This is a bitter stereotype that is leveled against both city-dwellers and suburb-dwellers, and, like many stereotypes, has some truth to it in both cases, but amounts to uncalled-for negativity. Some people don't want to interact with their neighbors, regardless of whether they live in a city or a suburb. Others are sociable with their community, and express it just as well whether they live in a city or a suburb.
In densely populated cities, you are often in close proximity with other humans you haven't met yet. But there can be social and cultural norms to keep walking and avoid eye contact because social interaction with all the countless people you pass is completely impractical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AoNuz1gjQo
So both environments have their challenges for impromptu social interactions.
Inadvertent interactions between people you see every day build a sense of community over time — the “sidewalk ballet”.
I always wondered what she would have thought about her ideas in the context of COVID.
>Joe Cornacchia, who keeps the delicatessen, usually has a dozen or so keys at a time for handing out like this. He has a special drawer for them.
>Now why do I, and many others, select Joe as a logical custodian for keys? Because we trust him, first, to be a respon sible custodian, but equally important because we know that he combines a feeling of good will with a feeling of no personal responsibility about our private affairs. Joe considers it no con cern of his whom we choose to permit in our places and why. Around on the other side of our block, people leave their keys at a Spanish grocery. On the other side of Joe's block, people leave them at the candy store. Down a block they leave them at the coffee shop, and a few hundred feet around the corner from that, in a barber shop. Around one corner from two fashionable blocks of town houses and apartments in the Upper East Side, people leave their keys in a butcher shop and a bookshop; around another corner they leave them in a cleaner's and a drug store.
>In unfashionable East Harlem keys are left with at least one florist, in bakeries, in luncheonettes, in Spanish and Italian groceries.
And over the course of our 6 week stay, we definitely ate at that pizza shop a few times!
Seems strange to me, I've never done anything of the sort and wouldn't consider it. The closest is maybe leaving things at school for another parent to pickup because they left them with my kid.
If the person had a history at denying the keys at random for no good reason, people wouldn't trust them with the keys anymore.
Anyway, it's way more likely that they would call the home owner instead of just denying. People are mostly reasonable.
People recently voted Trump into office.
I paid the money, give me the key. Plus at no point did I pay them any money -- they're just, essentially, key escrow.
It's good marketing for them since being in and out of a pizza place means someone will likely buy a slice, but as a BnB customer IDGAF what they think outside of giving me that bloody key.
> with a feeling of no personal responsibility about our private affairs
where i live now differs so that phenomenon doesn’t exist here.
This is what my suburb looks like:
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9014246,-87.791197,3a,75y,17...
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9301849,-87.7195955,3a,75y,3...
The front yard space and number of driveways in the Oak Park link also stuck out to me.
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7099143,-87.6801127,3a,75y,1...
This is really what most of Chicago looks like (modulo economic conditions in the different neighborhoods --- they're not all this upscale). It's a city of neighborhoods. Most of the streetscapes that jump to mind about Chicago, if you don't live here, are places people basically don't live.
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9405345,-87.6750174,3a,75y,2...
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9403868,-87.6590203,3a,75y,3...
wiki, use translator: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichlinghausen-S%C3%BCd Maps overview with borders highlighted: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fvr34T8JbLEVQLAF8 Street view of a normal street there; though I recommend 3D view for a better understanding: https://maps.app.goo.gl/QXEGChFvHciAq8Va8?g_st=ac
This is btw. 2.9x as dense as Oak Park, IL.
Note that 41k live in the Loop and 27k live in Jefferson Park.
Maybe if you sample by area, places look more suburban than stereotypical cities, but by population, lots of people live in the dense parts.
100k in the Near North Side, which I think is basically a “downtown” streetscape.
And of course many in the in-between density neighborhoods (eg 71k in Logan Square).
Source:
I moved from a denser part of Bridgeport, so it definitely has been an adjustment (particularly in variety). But even some areas of Bridgeport, which is much closer to downtown, had pockets that are equivalently walkable to where I'm at now, or maybe even less so. Anyone surprised to see SFHs and front yards in Chicago probably hasn't ventured far out of downtown/a handful of North Side neighborhoods.
https://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/public-participation/e...
Edit - sibling comment indicates Seattle has something similar.
This is entirely arbitrary and knowing whether a particular place is technically part of "the city" doesn't really tell you anything about it. As you might expect, this causes a ton of unnecessary confusion.
[0] Part of Kansas City proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9B9rhVzAtSykLhUs5
[1] "St. Louis" but not part of St. Louis proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xXM7A2fQYY2Kh3vY6
> Nobody I know would call that street the city. In my mind, "the city" is, minimally, houses that are a few feet apart, small yard in back/front, pretty much nothing on the side. Frequently, it's 2-3 story buildings, with whole floors rented out as an apartment. That's my "least dense" vision of a city. Anything less than that (ie, full yards) falls into my vision of suburb.
They almost never clarify. What they do is produce silly arguments like this one.
Define people?
When most people I know say suburb they mean this: You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there. Some suburbs are like what you describe, but most are exactly like what OP links to.
