> my husband Tyler and I wanted that sense of community that feels like it’s only possible in the suburbs, but we believed we could achieve this while living in San Francisco.
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.
>just lots of people occupying neighboring space and rarely talking to each other.
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.
Suburbs often have physical constraints with the way houses are laid out making this "stoop coffee" approach more difficult, if anything. Houses laid out in a way that you're more likely to drink your coffee on your back patio surrounded by a fence or hedges to avoid being seen. And even if you are sitting in front of your house, neighbors are more likely to be driving by instead of walking so not very likely to stop and chat.
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.
I think we're a long way off from the communities when Jane Jacobs lived. An except that I frequently think about, I can't even fathom in a large city in the current era, and not because technology has solved the key problem.
>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.
>This still happens in my experience, I've picked up keys from friends and Airbnb hosts via a local business in the past few years.
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.
But there is usually a code with some app and all of the social aspects have been removed. It’s not much different than being a higher scale realtor key box.
Well, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't but the idea that a local store owner wouldn't give me if I were to give off a "dangerous vibe" would be somewhat concerning. But maybe I have ancestry etc. where I just don't give off that vibe. More generally, I guess I'm just pretty used to lodging where a delayed flight doesn't mean I can't get in.
I'm a paying customer, why tf should I care what the clerk thinks?
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.
In the context of a lot of discussions here, Jacobs also seemed to believe in community driven development. Yes, she helped stop some highway development that many people here would (mostly rightly) hate. But a lot of people here would also consider her a NIMBY--even a fairly strong one--for supporting the right of communities to drive their own development whatever outsiders might desire.
I’m not sure it’s so much hostility to outsiders as such, as we like things mostly the way they are and we won’t appreciate if you come in and agitate for big change.
I live in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago (Oak Park) and stoop coffee would be much easier to do here than in San Francisco (where I lived many years ago).
There's no official definition of what the "the suburbs" means, but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks. The area you linked looks to me more like an older "streetcar suburb", which I think most people would just call "the city".
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.
Those houses are more densely packed than in what I'd call a suburb. And much more importantly, nothing in that area is more than a few blocks from some sort of commerce. Suburbia (at least in the US) isn't so much about the houses themselves, but what's around them. I'm in one of those "streetcar suburbs" and the nearest store is a mile away and the bus comes every 20 minutes. I could get by without a car but it would be very annoying. You might find a fairly similar set of houses in the nearby city, but they'll be near a lot of stuff and living without a car would be far more practical.
Yeah, I wouldn't call that a suburb either for practical purposes. It would be one by the definition of "small city near big city," but in terms of how it functions it looks like city to me.
This is the Chicago block I grew up on. It's less dense than Oak Park. It's easy find blocks like it elsewhere in Chicago. Jeff Park in Chicago and Oak Park are basically clones of each other.
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.
Wow, you weren't kidding about the relative density between those areas. I'd consider Oak Park dense compared to most suburbs, just not as dense as some neighborhoods in Chicago. I'm most familiar with the north side neighborhoods and had those kind of lots in mind, with their near non-existent front yards, with front steps right off the sidewalk, and virtually no front driveways.
Apartment building on Pine Grove in Lakeview for me and then a beautiful old two flat in Ravenswood. My rent in Pine Grove in 1999 was $400 I think for a two room apartment.
Small world, my wife and I literally just moved to Beverly not far from there. This area is a bit of liminal space between city and suburbs (or at least my definition of them) and it can vary quite a bit block to block. I'm walking distance to a grocery store, the Metra, coffee shops, restaurants, parks, etc., which is unfortunately more than many areas of Chicago can say.
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.
Some US cities incorporated their lower-density "streetcar suburbs" over the years and other US cities didn't. This is why "Kansas City" proper has literal farmland [0] within its city limits, while "St. Louis" proper [1] on the other side of the state doesn't even include most of the skyscraper development that's occurred there within the last 40 years.
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.
They're pretty clearly not using "the city" to refer to city but instead to a certain density threshold, so pointing out that city limits are arbitrary doesn't really help anything.
What you're describing is called "agreement." I'm very plainly arguing that if the distinction between "city" and "suburb" is to mean anything at all, then it can't just be about what's within municipal boundaries and what isn't.
