Beautiful. Does it ever feel challenging in any way, like you're fighting against a social norm?

A little, but not terribly much. Maybe it's an age thing, I'm not that old (around 40), but I don't feel weird talking to people I don't know - I quite enjoy it. In fact, I felt rather sad since the rise of smartphones, because a lot of places I use to get small talk(barber, airport, etc), everyone is busy or feigning being busy. But when people are just out enjoying the air, they are more free to chat.

The biggest thing to put aside are first impressions/biases - ie, treating people that you wouldn't normally think you'd be friends with the same. As a lot of my neighborhood are older than we are, that was a lot of people. In a way it's like coworkers, you can't pick them, but some end up being great friends.

It also helped to have a really outgoing child. She'd go riding her bike around the neighborhood, and a few people stopped by because "the little girl on the bike said I should come meet you guys."

I will say it was easier, to me, to do so when first moving in. I personally would feel weird if I'd lived somewhere a long time and never bothered to meet anyone, then started acting more social out of nowhere. But that's probably just in my head.

This worked for me, too (except I’m usually the one walking by rather than the one waving people over to chat).

If you don’t like small talk, a great way to interact with neighbors is to offer your help, e.g. if you see someone doing work outside, gardening, etc… offer to lend a hand!

Started doing this to a limited extent. For years I'd have never dreamed of doing this, as I did not want to feel obliged to casual acquaintances, i.e. I feared expectation of friendship that I did not want to reciprocate. Turns out most people are just happy to leave things casual. I don't mind small talk.

Related to why I've had limited friendships. I've wanted fewer, high quality ones as overshooting my social needs is uncomfortable, and I'm a creature of habit. Used to overcorrect towards solitude and that backfires, but I've had friendships in the past where I dreaded having to meet.

I am curious. Which country do you live in?

I'm not the person you're replying to, but we did this in an LA suburb.

Among other things that have resulted from it:

One of our neighbors invites everyone over for 4th of July every year. We have a block party where we block off the street once or twice per year. Neighbors have been over for backyard parties, my wife goes to birthday lunches with the wives on the street, and there's a giant text thread where people ask for help/etc for things.

During the first year of covid, we did a special neighborhood Halloween, where everyone on the block put out bags of candy for neighborhood kids to go house to house and pick up.

> where everyone on the block put out bags of candy for neighborhood kids to go house to house and pick up.

Is this usual in the region, or perhaps did I misunderstand you? Don't the kids usually walk up to the doors and ring, and then you personally hand out candy to them?

During covid lots of people didn't want to do a normal trick-or-treat.

So we arranged something in our immediate neighborhood - about 20 houses - to create a bag of candy for each kid in those houses. We left them on the lawn and each family with kids took their turn going around to each house to get their bag of candy.

So it was less "go to random people's houses" and more "let's get together and make sure halloween isn't cancelled".

Southwestern USA.

Which is kinda funny as my wife hates it and wants to move because gardening here is really hard-to-impossible, but she doesn't want to give up our great neighborhood, so we're at an impasse.

Gardening should be possible in the southwest, but you may have to utilize greenhouses or whatever the opposite of one is. Much of the "desert" will bloom if you pour enough water on it (and drip irrigation does wonders).

But you can't do a "midwest" style garden.

Right, and we're used to that style of gardening (and tropical, we've lived all over). Here the main problems are that the soil is completely garbage, it never rains, and there's too much sun. She's had limited success planting things in large bags full of garden soil, watering every day, and building a system of shades from the afternoon sun - it's just a big hassle compared to gardening in a lot of the eastern side of the US.

Yep. The first can be repaired, the second compensated for, but the third is the killer. You either have to vastly move the growing season (growing in winter seems strange) or you have to learn new tricks that don't "feel right" like growing things up against a building to get shade half the day.

Composting can be a great way to improve the soil, but it takes years to really get going. But if you're going to be there for years ...

And maybe you could even get "donations" from neighbors! I know one person who setup compost jars for her neighbors to get more compostables.

Gardening isn't easy to get started. Most people end up living in houses that have poor soil (fill dirt) and dont realize how much you need to water to have success. Automatic irrigation with sprinklers and timers is critical otherwise things will die while you go on vacation. Your gardening season is probably offset from the rest of the country with a dead zone in the July/august when you get heat kill.

My wife for example likes to water for 5-10 seconds and that basically does nothing, you have to water significantly more as you need to put down 1/2" a day or more during the peak. It would take forever to do that with just a garden house and the pots you have can probably barely hold the water required to last a day. Reference https://earlywarning.usgs.gov/ssebop/modis for you area.

Also if you aren't buying compost by the truck load you probably aren't buying enough. For the first run you need like 6+ yards to fill up a couple beds, and the next year that will decompose to half and you will need to fill up again. Spend a bit more buy the good stuff (ask online whats good locally), the city waste compost is not great stuff has plastic and shit you will never get out plus it holds water poorly due to all the filler they add.