I'm not at all sure what the utility is of a using a definition of suburb that excludes most of the not-high-density but not-rural US and only counts the absolute worst-designed spaces. It just means we're all talking past each other, with some of us saying "not all suburbs are terrible" and others insisting that suburbs are by definition terrible and anything that isn't terrible isn't a suburb. It's a bit of a True Scotsman fallacy and doesn't make for very useful dialog.
> Some suburbs are like what you describe, but most are exactly like what OP links to.
Without defining what constitutes a suburb, how can you argue that most are good? Your argument hinges on your own definition of suburb IMHO.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, but in my experience most people mean post-war development patterns when they talk about suburbs, but in any case it probably doesn’t hurt to be more precise about what we are praising or criticizing.
> You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there.
Since my definition is broader it's less susceptible to NTS fallacies. What you identify as a suburb is a suburb but it is not all suburbs.
> but in my experience most people mean post-war development patterns when they talk about suburbs
Even this is too broad to sweepingly say all suburbs are bad. I've lived in 5 different suburban neighborhoods as an adult, 4 of which were developed post-war, and all had sidewalks and plenty of walking around and neighborly interaction.
And, seriously, who cares? Why would you want your argument to die on this hill? What could it possibly matter?
Did you read me as disagreeing with you, or did I misunderstand and you were trying to say that Oak Park isn't a suburb? Or is Oak Park actually within walking distance of "the city" as Chicagoans would identify it?
In any case, I think there are multiple valid definitions for suburb—one which talks about smaller towns on the periphery of large cities and another which emphasizes postwar design principles/philosophies. I don’t see the point in arguing for a single true definition; language doesn’t work that way.
Clearly the author of TFA believed that this was the definition of suburb, because they were clearly thinking of a space where people could in fact just hang out in front of their houses and meet neighbors. So for the purpose of this conversation, this definition of suburb is the only one that makes sense.
My thing since I moved houses a couple years ago is just hanging out on the porch, and I'm probably just going to start telling people when I'm going to be out there and inviting everyone to just come over.
It's like pretending downtown Evanston is a suburb of Chicago.
(shh don't tell anybody i said that)
That being said, we did have this sorta thing on my block during covid times (once ppl stopped caring abt the social distancing and mask nonsense) but then the main families that did this moved away to bigger houses (as their families grew) and now it’s basically dead as there wasn’t a lot of intention behind it like the OP clearly has.
Quickly figured out that power was out and the weird sound was neighbors sitting on their front stoop talking.
Many homes are designed such that the inhabitants rarely use the front door, using only the garage.
A lot of "suburbs" in the Midwest lack sidewalks -- you can have the cops roll on you if you try to walk anywhere.
There is a close connection between urban architecture and whether or not community building can take place, and sadly, many places are not like it.
Kunstler's TED talk is a fantastic way to become more aware of that topic: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_...
His thesis is some of the US must be torn down to rebuild it in a friendlier community-enabling way.
Curiously, to the OP's "stoop coffee" topic, he already recognized the communicative potential/value of the space in front of houses, and he points out that old European cities "got that right" (and having a central market square, too).
This has not been my experience in the surburbs. A typical suburban home has both spaces: a front yard/patio and a back yard/patio. If anything the physical constraints are substantially more conducive to hanging out out front than what I'm seeing in these photos here—people in the suburbs have some amount of space that they actually own in front of their home, they don't have to occupy the sidewalk.
As OP said, which one people choose to use depends on the personality of the individual, not the layout of the space. For example: our last four homes, like every home in each neighborhood, have had both, and I always prefer to be out back while my wife loves being out front interacting with the neighbors as they walk by (which, yes, they have regularly done in all four neighborhoods!).
In my experience, you're far more likely to see kids biking/wandering around neighborhoods in the suburbs than in the city. This is the reason why people want things like cul-de-sacs, because eliminating through traffic means that people are able to use the area much more freely without having to worry about cars.
This doesn't match my personal experience, at all. Even the cutest and most pedestrian friendly suburbs have far less walking than typical cities, with faster more dangerous traffic, and less infrastructure for alternative modes of travel.
> far more likely to see kids biking/wandering around neighborhoods in the suburbs than in the city
This also doesn't come close to matching my personal experience (though it does match many people's inaccurate stereotypes, which I have heard repeatedly in conversations with people who don't live in cities). There are tons of kids and families around in cities.
> eliminating through traffic means that people are able to use the area much more freely
Quite the opposite. Cul-de-sacs cut places off from easy pedestrian access and make it usually significantly more difficult and dangerous to get anywhere by walking, because to get to destinations requires crossing massive (sometimes 6–10 lane) quasi-highways with high-speed traffic. Such places typically also come with separated residential and commercial zones and few useful destinations nearby: not as many schools, museums, libraries, parks, coffee shops, restaurants, retail stores, etc. within a reasonable distance, and lower population density with much more pavement per person. The predicable result is that in most places with many cul-de-sacs hardly any trips are made on foot or bike and people end up driving everywhere. Public transit also tends to suck in places with cul-de-sacs everywhere.