So you were agreeing with OP's comment, not disagreeing?
> 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.
That's why people have been using paragraphs to clarify what they mean. Paragraphs that you seem to have ignored in favor of critiquing the utility that specific words have when taken out of the context the author intentionally put them in.
No clue about Seattle, but they definitely do in Northern VA where I live. Every new development that requires a change of permitted use goes through a lengthy review process with plenty of opportunity for locals to object.
Edit - sibling comment indicates Seattle has something similar.
> but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks.
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.
I believe the colloquial definition has changed substantially over the last ~100 years in the US. As a concrete example, Travis Heights (part of Austin) was initially advertised as "Austin's first suburb", but is very much inside the city core today. In the UK, this is true of places like New Malden or even Wimbledon, which were as-built not part of London and were referred to as "suburbs", but are categorized that way by approximately no-one today.
You're right that people in practice use the word "suburb" to talk about all these different things, but that just reinforces that the word isn't very useful. Oak Park and Naperville are both "suburbs," but this reveals nothing to us. In fact, it mostly obfuscates.
A suburb is outside of the city in low density housing, typically not within walking distance of anything. That reveals plenty for a lot of purposes, and if you want to critique something more specific than that you should use a word that people will recognize as being more specific than that.
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.
There is nobody in Chicago who would describe Oak Park and Evanston as anything other than "suburbs". You'd get laughed at if you called them "the city".
Right. I'm not at all sure why some people on here think "suburb" is only meant to refer to a very specific type of housing development, rather than a description of a location's spatial and cultural relationship to "the city".
I mean, you’re making the same sort of NTS argument here, aren’t you?
> 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.
No, I'm not, because I'm not saying that what you are identifying as a suburb isn't a suburb, I'm saying it's not representative of all suburbs. I provide a perfectly valid definition:
> 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.
That is a definition you're making up to suit an argument you're making. It's not the actual definition of the term. Anybody can just look it up and see that! The Oxford Languages dataset that Google uses for the definition literally uses Chicago's suburbs as an example.
And, seriously, who cares? Why would you want your argument to die on this hill? What could it possibly matter?
I'm not sure why you're critiquing my definition, given that I'm trying to emphasize that your specific Chicago suburb very much does meet the typical way that people think of suburbs. So yes, I agree with Google: Chicago's suburbs are suburbs. Oak Park is not within walking distance of anything that most people I know would identify as "the city", which puts it squarely in the suburbs in my book.
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?
Oh I may just be reading the thread backwards! Sorry. Yes, Oak Park is definitely a suburb. Oak Park is also extremely within walking distance of the city; it's across Austin Blvd from it.
Yes, both the parent and I agree that Oak Park is a suburb (and a lovely one by the way; I hit up Amerikas every time I visit)—I was pointing out that he was making an argument of the same style that he was criticizing (using his own definition of a suburb to advocate for his own definition of a suburb).
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.
Agree. Lots of US cities have neighborhoods like this outside of the downtown business districts. Even in NYC, famous for concrete-jungle apartment dwelling, you find this in Staten Island and in parts of Queens.
we each can only rely on our own experiences, but mine don't agree with you. suburbs in the US northeast have sidewalks. most of LA looks like a suburb to a nor'easter. No sidewalk? rural.
I agree, and outside of Fly.io the thing I work hardest on is advocating for more density here; we're slowly transforming into Winnetka (if you're not a Chicago person, Winnetka is the John Hughes suburb you have in your head when people say things like "suburbs are nothing like the city"). Thankfully, we have a board consensus that has us pointed in the general direction of eliminating single-family zoning, allowing as-of-right 3- and 4-flats everywhere in the Village.
Lol this is the most chicago looking chicago that has ever chicagoed. I clicked the link before really registering the comment, and was confused why I was looking at a random Chicago neighborhood. While I do like the way chicago neighborhoods are set up (especially the space between houses and general greenery) I think the compactness that SF has creates more opportunity for interaction.
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.
