that the hanging out at home with friends thing is probably over represented in sitcoms for plot purposes. That said the entire culture in Europe historically centred around working then going to the village or town pub/tavern/restaurant afterwards for drinks, along with church on Sundays. And this still is life in a lot of places. In addition, the majority of people would probably stay where they grew up rather than moving away for study and work unless forced by war or famine. And going back even further we lived in close knit hunter gatherer tribes. Only seeing your friends twice a year is definitely not normal human behaviour when viewed historically.
One aspect of this which I find myself often think about is that it takes some deliberation with whom you want to spend your time when you get older if you're not living the usual family life.
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.
Yea, I think I feel this from the other direction. I'm not that much older than a lot of my friends, but I've lost many of them over the years to marriages and children. Many of them moved across the country or at least a large distance away to facilitate that, but even the ones who stayed nearby justifiably made their life about their spouse or children over their friends, and there was often little to be done to keep myself involved in their life.
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.
As I approach 40, I've learned that you can either loosen expectations and make new friends with those around you or be content with a dwindling friend group. Everyone changes over time and many (most?) friendships will not survive unless you are the "event organizer" of your friend group. The people who I was friends with a decade+ ago are completely different people (and so am I!), so its not too surprising that those friendships naturally diminish.
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.
I appreciate the perspective, and I certainly don't hold anything against the folks who have prioritized other things in their life. The difficulty I've found is often when there used to be some activity or hobby you did with someone, which then becomes harder to continue doing without them. If your usual tennis partner moves away to start a family, it's not just trying to find a new friend, it's trying to find a new friend you enjoy playing tennis with, or upending your schedule to now play less tennis, or stop playing tennis at all.
Perhaps a possible drawback of such an arrangement could be that people change over time, and sometimes you just don't like the new person that they've become.
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.
Well that "arrangement" isn't a marriage of convenience. It can end anytime if we drift apart. We all acknowledge that we are different people then we were before. So is the world.
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.
Sprawl exists because it’s nice. People really like having a 3,000 square foot detached single family home with a 2 car garage. Especially when all of their friends have one. The only way everyone gets that, by definition, is sprawl.
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.
They didn't invalidate the idea that some people prefer sprawling neighborhoods. They just posited that that is not the only, or the primary reason for the extend of sprawl.
I live in Romania, in a city that has been growing a lot. There's plenty of new development, both high density and single unit detached homes. Zoning is not that restrictive here, so it's actually people preferring to live in a separate home. So yeah, sprawl is nice.
And how much infrastructure (schools, kindergardens, medical centers, parks, postal offices, good public transport etc.) do you have around those new developments?
Pretty good infrastructure. Most of the new high rises are in the place of old factories that were built in the middle of the city, so they are in a good position, with access to good schools and everything, including public transportation.
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.
I'm not really sure what city in Romania you're talking about, but if it's one of the higher population ones I'll tell you that the "housing in place of factories" is an exception. Most development happens outside of the city centre and has so little thought or care put into it it's almost third country-like.
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.
I don’t think the density quite compares. I’ve seen some of the new developments around Timi?oara for example and they’re still far higher density than most of the US.
My wife and I just moved from our 3200 square foot newly built (circa 2016) house last year and bought a 1300 square foot fully furnished condotel (units are owned individually in a resort condominium and they are rented out like hotels when we aren’t there and we get half the income).
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.
My home before I moved was built for $335K and we bought it using an FHA loan with 3.5% down in north metro Atlanta in 2016. It was about the median price of a home back then. I was still in the recovery phase of my career (long story). We qualified for when I was making $135K. For reference, that’s less than a returning intern I mentored at BigTech got offered in 2021 (we work remotely).
> People really like having a 3,000 square foot detached single family home with a 2 car garage.
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.
One has to weigh the probability that (1) said limits are removed and (2) when they're removed, it makes a sufficient difference in prices against being permanently priced out. A house now, or a 5 million dollar apartment for 500k (both figures inflation adjusted) in 50 years? People wouldn't be foolish for going with the former if they're not rich.
I think they're rare in America - where even new build has poor construction quality. I lived in one in London where I ran into my neighbour one day and she apologized for her children being absolute hellions that weekend and kicking up a ruckus. Well, I hadn't the slightest idea there was anyone next door at the time.