I run into the opposite problem - people who grew up in the suburbs, move into gentrifying city neighborhoods as adults, and who carry idealized view of the city they moved to, will often accuse others - even people who have lived in the city there entire life - of being an outsider if they don't hold the same idealized view.
Judging by how shocked this type of person often gets when I tell them I was born and raised here ("You from here? 'Here' here? Wow, that's pretty rare!"), I get the impression that many of these people live in a bit of a gentrification bubble. Which is fine, but it would be nice if they were aware that there was much more to the city than the gentrification bubble (including people who have lived here far longer than them, sometimes for generations).
Anyway, you'll notice I never claimed there weren't "tons of kids and families around in cities," but rather that seeing kids roaming around neighborhoods on their own was more common in the suburbs than the city (at least based on my personal experience).
> Cul-de-sacs cut places off from easy pedestrian access and make it usually significantly more difficult and dangerous to get anywhere by walking, because to get to destinations requires crossing massive (sometimes 6–10 lane) quasi-highways with high-speed traffic.
This is a non-sequitur. I already mentioned in my post that in the suburbs it's more difficult to get to commercial destinations. That doesn't change the fact that a cul-de-sac is an area with little traffic, that most suburban developments/neighborhoods have pretty light traffic, and that you're typically going to encounter very little traffic inside these developments/neighborhoods.
Having lived in both, this is just categorically untrue.
Cities are filled with pedestrians and cyclists. Both recreationally and for practical purposes. In a given hour I might see over a hundred pedestrians outside my window and perhaps twenty cyclists. This would be an order of magnitude higher if I was on a commercial corridor or actually busy street.
In contrast you might see ten pedestrians a day in most parts of the suburbs. And maybe one or two cyclists, unless you leave your neighborhood.
Suburbs also have far worse traffic. City streets have small roads and slow-moving vehicles. Suburbs have giant thoroughfares and fast-moving vehicles. As a pedestrian and cyclists, I know which of the two I’d rather be in.
I'd heavily agree with the idea that my suburban experience is that I do not know my neighbours, and the only time I've known them has been for bad reasons (harassment, fencing disputes etc.). In the inner city, I may not know my neighbours, but you probably know and interact with your general community in public spaces a lot more than the suburbs, mainly because you don't get everywhere by car. The small coffee shop on every corner in the gentrified inner city where people wait on the path for their coffee is a bit reminiscent (to a lesser degree) of the "stoop coffee" idea. That experience in the suburbs only really exists through your children (i.e. via schools and sports clubs) and doesn't exist much for child-free people.
With growing high density development near train stations in the suburbs, there is a bit more of this experience further from the city center. However it is really limited to a few square kilometers of urbanism and apartment living that then gives way to endless free standing houses and car dependent suburbia.
If some people here think that a suburb has to be the absolute worst stereotype of NIMBY living to count as a suburb and others are talking about anything with detached single family homes and yards, we're having very very different conversations. It seems more useful to work with the definition of suburb that simply means "outside the urban core".
Even the definition of "outside the urban core" is hard to pin down; I'm pretty sure you could get disagreement on whether where I live is within the urban core or not.
Yes, counterexamples exist. But the vast majority of American suburbia is quite like what you describe: isolated homes with very low density where the only way to get to anything you’d want to do is drive, even within the neighborhood!
I don’t have a front yard in my home in the city. But I do have a million things outside my front door. So I walk to them, and I see and meet neighbors along the way.
I walk my dog and meet neighbors who are sitting outside their houses. I also sit outside my house and meet neighbors who are out walking their dogs or just out for a stroll.
When I've spent time in big cities I simply don't see this, because there aren't good places to walk dogs and it's generally unpleasant to just be out in the street for the sake of it.
The idea that all suburbs are isolated nightmarish hellscapes of pavement and car accidents is some combination of a myth spread by city dwellers and a minority experience in a few types of McMansion housing developments.
Sure, but they are a lot more setup for walking dogs and casual walks and bike rides with your family and friends. The version of stoop coffee in my neighborhood is people walking their dogs and then stopping to chat. That and leaning on their fence talking to their neighbors.
well, there's also security, physical containment of your pet/children.
I think of Frost's "Good fences make good neighbors"
These houses have narrow lots, a porch right up to the sidewalk, and are on narrow streets. Newer neighbourhoods don't have that magic combination - even when the lots are narrow and there is no garage in the front, there is always a setback, a useless front yard, and more often than not no porch (or a "vestigial" porch that's too shallow to use comfortably).
Editing to add: The old neighborhoods are nearly always on a grid of streets, where every street has passers by. Newer neighbourhoods will have hierarchical streets that include crescents and cul de sacs, which connect to nothing and have nobody just passing through (although that does seem to be changing in the newest neighbourhoods).
I don't have a dog though.
I don’t really get this. Our communities have so much in common and so much overlap, we shop at the same stores, go to the same parks, get stuck in the same traffic, our kids are at the same schools,our neighbors care for us medically, teach our kids, maintain our dwellings, work on our cars, and contribute to our local municipalities through property tax. We vacation at the same places.