My wife and I, several years ago, stayed in an Oak Park hotel while visiting Chicago. There was a sort of food festival we happened upon and everyone was extremely friendly. As we rode the el train in, we were fascinated by the view of the closed Brachs factory.
hey neighbor :) we should totally do this in oak park. oak parkers already kinda do "stoop coffee", but usually only twice a year during a pre-planned block party. i could see this expanded to something a little more frequent, like maybe sunday mornings from memorial day to labor day.
I'm amused to see so many of my neighbors on here - we could do a Hacker News Stoop at one of the coffee shops (Whirlwind is my regular, but it's not like any of the ones in OP are hard to get to!)
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.
I live in a big city in central Illinois, and we have neighborhoods like that in the city. It's hard for people outside to understand that I have suburban style neighborhood but I could walk to the DMV.
Sen was a lifeline during the pandemic when going into the city for Japanese stopped being an option. One of the better Oak Park restaurants, in a suburb that is not exactly known for great restaurants.
Looking around the neighborhood, I'm seeing sidewalks on many of those streets, paved paths along public green spaces that run between the houses, multiple apartment buildings and a retirement center. Looking at the map, there also appear to be trails through the woods leading to a nearby sports center that's a 5 minute walk away, as well as a nearby bakery.
> Suburbs often have physical constraints with the way houses are laid out making this "stoop coffee" approach more difficult, if anything. Houses laid out in a way that you're more likely to drink your coffee on your back patio surrounded by a fence or hedges to avoid being seen.
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!).
Apparently there's some idea that suburbs by definition don't have sidewalks and have half acre lots with oversized McMansions. If that's your definition of suburb, I take it back: I've never lived in a suburb. But I also strongly question the utility that definition for discourse like this.
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".
There's a spectrum of density, and perhaps the sweet spot for front-porch interactions is somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I live in a neighborhood with ample front porches and sidewalks -- and I've heard it referred to both as a suburb (by dense city dwellers) and "the city" (by people who live further out from the dense urban core). But it's easy to imagine both a dense city neighborhood and a semi-rural far-flung suburb with no front porches and no culture of interacting with neighbors.
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.
But you know what suburbs typically do have? Pleasant areas to walk in.
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.
I think this may vary massively depending on what suburbs in what country and even what city you are talking about. The "usable front yard" or "front patio" is an almost non-existent design feature in free standing homes in Australia, at least in the more moderate climates in the southern side of the eastern seaboard.
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.
It’s easier to sit out in the suburbs, but the layout and infrastructure don’t generally encourage walking around, so there are a lot fewer neighbors walking past.
Generally, surburbs are better at encouraging walking/cycling around (since there's very little traffic), but worse at encouraging people to walk to commercial areas (since they're usually far away and the path there is unpleasant).
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.
> (though it does match many people's inaccurate stereotypes, which I have heard repeatedly in conversations with people who don't live in cities)
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.
> Generally, surburbs are better at encouraging walking/cycling around
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.
Really? My experience in the suburbs is that there are a lot of people "going on walks" with dogs and kids in the evening. People aren't walking TO places, but there is a lot of just walking around.
Suburbs are not hostile to pedestrians. They are hostile to getting anyplace on foot so cars are common. However they are great places to walk for exercise and many people who live there do that. (see the sibling comment about walking the dog)
My experience with suburbs is different from yours. I have lived in places where walking is downright dangerous because the architecture is oriented around cars and the drivers are not accustomed to yielding to pedestrians.
Many homes are designed such that the inhabitants rarely use the front door, using only the garage.
That doesn't sound like suburbs I know. The streets are so empty you can safely walk down the middle of them most of the time. People don't, but you could. (kids used to play baseball/basketball in the streets, stopping play when cars come). Of course to get anywhere you need to leave and so it is never far for a major road that is dangerous to be near.
I am sure that you have seen some pedestrian friendly suburbs. So have I. I never said that they are all hostile to pedestrians. Some are designed for people instead of cars. It is rare.
It also depends on the suburb. I was sad when I lived in Mountain View, heading in sight unseen, but there were a lot of sidewalks and a little main drag with some bars and shops.
A lot of "suburbs" in the Midwest lack sidewalks -- you can have the cops roll on you if you try to walk anywhere.
Where I am in the suburbs, all the dogs know each other, because most of them are on invisible fence lots and they all visit every other dog when on a walk. And it's common for the owner to come out and say hi, too. That being said, I know some of my neighbors by their dog's name ("That's Taj's dad").