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.
No it’s missing the best part. The outdoors and having a huge backyard. You can’t have any hobbies like woodworking, metalworking, gardening/farming, animal husbandry etc. in that setup.
Cities subsidizing maker spaces would solve the wood/metal workign part of this well, and I live in a pretty dense part of the city that has a community garden down the street.
Shared spaces are not for me. I’d much rather have my own workshop where I don’t have to share. That’s the beauty of the American lifestyle, you don’t have to share. Your home is your castle.
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.
So the author points out that some reasons constraining mobility are outside of a person's control:
> 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.
The article briefly speaks on why people might not have control over where they live - and then the author then continues to discuss the matter as if an individual does have control, as you said. However, this is far from meaningless, because many do have a say in where they live, and still neglect to factor in living near to close friends. I agree that it doesn't apply to everyone, but this doesn't make it nonsense in my opinion.
The author's contention is the "unprivileged" person probably doesn't have this problem by virtue of not having left their hometown in the first place.
Seems like the obvious answer to this question is just greed and/or ambition, right? The target audience for this article seems to be white collar workers and most professionals can mostly live wherever they want, they just have to accept the pay grade & accommodations that come along with that choice: none of which involve poverty or desperate circumstances.
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.
People move a lot these days because of mainly economic circumstances that fit their age, work, family circumstances and friends are made mainly earlier in life.
Chances are thus that most friendships will be separated over time. That's not even considering relationships that start remotely in the first place.
It's not a new phenomenon, it's been going on for generations. In my country, my generation moved more than the previous ones. Perhaps we've reached a tipping point but not anywhere near to the point that people will not move away from most of their meatspace acquaintances and friendships.
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.
All these articles about "just moving". Who can afford it? We would lose A$24,890 just on stamp duty - a "tax" that goes to the government based on nothing other than the value of the property that they've been inflating over the last three decades. If I had a spare $25k kicking around, using it just to pay off creditcards would make me much happier than moving next to friends.
I bought the house across the street from my best friend a few years ago. It's been an excellent decision. We actively recruit our other friends to do the same, but no one else has jumped on it yet.
This article casts moving far away from home as some great tragedy but about the last place I'd want to go again is my hometown. I certainly don't feel like there are such close friends there that it's like they are long-lost family (and, you know, your actual family sometimes it's kind of mixed too).
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.
I think this is a great idea but it's hard to effect in practice. We have formalized relationships between significant others, including the obligations that come with that.
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.
Because my country suddenly (ok, gradually) turned murder-crazy, and half of my friends emigrated and will never be able to return, and the other half escaped war and destruction and atrocities, and the other half is still there and defending their country from the crazy murderous idiots of my former country?
One of the perks of living in a smaller city (in my case, Reno) is that if your friends are in the same city at all, chances are y'all are already within close proximity.
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.
Up until 10 years ago, the largest city I had lived in had 50-60k people. It wasn't really worth it to count a metro area: That was the hub for the small towns of the area, and honestly pretty normal where I was in the Midwest. Some had no taxis (and pre-uber) and in others, you couldn't count on a taxi to get you to work on time. Only 1 had busses outside of school busses (but all had school busses).
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.
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.
I think cars was the single most stupid "evolution" for humanity. And when maybe we had an out (prioritizing public transports, because fossil fuel is running out), then what... ELECTRIC CARS FOR EVERYONE. Cars take up so much money and space and energy... And the time that you should gain thanks to your car is just lost in transportation time, because now you can (and have to) live farther from work / friends / family / activities.
- 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".
You just can't imagine how dense and efficient the public transport network could be if humanity didn't invest trillions over trillions of dollars into cars and car infrastructure.
Cars are bad and I hate cars because they're the worst idea humanity ever had.
I lived in Columbia, MD from 2010 to 2018 and from 2021 to present and I can state with confidence that our design does help to alleviate some of these issues.
I wish our model would have caught on. We do a lot of things right here.
It requires designing your life actively, which more people don't do.
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.
I've organised my life around moving very close to my best friend. It makes me live in a somewhat crappy city and I can only work remotely, but the fun we have together is more than worth it.
> 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.
I would think that most members of the LGBTQ+ community in most parts of the world are shunned out of their traditional familial and friend circles (neighbous, classmates) due to their perceived abnormalities.