We have so much in common but we put our heads down and duck into our homes ignoring our neighbors. To be honest it makes me really sick to think about. Like the internet has allowed us to live these parallel lives, highly dependent on our neighbors but completely isolated from them. We smile and nod then go to the ballots and kick our spite up to the federal level (in the US).
To me, we have the majority of our lives in common.
Social media and the political engines preys on our differences making them the focus of our interactions ignoring the fact that 90% of our day-to-day lives are overlapping and our concerns are similar: health, wealth, prosperity, safety, education and recreation.
It’s not much, but as I get older I’m making a point to slow down and talk to my neighbors, have real conversations with them, many of them fly political flags that are contrary to my political beliefs but I find out we have so much In common because we have such similar day-to-day lives and experiences.
Neighbour 1 cares about Trump, neighbour 2 about Ukraine, neighbour 3 is focused on Palestine, neighbour 5 about public transit, while I might not care about any of those. All of them are going to seek like-minded people who are unlikely to be their next door neighbours. It wasn't like this in the past, where economic mobility was relatively limited.
Multiculturalism coupled with economic mobility means often neighbours and you don't really have much in common. As an example my next door neighbour: He's a major, I'm in the sciences. We travel in different circles. I have a dog, he doesn't like pets. We both have kids but they are of different ages, don't go to the same schools and basically don't know each other. We met a few times then realized that we have very little in common and stopped interacting. There's nothing binding us beyond a shared geography.
Not everybody has to be best buddies with their direct neighbors, but in my experience in a one-mile radius from you, whereever most of us are, there are some interesting folks nearby that are worth knowing, and they would say the same about you.
Because of TV, social media, computer games and gadgets, we forgot how to socialize well, but if we (enough of us) care enough, we can re-learn it.
I mean, that's a circle with a diameter of two miles - it's basically "entire city" for many cities.
only the most onerous of neighbors are going to launch into tirades about politics before getting to know them anyway. these people will already have their giant TRUMP flag on the lawn.
I think this is only true if it's true. If you have a neighbor who doesn't have kids, doesn't shop at the same places you do, doesn't vacation at the same places you do, and doesn't work on their car, how do you think they feel about you characterizing the neighborhood that way?
After growing up in a small town, I knew I didn't want to spend the rest of my life explaining that no, I don't have kids (and hearing them say, "oh, I'm so sorry,") no, I'm not fascinated by how my car works, no, I don't want my lawn to be a perfect uniform shade of unnatural green. I feel much more comfortable in the city, but I'm aware that it's only because I fit my liberal city neighbors' assumptions much better than I fit the assumptions in the small town I came from.
To me, being on good terms with my neighbors is work. It's sometimes pleasant and almost always worth the effort, but it's work, and I'm always aware that I'm participating in the same game that felt so alienating and excluding when I was a kid in my hometown. The only differences are that the gap is a lot narrower and I've become more pragmatic about it. I skip past questions that uncover differences. I help guide the conversation towards commonalities. I try not to think about how it feels for people who have to paper over bigger differences than I do.
It's amazing to me that not keeping my lawn looking like it's part of a fancy golf course is my biggest hurdle in making friends with my neighbors.
It’s not even politics related, people just don’t like the same activities. Some people cook, some people eat out, some people buy in bulk, some people hit farmers markets.
Easy transportation, internet shopping, etc make it trivial to have zero overlap with your neighbor’s day to day, regardless of city or suburb.
This rings really true for me.
My last house was in a small gated set of 16 townhouses.
I knew everybody's cat or dog's name, but only on of the human's names.
Most people I knew by descriptive tags. There was saxophone lady, federal drug cop, potsmoking couple who lived on the other side of federal drug cop and who's pot smoke I could smell if I opened my back doors, there was ski boat guy, Harley riding girl, there was shouty dad and annoying child.
I still live nearby, and I passed an older couple from there in the street a while back and greeted their dog by name, and they said "No, this isn't Oscar, he died a few years back, this is (new dog name that I've already forgotten)."
One of my neighbors I lived next to for over thirty years, was so nosy, passive aggressive, and judgmental, I avoided them like the plague. They finally moved and the new people called the city on us because my dog barked for more then ten minutes during the daytime, on the second day after they moved in! (She was only outside for an hour.) On the other side of us is a car on jacks and 'stuff' in the front and back yards.
I've learned to keep my head down and not worry about them.
There's certainly opportunity. NextDoor comments here are of mixed quality. And the NextDoor feed seems to have the ad saturation cranked up unpleasantly high.
> Thus, the WhatsApp group was born. At first this was just a place to announce when we’d be out having stoop coffee, but we soon realized people wanted to connect over more things than just coffee. So we ended up converting the group into a WhatsApp Community where we could have chats dedicated to certain topics or groups and plan other types of events together.
This is kinda funny from my perspective. In most of the world WhatsApp reigns supreme to such a degree, that advertising for it would have the same pointlessness of a Coca Cola ad. In LATAM every neighborhood, department building, workplace and school has a multitude of Whatsapp groups.