>Suburbs often have physical constraints with the way houses are laid out making this "stoop coffee" approach more difficult, if anything.
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.
Suburbia houses are usually right next to each other. Densely populated cities stack housing so you have to go down to get out. I've found that its much easier to meeting people in single family homes than five level flats. In any case, the US even in cities, is not set up for gatherings like it is in Europe where there are large spaces people go to socialize.
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).
In my city, the only places I see neighbours gathering on their front porches is in prewar neighbourhoods with single family style homes (many actually split into apartments).
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 live in the burbs and I feel like almost everyone in the neighborhood has a dog. No matter what time I'm leaving my house, there's always someone walking their dog. Of course some times are busier than others, but I feel like dog walking itself can become a pretty good sense community.
I agree with your points about the challenges in both suburban and urban environments. I think the design of public spaces also plays a significant role. Intentional design can help overcome some of these challenges and foster more impromptu social interactions.
In my experiences of living in suburbs for 30 years, I’ve seen the default is to ignore neighbors.
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.
> 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
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.
This experience fits me as well. I'm older, no kids, don't spend a lot of time outside. The neighbor on one side is nice and friendly and he gets to have all the apples and plums off of my trees as he wishes. The neighbor two houses down gets red in the face angry at me if I wave at him as I drive by. Apparently, just keeping my lawn mowed regularly but not perfect is enough for him to hate my guts with a surprising amount of passion. The neighbor who shares a line of property with me (but lives on the street behind me) I've talked to twice the summer I moved in in '99. Both times he berated me about my lawn while I tried to just say "hey, I'm your new neighbor, nice to meet you!" He put up a fence high enough so he couldn't see my lawn before I managed to tame it back to the "not perfect, but not crazy" state it's normally in now.
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.
You would be surprised how little in common you can have with your neighbors. You likely don’t shop at the same places, don’t frequent the same restaurants, bars, parks, etc.
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.
> In my experiences of living in suburbs for 30 years, I’ve seen the default is to ignore neighbors.
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)."
Part of it is politics. Totally correct about everything in common, and yet in the multicultural fabric we call society, politics could be vastly different:
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.
That's okay. You may still benefit from knowing each other when you run out of milk and shops are closed, or whatever favor neighbors can provide via the valuable indirect social graph connections (need a reference for a job or to enter a good uni, ask a neighbor who is a Harvard alum; or just let a kid interview a Republican neighbor for a school essay, or...), so it's good you sounded each other out.
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.
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 don't discount anything you have said. But my experience is different.
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.
My neighbors are fucking assholes. We don't shop at the same stores, or see each other at the park, we don't have kids, or work on cars. One neighbor doesn't like me because they don't like dogs and I have a dog. The other is just a mean, bitter, old lady. Not everyone is nice and friendly dude.
I suppose the trick is that these people won't come out and drink coffee with you! The people who do come out will be more fun and social, and these two you mention would just stay home like usual.
Yeah -- my partner and I moved to a small island in WA and this is so intensely true that I feel it to my core. Nextdoor attracts mostly vain self-promotion where we're at. Where we move to after this, I'm going to get on their Nextdoor and make a list of names of people who post there regularly, and when I meet them in real life I'm going to avoid them as much as possible.
When they started mentioning WhatsApp, I did have the briefest thought that this could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor.
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 could be marketing to try to replace NextDoor.
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.
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.
BTW, good comments, and sorry for the meta aside, but please be careful when quoting. I said:
> 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).
Even before we had some unelected mentally ill person making Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and then still handed them unprecedented powers to disassemble our government... and a whole lot of people seeming fine with that...
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).
In the rest of the world (London, at least), WhatsApp is used for communities/building developments. It's the exact same NextDoor hell, but just with more instant messaging.
I mean, I know you're kind of kidding, but there's also a lot of truth in it. When I was last on Nextdoor, a woman had posted asking for any information about a car that hit her as she was riding her bike and sent her to the hospital. She was trying to find people who might have witnessed the incident. People were answering that it was her fault for being on a bike. I uninstalled the app right then and there.