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.
Here's another, not very practical or scalable solution: live in a small, healthy European village in the 200 to 1000 population range. I have a grocery store, a hair stylist, a kindergarten and my firewood guy within walking distance. And 499 neighbors, some of whom have become friends.
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 live in a small European town. Lived in bigger cities for a while. Not for me. I can just walk into the pub and have a pint and a conversation, with a friend or a stranger. Good times.
Commoditization of "home" is probably the number one culprit. Nobody wants to make a decision with the largest investment they have based around where their friends live right now (especially when they might react to market conditions and move in 1-2 years afterward).
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).
Sometimes I think NYC is the worst of both worlds. Urbanist density, with surrounding sprawl and decaying transit with congested streets. It has large areas without good greenspace, while also being a good 60min by car / 90min by train from escaping the city to get to some nature.
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.
But if your hypothetical spouse has friends, you have to move near those friends as well. And if their hypothetical spouses also friends, those also have to be nearby. And let's not get into hypothetical children, their friends and the parents of those friends.
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.
Date your friends and marry them. Problem solved :)
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.
In my case, it's because all of my friends moved to the other side of the country. I stayed in the city where we met, but they didn't. (Possibly because it's too expensive.)
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.
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.
This article is explicitly wondering why people don’t live closer to friends, explicitly preferring friends over family. I don’t think it’s surprising personally.
"""
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.
"""
We're slaves to the machine, it's a depressing thought. The whole consumer culture, especially with the digital entertainment nowdays, seems more like an opiate of the masses than religion ever was.
Perhaps digital world is a new kind of quazi-religion?
It's just so damn hard to get away from the Screen. Everything else has a start-up cost to it. The Screen keeps the dopamine trickling.
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.
After graduation I moved to a large city away from friends and got pretty sad. Got a job back where I knew people even though it is way smaller and I immediately felt much better
I have a behaviour that some people have said is weird. I rarely hold on to friends when I change locales. Once in university, I had none of my high school friends within a year. Once I graduated, I had almost none of my university friends within a year.
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 think the way you frame this is probably weird, but the actual behavior is completely normal. Most people would say that they care about their friends from previous phases of their life, but most social research says that friends rarely survive the transition from one stage or location to the next. For friends, proximity is king.
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.
Times change and friends change. As an adult, I also view ending friendships in a similar manner. Some friendships burn bright others simmer, but the latter group seems to always lead to more sustainable long-term friendships.
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.
> We Seek Solutions Within the Family Unit — Not Outside of It
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.
> 5.) Many States Aren’t Safe — For So Many Reasons
> 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.
Crime is measured on the orders of magnitude of small tens to few hundreds per hundreds of thousands of people or so. On the otherhand, these laws affect these groups 100% of the time so long as they remain in these states where its clear their representatives don’t care about their concerns.
Crime at the societal level is measured at those rates because most places have no murders for decades, whereas the most dangerous neighborhoods — basically all full of “marginalized people” — have staggering rates of violent crime.
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?
0-5 Years: I depend on my parents
5-10 Years: I want to learn to be independent
11-20 Years: I want to be independent and free
20-40 Years: Oh crap I need a network of friends and our parents to depend on to help with our kids
40+ Years: Oh crap I'm dependent on the love from my children who moved out
Because some of our coworkers have no friends and want us to socialise with them, and their insecure managers agree. Therefore some have work in offices and uproot their lives all the while employers have no issue serving remote customers.
I completely agree to this. We moved to TX from MN for the sake of being closer to friends. Within months I can see my social life is improved, I bump into friends casually while picking up kids & walking in the community.
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.
I was presented with the option to endure a unpromising job for 8+hr a day but be around great friends (hometown), or move to a completely unknown city for a better job but not be around friends. it wasn't an easy choice, but I considered the # of hours of suffering vs joy in either scenario, i went with moving for the job. pandemic and having kids really makes me reconsider whether i made the right choice.
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.
It's not a problem with the people as much as it's a side effect of high mobility etc. Your friend might decide they're moving to New Zealand and that's them gone forever. And so it's just sensible not to bet on friends sticking through life. If you value it above all else then there's literally small villages in the middle of nowhere you can pool together and buy.
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
reply