The good and functioning ones are: work related, have people that organically have become dang or are too small to receive "manual" spam / random petty fights. The "manual" spam is people sending MLM scams, annoyingly advertising their side hustles, political or religious message chains. People also will fight publicly because someone may or not have flirted with someone else's husband. Forums are eternal.
The only thing like NextDoor here is SoSafe, a community safety app, which quarantines the crazy people that see an "undesirable" taking a walk and wants to call the cops.
> When they started mentioning WhatsApp, I did have the briefest thought that this could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor.
But the quote of a fragment of that, without ellipses, and somehow capitalized, looks like a verbatim quote of an entire sentence, which changes the meaning substantially:
> This could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor.
The difference in meaning is irrelevant to your comments, but, in general, others who come along will see and respond to quotes, so quotes take on a life of their own, while remaining attributed to a person (who didn't necessarily say that).
;-)
I agree that this would be a pointless exercise in advertising WhatsApp, but this is a kinda funny comparison. Coca-Cola is advertised like crazy. Unlike WhatsApp, advertising is an essential part of how they maintain their dominance. They don't have the network effects of WhatsApp.
You're lucky, sounds like your local NextDoor community has above average (for NextDoor) comment quality...
The signs of a populace with wildly conflicting values, a lot of anger, a lot of mental illness, and a lot of cognitive problems and knowledge deficit... has been apparent in online comments for a couple decades.
One thing with NextDoor might be that it's developed a reputation. So that many people expect that the typical post will be some alarmed retiree posting a doorbell cam photo of a "suspicious person" going to doors on their street, who was obviously delivering packages while being nonwhite. In real life, most people would minimize interaction with the alarmed person, not install an app to get more of it.
Another thing with NextDoor is that some aspects of the experience are really user hostile. Besides the ad saturation-bombing, and the user interface that could use some cleanup and straigtening-out, there's things like 2FA (for Nextdoor!). I'd love to see numbers on how many users that 2FA alone cost them, and what they got in return. A UI cleanup is possible only if it's not overruled by the people doing the ad saturation, where user confusion just means more opportunity to show ads (until those users dont' come back, and don't bring their friends, but that's someone else's KPI this quarter).
Or bicker about street parking. Or people who post on social media in general, like to talk about politics or fake outrage over nothing or the weird boasting people like to do like post a news article about some family freezing to death in the Yukon and how disappointing it is that the husband didn't keep his SUV prepped for such an occasion like I do here in Houston—you know, I don't even leave my house without <LARP armor>.
It can get in the way of a foundational part of the social fabric: being able to assume your neighbors are normal, nice people.
That's what the urbanologist Jane Jacobs, in her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" called "eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street".
As she said, "The first thing to understand is that the public peace - the sidewalk and street peace - of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves".
To many people, of course, this is disgusting behavior.
Well in my experience when I lived in a neighborhood like this in practice this meant a lot of really bored soccer moms in the local facebook group posting pictures of every new van on the street because they were now convinced their kids were in mortal danger. The million ring doorbells probably didn't help either.
I think P.K. Dick was much more accurate and prescient than Jacobs when it came to the paranoid character of local neighborhoods in particular in an age where that is amplified by technology
if my neighbors are weirdos I'd like to know, and in what sort of ways
But you aren't learning that they're pedophiles or violent or that they'll harm you or that you can't trust them to watch your kids or make moves on your wife or poison your dog or burgle your house or can't be a good friend or reliable neighbor.
You're learning things that really have no impact except to make you dislike them.
It might not seem like it since we love to forage for this kind of info on social media, but you only lose from that transaction.
It’s still obviously racist to everyone but it’s not reportable or treated as such.
It seems Nextdoor has fulfilled that need and more.
In fact, parts of SF match the description too. This story would have unfolded differently in SOMA. Even in safe neighborhoods, (eg: Mission Bay, Rincon Hill) large towers, 5 lane roads and 35+ mph thru-traffic discourage neighborhood vibes.
> has some truth to it in both cases, but amounts to uncalled-for negativity
I disagree. This isn't a case of 'both sides'.
Cars destroyed American cities. Then Americans moved to gated suburbs that did everything in their power to limit through traffic and therefore the destructive onslaught of cars. Suburban residents demand easy access to the city by car, but reject the car in their own neighborhood. Suburbs want to have their cake and eat it too, at the expense of city residents. In contrast, cities do not impose their wants or needs onto suburbs. The resentment by city dwellers towards suburbanites is justified.
Fortunately some cities escaped razing. Boston, NYC, DC & SF have many neighborhoods that enable wonderful stories such as this.
It is worth extreme efforts to cultivate good relationships with your neighbors.
I remember one beautiful June Saturday afternoon cutting through a gorgeous neighborhood on my bike and amazed it was like a ghost town. All the houses with their beautiful yards on a quiet street, and literally no one outside. It was so weird.
For a very different example, I live in a small village of about 250 people in rural New Mexico. Of the 250, there are between 50 and 75 people who are sociable and interested in forming, maintaining and enjoying community. Of the remaining 200 or so, about 1/3 of them are friendly and social, but generally do not want to participate in community activities. The remaining 2/3 live here because it offers them (amongst other things) a chance for privacy.