On the way home from the subway one snowy Boston evening, I joked with my wife that what the world needs is yelp, but for snow shoveling. People could get out all their passive-aggressive and aggressive-aggressive crap about their neighbors by complaining about the quality of the snow shoveling in the sidewalks in town.
It seems Nextdoor has fulfilled that need and more.
It exposes you to the mental illness of some people, like the kind of person who will make a thread asking if anybody knows this new runner they saw jog by their place because it's very suspicious and it's making them very angry that someone would jog down their street.
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.
Social Media in general (not just Nextdoor) has outed so many angry, belligerent, mentally-unwell, terrible people who, for a really long time, have successfully pretended to be normal and nice. Not just neighbors, but friends and even family. It's like the movie They Live, but where we all suddenly got the ability to see who the antagonists are, and realized there are so many more than we thought there were...
>> the kind of person who will make a thread asking if anybody knows this new runner they saw jog by their place
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.
>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
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.
NextDoor used to be bad about that, but they are now much more careful to remove it quickly if anyone does post racist crap.
Now it seems to be 50% paid ads, 30% lost/found pets, 10% unpaid ads, and 10% everything else. Worth checking to find the owner of a stray dog or cat, but not much else.
I deleted the app a few years ago because it was a drag. Glad (and honestly surprised) to hear you say they remove the racist stuff quickly, and not surprised it's mostly ads these days.
The problem is people say the same thing without saying race. “Did anyone see this suspicious character?” with a picture from a doorbell cam of a black guy.
It’s still obviously racist to everyone but it’s not reportable or treated as such.
Many Americans still think of cities as modernist concrete, interstate exits and parking lots. In this imagination, social trust is eroded by homelessness, drug addicts and variety of crimes endemic to inner cities. Unfortunately, cities that were razed for cars fit some of these stereotypes.
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.
Having lived most of my life in cities, I moved from London to the suburb of a smallish town about 4 years ago. Since that move, I've got to know maybe 20x more of my neighbours here than I managed in two decades in London. However, I also got a dog and I think 90% of this is down to that.
Very similar story to mine. Moving from Amsterdam to the “suburbs” of a smaller city in the Netherlands AND getting a dog was the only way I’ve found to meet new people and befriend neighbors.
The dog part is definitely key. We moved a few blocks — so within the same neighbourhood — shortly after getting our dog, and it was amazing how much more quickly we got to know our new neighbours with our (extremely extroverted) then-puppy compared to the previous place. (And, on the flip side, I'm on a first name basis with every dog on my block, which usually implies also being on a first name basis with at least one of their humans.)
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.
The thing is that whether you click with your neighbours or not is pure luck and it's no one's fault. That's why you read many opposing anecdotes in this thread. When there are more local third places, there is a higher chance you will find a nice community to hang out with.
Pro tip. Being a good neighbor helps you click with your neighbors, and that can be the difference between life and death in an emergency, or your house burning down or not if a neighbor catches something and calls you because you’re chill, friendly and helpful.
It is worth extreme efforts to cultivate good relationships with your neighbors.
Every house has a front yard, and many have large front porches. And no one uses them. I'd say "anymore" but I've rarely seen them used for socializing in my lifetime. They're almost vestigial.
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.
You only have room for a few hundred friends in your life. Sure there might be 500 people who live in 5 minutes walk - but that is too many and so you will learn to take steps to limit the number of people who will accept an open invite.
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)
I guess my comment wasn’t clear, but I’m saying if on average half the people are not social, then in a city that leaves 250, which as you point out is plenty. In a suburb, because the total population of a block is smaller, the variance in the percentage of anti-social people is going to be much higher, even if averaged across all blocks you still get 50% (or whatever the population average is). If the number drops to 20, for example, my experience is this is less likely to form into a “community.” Twenty is a lot of people but you need more because any given person isn’t available much of the time.
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.
It's all down to the design of suburbs. Many cities have bylaws and zoning regulations that prohibit human-centric suburbs from being built [1]. Older neighbourhoods (prior to these ill-advised laws) are incredibly livable and naturally produce a sense of community. They also feature mixed-use zoning with quaint little corner cafes, restaurants, and small shops. These are incredibly important as third places [2] which have largely disappeared from our society.