Thanks, I love the idea of living in this kind of a neighborhood. I have been living in an apartment building for close to a decade now and I don't know a single person on my floor or in my building. I don't even know who my neighbor is.

It's sad that modern American yards are so unfriendly to sitting in your front yard, but that can be easily fixed, even within the boundaries of over-zealous HOAs or towns.

Just make a cute little "gate" (it doesn't even need the gate) with flowers at the end of the walkway near the sidewalk, and add in a table and some chairs (or move them out when you go to sit).

Being at the sidewalk vs being 20-40 feet away on a porch makes a huge difference.

I agree. In my opinion, it's another manifestation of individualism promoted by the capitalist system in the US - in urban design, in this case. Another commenter pointed out how they only see their neighbour when they both walk to or from their car at the same time. It sounds sad to me, but some might prefer it that way.

It’s mostly just fashion, no need to read into it so much with your own personal biases. Although it can serve a purpose if your house is on a busy road. It’s quieter the further you are from traffic.

Setbacks are often required but there’s quite a bit you can do even with that. Front yard barbecues are great!

There's a rented row cottage near my office where the front fence is made from timber pallets, and appears like a bar with built-in succulent plantings. The tenants at the time used to drag out stools and sit there and chat like it was a wine bar.

We've put seats out on our front porch with a view to one day remembering to actually sit on them. So far, it's just the neighbourhood cats snoozing there when the sun hits the right spot.

New Orleans has stups and porches. People use them. You have to meet your neighbors somehow.

Retired city planners never envisioned a world where we were so collectively anxious/antisocial that waving and inviting someone onto your porch 20-40 feet from the sidewalk would be considered a “sad” state of affairs. Is it the planning that’s in a sad state?

This isn't really the case outside of far-flung suburbs and rural areas. Where I live, setbacks of more than 6 feet or so are rare, and front porches and stoops right off the heavily used sidewalks are the norm. We do "porch hangs" with our in-building neighbors, our kids and the kids in the neighboring buildings do sidewalk chalk together, we hang out at the local parks together, bring over friends from nearby neighborhoods, and talk with other parents and stuff.

Being a parent in a child-friendly neighborhood helps a ton with finding a community. Before we had a kid, we'd do things like welcome new neighbors with treats from our favorite bakery and our phone number if they needed anything, being generous with our time and things, etc.

I'm prepared for this to be an unpopular opinion, but I'm glad my neighbors don't do this.

I know my neighbors well enough. We check each other's mail when they're away and will help out in other ways.

But I have lots of friends to keep up with outside of my neighborhood -- people I have a lot in common with -- my neighbors, not so much. If they wanted to talk with me each time I saw them coming or going, I would likely start actively avoiding them so I could get on my way.

i'm sure you can just say hi and move on.

Then just wave and move on, GP and his wife will not be sequestrating you to make you mingle.

You would love my next door neighbors. They moved in the same week we did 2 years ago. We saw them when they first drove up and enters their garage (middle age couple). Since then, nobody has ever seen them. They never have lights on in their house at night. They never answer their door. They never open their garage and drive away. They never have packages or anything else delivered. They only way we know they are still alive is their trash bins go out and are taken back in every week (though nobody has ever seen them do it) and in the winter you can see the white smoke/condensation from their utility vents.

Where does the trash come from?

Brought in through underground tunnels .

We assume they are leaving in the dead of night and grocery shopping at one of the 24 hour grocery stores. Maybe they have packages delivered somewhere they can pick them up in the dead of night. There is always someone around during the day, so for sure somebody would have seen them come or go if they were doing so during the day in the past 2 years. Our conjecture is either they are vampires (which is unlikely since it was daytime when they first arrived) or they are in the witness protection program.

I just remembered another detail. They have grass in their front yard. It is cut, but a service has never come by and cut it and, of course, we’ve never seen them cut it. But we don’t hear any sounds in the dead of night of it being cut and it doesn’t look like it was cut with a scythe. Frankly, it’s a mystery.

They are one of the Matrix communication ports...

It sounds like you're in the cohort of "some just waved and moved on."

it's a little dramatic to say it's an unpopular opinion for you to not want to exchange deep hour-long life stories with your neighbor every interaction. of course!

i'm replying because the fact you mention "i know my neighbors well enough" is already the ideal that OP is speaking on. in todays world you can literally not acknowledge your neighbor's existence in all directions and get along 100% just fine. i mean, "borrowing sugar" is why instacart exists!

no no no, you're already doing lovely and agreeing with OP that neighbors, as real human people to honor as existing, is a good thing.

Yeah there’s a Seinfeld for that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_Hello

>My neighborhood

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

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

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

In a typical evening, how many neighbors walk by?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've got a similar situation here in Baltimore. The community I'm a part of here is like nothing I've ever experienced. We actually have a neighborhood telegram chat of ~70 people where we post about neighborhood events, parties, etc. My wife and I have a great circle of friends within this community and it led us to buy a house a few years back(before the market got all wild). We just had our first kid, and there's plenty of other newborns popping up so I'm looking forward to seeing them all grow up together!