“Everyone with a five minute walking me” is a very different number of people in Brooklyn vs the suburbs. Let’s say 50 vs 500?
I think it’s way easier to end up on an anti-social block than in a city, where the law of large numbers draws blocks toward the average.
If you are a Hindu living in a small US city you will find and becomes friends with every other Hindu in the city - there are not very many and you stick together. If you move to a slightly larger small city you will discover that there are too many Hindus and it is hard to make friends with them because their friend groups are already full. (This is a real example from someone I work with, names and exact cities not given for obvious reasons)
This matches my own experience of living in the suburbs where some streets are way more interconnected than others.
To be clear I’m not claiming this is rigorous social science. Just sharing my intuitions based on experience.
Wealthy white collar suburbs almost universally suck because people don't really miss out on much by not interacting with each other and people have no real problems so they tend to make each other their problems and not like what their neighbors do.
You go down the economic ladder and things get a lot better because people have enough real problems they don't give a shit about whether their other neighbor pulled permits or what the setbacks are or how long their project car/boat has sat on blocks, and they interact with each other because being friends with your neighbors well enough to share tools and trade favors is worth it.
Reality is what removes the bias more than anecdote, and statistics is what tracks these facts.
It would negatively biased if it was more of corner cases than not.
Meanwhile, the more wealthy neighborhoods are full of busybodies sniffing around for the slightest HOA infraction, and high-anxiety individuals reflecting and amplifying each other's tensions. Each home is a fortress unto itself. I feel pretty lucky to be in the middle, where we don't have as much crime as the poorer areas, but we still know one another, and still trade food on the holidays.
Wealthier neighborhoods tend to have massive buy-in from the residents, because who wants to lose something that nice?
Point being: the experience is best when avoiding extremes. Poverty and incredible wealth both lead to issues in a neighborhood.
But my experience in an urban apartment building is not very different. You might encounter someone in the elevator but it's polite to keep quiet. A lot of dense townhouse neighbourhoods are built without any corner stores, cafes, or bakeries mixed in at the ground floor.
I like that this family found a way to make do without any third place at all, just occupying the sidewalk and roadside. But I'm sure it would be a lot more comfortable if they had at least a shady patch of grass!
Exactly. This is a story about intentionality, which is required regardless of whether you're living in the suburb or the city. In the US, neither culture prioritizes spontaneous interaction by default, they're only different in the manner in which the isolation manifests.
My neighborhood has a tradition of summer “wine walks” even though homes are widely spaced. It’s not about place, it’s about attitude.
As a cultural thing, that type of community behavior has likely been going on for most of the past century in NYC.
But the person in the article tries to create that in a place where there is no cultural proclivity to that kind of behavior. That's actually a far more difficult thing to do.
Still, it is awesome to have it just as a cultural practice. No question.
My block and many of the surrounding ones in the neighborhood have block associations that organize events like block parties, clean ups, stoop sales, holiday events, backyard garden tours, workshops etc, as well as being able to advocate for the block's collective interest as a legal entity.
A dozen or so people with dogs met at the park every day. We knew each other, watched each other's houses/pets on vacation, and sometimes did dinner or BBQs.
A few people organized a DnD group after advertising on nextdoor (which is a cesspool but only 70%).
Of course those with kids the same age often knew each other because of school or activities.
The neighborhood park had a system of "pea patches" where you could grow some stuff next to your neighbors.
There's nothing that unique all in all about this space other than there was a "third place" we all had built and took care of (the park was originally supposed to be a school that never got built so the community got it to become a park but at least half the work came from the community. The county provided some matching work).
The weird thing is people are people no matter where they are, mostly. And if you are lonely, you can go fix it.
Lots of people move from somewhere they hate so somewhere they think will solve all their problems. And they are right. Or they move from somewhere they love to somewhere that they know will be terrible. And they are right. It seems like whether you think your neighborhood is great or terrible, you're not right.
I've also lived in neighborhoods where nobody knew each other. I think all we can get out of this HN thread is: "Not all suburban neighborhoods are the same."
I agree there's a huge variety in neighborhoods in the suburban umbrella, which is unfortunately ignored in urban/suburb discussions. We're house shopping and want to find a "good" neighborhood, but short of knowing someone in the neighborhood already or spending significant time in the neighborhood it's hard to get a good indication of vibes.
In one neighborhood there was a yearly block party where we closed the street and cooked out, kids played together in the street consistently and visited each others' houses, neighbors babysat, etc. Everyone on the street knew everyone else's name. Whether this was a suburb is maybe up for debate, I don't know, but it was at least all single family homes.
I moved directly from that to a more rural suburb. Homes were still pretty close to each other - nobody had much land - but there were no sidewalks and the neighborhood was a network of cul de sacs. I knew the last names of my two next door neighbors but only talked to them maybe three times in about ten years. I knew of some people ("a fire chief for a nearby town lives in that house, that one has a family") but that's really it.