I don't think it's "just" a stereotype. There's a lot of literature around how American suburbs are designed to be isolationist. The most obvious example is how much more difficult it is to meet your neighbors when you have to get into your car for every slight errand (FWIW, I've lived in all densities--I'm not some urban chauvinist).
As usual, the people you fill the space with make all the difference. The stereotype gets reinforced by the kind of suburbs HN people tend to live in and to have been raised in.
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.
Another bitter stereotype contributing to the US cultural divide. I live in an economically diverse but mostly well-off white collar suburb (not in CA), and we have a strong sense of community. We walk to each other's houses on a whim, we help each other get things done, we shovel the snow for the older folks, we watch out for each other and text each other, we organize community get-togethers. I realize this is an anecdote - I am not saying the correlation you're describing isn't statistically real, just that it's pointlessly negative.
Exact opposite experience for me. When people have nothing, they have no buy-in, and give no craps about what their neighborhood is like. They’re too busy dealing with their “real problems” to care if someone is robbing a house right in front of them.
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.
FWIW, this has been my experience as well. When I lived in poor neighborhoods, yeah, we had more property crime. We also had a tremendous sense of community; I knew everyone, they knew me, food & favors were traded happily. The block parties we had during the summer were tremendous amounts of fun.
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.
Same, but I think it really depends on the design on the neighborhood, regardless of if it's a city or a suburb.
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.
I think another part of neighborhood design that influences this feeling is how walkable a neighborhood is — anecdotally, I feel like I've had way more run-ins and conversations with neighbors when I've lived in places that had grocery stores and coffee shops within walking distance, as opposed to when I've been in neighborhoods that required driving 10-15 mins to get to anything.
For sure, walkability is an important factor. Although I think even with that it depends on what sort of shops are within walking distance.
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.
Yes, my experience in the suburbs is that most residents hop in their cars and take off somewhere with their tinted windows rolled up, and there are no "third places" around to casually encounter your neighbours. Sometimes there will be yard sales, BBQs, or birthday parties though.
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!
> 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.
I used to live in a suburb. I met people the same way you meet people anywhere: common interests.
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.
My suburban neighborhood is great. They have a voluntary group that you can join with a donation, and all that group really does is organize parties and events. It's not a HOA and doesn't have rules. We have a full community get-together event every two months or so, with volunteers who host at their houses. We also have once-a-year events like a community-wide garage sale event, and a car show.
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."
Out of curiosity, did you know the neighborhood was like that before moving in? Or was it luck?
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.
> 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.
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.
I think that part of the issue is “suburbs” means different things. Suburbs can be pre-war streetcar suburbs or villages, often pretty walkable and dense. It could mean a housing development which can be large with hundreds of houses or town homes or small. My development has 13 houses on two culdesaca and everyone knows everyone, gives a great neighborly vibe. But ive lived in a town home development with 200 houses and most people didnt know anyone. Urban environments and apartments I didnt really know my neighbors.
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.
Dunno, I've found suburbs more friendly than the city. Someone's more likely to say hi when you're grilling, mowing your lawn or just walking around.
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.
It depends on the suburb. Some suburbs are effectively just city neighborhoods in a different school district, and they have blocks and block parties. Other suburbs are nests of culs-de-sac, where you'll say "hi" to your next door neighbors but not know anybody else.
This is very true; I've experienced both extremes.
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
>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.
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.
Lol exactly. I 100% cannot imagine this happening where my parents live, in a typical US suburban subdivision. On the flip side, I can absolutely see something like this taking off on my block in Brooklyn and would just be another addition to the already established community
Where I currently live, in a medium-density area of town-houses (actually, pretty high-density for town-houses), seems to be the perfect density for community. I see my neighbours all of the time, just doing our things, and you say hi and chat because that's what humans do. Any more dense and you have apartments, where strangely people are more distant (even though closer) (unless effort has gone into the apartment design to get people interacting), less dense and you have a suburbia with its fortresses.
We had block parties like this in Brooklyn while I was growing up. People would make or buy food and we'd just occupy half of the block with loud music, running around for the kids and drinking for the adults. Cars could still pass by, but they were careful and people would move out of the way. It was fun!