Is this Baltimore County or City? Up in Milford Mill, I wish I could say this was the case for my neighborhood.

Such a sweet idea! Really looking for ways to grow community in our neighborhood aswell.

Yes this exactly. I threw a block party last year and the community loved it and most were like "you know we haven't had one in years."

A year later and we've found lost dogs, gotten people employed and I have some of the best and strongest relationships in years - and my kids have a ton of others to hang with of all ages (7-15)

When in hard times, build Communities not bunkers

Based and grill-pilled.

We've been doing the same. I recently have gotten into brisket smoking, and for the last few weekends, my wife and kids have been out in the yard every Saturday all day smoking meats. At night we offer some to everybody who walks by.

It's really been nice.

Ah hell yea, smoked meats. Are you a fellow enjoyer of Sweet Baby Rays too?

I keep a bottle in the fridge just in case Mark comes over.

A cute friendly dog works wonders too.

I did just this a few days ago, it's incredible how many people will come up and ask to pet your dog. Some will keep moving quickly, others will talk about their own animals, and some will drop little hints about themselves to further a conversation. Aside from everything fun about a companion, it's really is a fantastic feeling to be able to see someones eyes light up, you're brightening up their day!

When my wife and I bought our house last year, we made bags of cookies and visited every neighbor to introduce ourselves. This has paid dividends. In our neighborhood we now have friends we see weekly, people to call upon if we're out of town and need someone to check on the house, and use of two neighbors' pools!

Brilliant idea - I think I'll try this in my neighborhood and at work where people seem to be walking alone all the time

I host two events. In fall, I’m the pancake breakfast guy and then in spring I’m the crawfish boil guy. I just put flyers on people’s doors before each event. I just think it’s fun and missed the sense of neighborhood community I had as a kid, had my “be the change you want” moment. My kid on the other hand gets a kick out of having everyone know his name and being a hyper local celebrity lol.

My kid would love you for the pancakes, and my wife for the crawfish boil.

Any tips/recipes for the boil? Assuming it's that cajun buttery stuff - I have to drive an hour to get some, and would love to be able to make it as good at home.

It’s not hard. Just takes a little practice, right/good equipment, and good ingredients. My main tip is get them live. Get them purged and cleaned if possible. Otherwise just another simple skill to learn but definitely don’t want poopy crawfish. I find people devour the potatoes and corn. Then about 4 lbs of crawfish per person (some people will eat none and some will eat 10 lbs so hard to estimate).

You can probably get the decent starter recipe online as it’s pretty basic and you’ll just start with a premix of spices. I wouldn’t recommend DIY approach for a bit on spices. Do a couple practice runs to build muscle memory and adjust how spicy(hot) you like it.

I grew up around it but even still I had to watch some YouTube videos to spark my memory of what the adults were actually doing. So just invest some time there as well.

Good luck with the boils!

Edit: to add, I also have to drive a bit. It was partially the genesis for this as I realized I somehow crossed this border where I was no longer near the gulf coast but inland and although I’m in same state it’s actually quite a different culture where I am versus closer to the coast.

awesome.

reminds me of The Balcony Movie (saw on Mubi).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e58xwcNzjb0

...and, this is kind of the idea behind this -- for apartment-dwellers.

https://myapartmentfamily.com/

This is just brilliant! It makes all the difference in a neighbourhood to have folks who seem to genuinely be friendly and caring staying very close by. My wife and I try to do this in neighbourhoods where we stay without being intrusive or too chatty. Works wonders.

It's funny, in a lot of mainland Europe (i.e. not UK, also not non-rural France IME) that's completely normal. People would rather sit at the front (even if they don't have a garden/balcony/anything at the front, just sit on the doorstep or chair in the street) with a coffee/smoke and chat to neighbours or nearest shopkeeper.

In the UK I think it's probably more common not even to use your private back garden with your own family, because the neighbours are using theirs this evening!

In my experience actually Americans are a lot more up for smalltalk with strangers than we are here in Europe.

Reddit.com/r/fuckcars Reddit.com/r/suburbanhell

It’s not the sad isolating culture leading to cars it’s the reverse. Who wants to sit outside with cars driving nearby?

I'm in Boston, which is very walkable but have lived on major arteries and busy neighborhood roads. We still hang out on our porch with our neighbors all the time, as do lots of people here. It has nothing to do with vehicular traffic.

In small towns in Spain is very common, when the weather is good people just sit outside their houses with a chair, and im talking about houses without garden whatsoever, they just sit on the street, of-course its secondary streets where there are almost no cars. Normally people stops to chat, and the more closer neighbors also come to sit.

Imagine doing that on a city such as NY.

This is so wholesome and has generally worked for us.

I have one thing to add if you can pull it off: get a dog, and walk the dog around then neighborhood. I've met so many cool people that way.