My assumption is that this is getting worse over time as entertainment gets more and more individually catered. Basically _Bowling Alone_ but moreso and as the most civically-minded people die off. Not sure if there's anything individuals can really do about it other than be friendlier with your neighbors
As someone who lives in the suburbs it threw me because it's so rare for anyone to acknowledge any positive of the suburbs. The suburbs are always some lifeless dystopia where we all drink away our days and wish we could visit the bodega and get a fresh baguette or something.
Here in suburbia in an exurb, everyone knows each other. We have regular street parties. All of the kids play games together frequently.
It's been a lot of fun. We know our neighbors, people are frequently out walking, talking to each other, and so on.
Urban settings have more 3rd spaces which can be good places to socialise, but your immediate neighbours are less likely to speak with you in my experience.
And having a toddler amplifies the experience since most families move to the suburbs when they have kids, urban spaces are far more likely to have young people without families.
I've found the opposite. My neighbors and I (apartment, in the city) rarely speak to each other in the city, but when I lived in the suburbs I knew LOTS of my neighbors
An old rationalization of prejudice. Everyone seems homogenous to me and what was heterogeneous yesterday (e.g., Italians and Irish) is homogenous today. Just stop worrying about it. People with different backgrounds are much more interesting, all else being equal. All are Homo sapiens.
Also, kids in city neighborhoods also go to the same schools. In suburbs I've seen people don't generally share an employer and church - that's a small town.
It depends on the definition of suburb (some are pretty urban), but my experience in cul-de-sacs is neighbors rarely interact. Lots of places don't even have sidewalks.
In a sense, you no longer need to since you now have thousands of people within about a dozen-suburban-house's distance away.
I think you had a bad experience. The center of activity isn't the street in the suburbs - its schools, churches, events, etc...
Cities are that too dense (Manhattan) don't have the space to do "stoop coffee" or equivalent. Everybody is in a tall apartment.
The cookie-cutter suburb is too spread out and too car-dependent. You could have "stoop coffee" but your neighbors are in their cars, so don't stop to talk.
An older bedroom community, or smaller city with single family dwellings (row homes or tightly-packed detached) hits the balance - enough people on foot, enough space to spread out and not block the sidewalk.
I think this idea that a “city” is like Manhattan just doesn’t hold up in the US. Manhattan is approaching unique here and there are places in Manhattan that could be described by your ideal.
I think it has much more to do with demographics and type of people that happen to be living there, and whether there's an existing community. The more lively neighborhood in my case was in a "worse" neighborhood with cheaper houses, while the new neighborhood was all newly build housing. We were all starting from scratch with each other, with some people maybe having a year or so more history than others (as they staged builds 5-10 houses at a time). Community is a frail thing, and needs to be tended or it will wither, and sometimes it dies before it even has a chance to flourish.
It's not like communal behaviors or venues in SF/Oakland/Berkeley did not exist prior to 2025...
I do think that people who live in the most downtown of downtown areas are more similar to cul-de-sac style suburb dwellers, because there's often a similar kind of implied distance to third-spaces that people want to be in, as if taking the elevator down is equivalent to getting in the car and driving somewhere, and being elevated is like having your fenced off yard in a way, but there's so much more to urban spaces that include skyscrapers than there is in suburbs that include cul-de-sac car centric hellscapes, imo.
If you move to the city from a particularly isolated suburb, please leave the social isolation where you came from, and do what you can to just be present and open to conversation, it's amazing how it feels to be connected to people that you can by on the street because you're both going to the train stop or cafe, and it's this sense of connectedness that makes the thought of moving back to my hometown quite repulsive, despite the individuals who live there otherwise being alright
When I lived in "Brownstone Brooklyn" I had a stoop and would often hang out on it, as is common in neighborhoods with this feature. I knew tons of my neighbors, people would stop and talk to each other, etc. When I moved to Williamsburg years ago, that stopped. There are stairs that lead to my apartment, but it's not like a stoop that you'd find in other parts of Brooklyn -- they're steeper than you'd get on a brownstone and don't really encourage sitting at street level. I'd hang out on them sometimes, but then a few years back all the street lights and building lights switched to bright LEDs, making it gross to sit under them at night. But if you go to other parts of this neighborhood just a 5 minute walk away the building design is more conducive for gathering and chatting on stoops at street level, and I notice that that happens in that part of the neighborhood.
Anyway, I wish we'd consider these things when building our environment.
Years ago my current neighborhood of Williamsburg had mostly local shops -- a locally owned grocery store or two, cafes, bagel shops, bookstores, pharmacies, bodegas, etc. Now it's mainly a corporate wasteland -- Whole Foods, Apple, Sephora, Hermes, Chanel, North Face, Trader Joes, etc etc. By all measures I live in one of the most walkable parts of the most walkable city in the country, but as this corporate takeover has happened the small third spaces are dying or have fully died out (depending on the block). And I find that the feeling of community really has evaporated as that process has unfolded over the past 15-20 years.