Pretty sure in Brooklyn, and other NYC boroughs, that is more of a cultural thing rather than a "try to create a sense of neighborliness" thing.
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.
There are definitely places now within Brooklyn that do it with an intent of creating a sense of neighborliness and community, as well as many that still do it just because that's what people have always done on their block.
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.
I live in suburbia and one of the neighbors periodically hosts coffee and pastries in their front yard. I also do happy hour at different houses. I never got this community feel living in SF for 10 years.
Suburbs are typically more socially homogenous, with more institutional connections between residents (kids go to the same school, people work for the same local employer, same church, etc) with a physical environment less conducive to connectivity. City neighborhoods (again, typically) have better physical presence with neighbors that are less likely to have things in common. I think that's what the author is trying to say.
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.
Those were generalizations covering 100M+ people in each category, just in America, and my guess at what the original author meant by the statement that GP was surprised by.
I've lived in suburbs where I had a good idea of who lived in each house, talked to some of them semi-regularly, and kids ran around the neighborhood together every day, and I've lived in neighborhoods where everyone stays inside and nobody interacts with each other and even the few group things explicity set up (neighborhood street potluck, chili cookoff at the attached park) couldn't be sustained. I moved directly from the former to the latter, so the difference was stark.
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.
> 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.
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
Not all suburbs are built the same. My dad grew up in suburban Cleveland in the 50s, which has a bunch of some of the very earliest style of suburbs. When I have been there, and from what I remember my dad telling me, there was actually a pretty decent community there despite it being a suburb.
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.
And just as true: being a city does not by itself make for good communities. Residents need to want to make that happen—as in this story in TFA. If they don't want it, most cities are just as poorly designed for more-than-cursory spontaneous interaction as most suburbs.
So I live in a big city in the beltline area around the core and the problem is it's a car culture and we all have detached garages. This means a big majority never use their front door, they enter their garage via the alley and go in the back. The suburbs typically have garages at the front and people who are driving to work are likely to leave and return at the same time so this increases the odds of bumping into your neighbor.
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 live in a big suburb outside downtown Denver with the alley situation you describe but we have a thriving community with monthly or bi-monthly events. Previously lived in the Bay Area for 15 years.
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.
I know all my immediate neighbors, and am great friends with one, and amiable with all the others. You just have to not be shy, I have a type A personality so not afraid to walk over and say howdy. Most people are good with small talk if you open. Not everyone wants to be your best friend and I keep that in mind, but would rather say hello than a total stranger.
It really depends on the suburb. American ones are mostly garbage for social interaction, but I just moved to one (Houten, NL) that is really good for this.
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.
Is that your lived experience of the suburbs, or just what you've been led to believe on online forums filled with both a) city dwellers, b) angsty teens?
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.
My suburban neighborhood here in the bay area is mostly cul-de-sacs, and on the 4th of July about half of them close off the entrance to non-residents/family, and have a collective BBQ in the middle of the circle. Several of our neighbors are musicians, so we get live music from people we know, and we all know how to cook up good stuff for the party. It's genuinely a lot of fun, and I look forward to it every year.
I see a fair amount of that here in Sacramento. People having block parties, chairs out in the driveways, etc. One of the newer neighborhoods in the area seems like it was designed with this in mine as well. '
It's been a lot of fun. We know our neighbors, people are frequently out walking, talking to each other, and so on.
yup, they probably mean small town/village life as opposed to suburbs, which is what this community has come to resemble, which is what they wanted so a great success, even if the terminology was off.
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 live in Chicago, in a denser part, and we have all the things you mention.
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 now live in a suburb and it’s plenty social. We baked cookies and took them to every house up and down the block when we moved in and we greet new neighbors with treats when there’s turnover. We also exchange holiday cards and cookies every year. We either know or recognize most people within a few blocks and we have become friends with a few families that also have kids the age of ours whom we met at the neighborhood park. Suburbs can be great!
Would still benefit from eventually moving the initial meetup group to a green space, especially if there can be a community garden to work on (yes I realize we are re-inventing the wheel of a village)
Ya, came here to say the same thing and I'm glad others are similarly surprised.
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
I came here to say the same. Sense of community in the suburbs? That has not been my experience and tends to be one of the main complaints about the 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.