Personally having been there, and also many suburbs in the rest of the US, I think it's more complex than just "typical suburban problems are inherent to the suburban environment". That is to say, very early-style suburbs like Eastern Cleveland, suburbs of major cities like NYC, suburbs of smaller cities like Cincinnati, cities that are almost entirely suburban like LA or San Jose, and very old/organic suburbs like the gold coast of Connecticut are all completely different from each other.
Even within places like Cleveland or New York, the time period in which the suburb formed (50s-60s suburbs are completely different from 2000-2010's suburbs) and the circumstances of how it formed (it could be completely organic and decentralized, totally centralized in a big development project, organized as a purely residential community with hoa fees and gates and community pools/golf clubs, or organized as a natural extension to the city and include spaces for business and schools) make it so that two places can both be suburban but have very different problems.
And then of course you have demographics as a major confounding variable. In suburban Cleveland in the 50s and 60s almost every house was occupied by a nuclear family with school-aged kids, most men were actively employed (mostly unionized blue collar workers in eg steel). But the rust belt happened, people started living longer and stopped having so many kids, upper middle class people started preferring bigger houses, etc. so now that community is significantly more elderly, fragmented, and not really upper-middle-class any more despite the suburb itself not changing much. Similarly, Palo Alto is not really built that differently from many nice parts of Florida, but the culture is completely different from the physically-similar communities in Florida, because one place has lots of upwardly mobile people in tech/finance/affiliated with Stanford, and the other is a retirement destination.
I guess my point is that "suburban problems" are oftentimes just "problems in suburbs" or "a problem in that suburb" or "a problem with that kind of suburb", not "problems with suburbs in general". Suburbs can have a sense of community but their residents need to want that and make it happen.
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on a hillside
And they all look just the same.
The key, of course, is to get cars away from people so that the streets (or bike paths and gardens in my case) are a place for humans, where it's comfortable to chat, let your kids run around, etc.
This post and the comments here are genuinely interesting to me, because it shows how much people have different experiences in "suburban" and "urban" living. That, in turn, puts a whole new spin on everything I read about NIMBYism and urban development and whatnot. People don't even have a shared basis for what a city or suburb is and totally different experiences in each, so it calls into question how well we can even agree on or communicate what we want!
Personally, having lived over (urban: Manhattan, Boston, suburban: Houston-ish, Chicago-ish, rural: California, Missouri), I tend to agree that suburbs are the sweet spot for knowing your neighbors to some degree. In my Manhattan apartment, I lived in a tiny studio crammed into a building with tons of other people who I never met. In my rural living, people were mostly too far apart to mingle. In my suburbs, we were "friendly" with people about 6-7 houses in either direction, and front or back.
I live now in what I'd call a suburb (along this street: https://maps.app.goo.gl/7VfBtjzq3fMJRGXL9), and there's lots of people frequently "going for walks". There's not that much to walk _to_ but people are generally pretty active when the weather is nice, and so you run into your neighbors a fair bit. I'd say I know by name the families (so, multiple people) of about 10 houses in my near vicinity, and have the cell phone numbers of a handful.
I love this stoop coffee idea, and am going to have to try it here with my wife and kids.
Small villages, street car suburbs that have individual houses but walkable, and small developments seem best.
The biggest differentiator I have found is: do the majority of people consider this place their long term home or a temporary home? an apartment or town home people know they will only live 2-4 years or so, makes different behavior with a house that everyone plans to spend the next 20 years in.
I think suburbs with porches and stoops help as well, too much garage/car focus means people dont spend time in the front of their house.
The equalizers: dogs and younger kids. Dog walkers seem to fall into 2 camps: friendly and most definitely not friendly; the former give you lots of chances to have a casual conversation. Young kids are likely to be playing out front too.
I'm sure other cities have this too, but we have an annual neighbor day that only takes a little bit of effort and bravery to kick start this sort of community: https://www.calgary.ca/events/neighbour-day.html?redirect=/n...
Factors that help:
-Every house is within two small blocks of a park.
-We don’t have individual mailboxes so most people walk to the park daily as part of the USPS CBU initiative
-Every park has a different theme and two different age appropriate activities
-Walking trails around the suburb
-Amazing community pools
-Very well run HOA with transparent communication, minimal intervention, low ($50) monthly dues.
-High number of families with young children
-Walkable grocery store and bike paths
I've lived in both settings, and my own experience has been a mix. In the (walkable) suburbs I've lived in, I've connected with my immediate neighbors, strength of connection rapidly dissipates with distance. We are friendly, occasionally have a BBQ or meal together, and lots of random chats while going for a walk or doing yard work.
When I've lived in cities, it's been a much larger and more active community where the connection is less about proximity of our homes, and more about being in the same place at the same time since our daily errands and living were generally on foot. For those and the simple reason of small homes, we were more likely to meet somewhere or do an activity. I was also FAR more likely to run into someone I knew in my city than I was in my suburbs.
This genuinely threw me because in my experience the suburbs are the antithesis of this, just lots of people occupying neighboring space and rarely talking to each other.
Still, a heartwarming story all the same. And yes, this is _exactly_ what city living should enable.