How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult • Hacker News Board

Re: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

#11

Post by PhantomGremlin » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 6:27 AM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #3

Counterpoint: If you've ever really been burned by having a crappy neighbor -- or a string of them -- you may be inclined to get as far away as possible. I'm sensitive to noise, and I ended up not with average neighbors but with extremely noisy ones, on multiple occasions. (On one occasion, inescapable even when I was across the street and down two houses.) I'd like a greater sense of community, but I never want to g…

I ended up not with average neighbors but with extremely noisy ones

It might not even be the neighbor himself, it could be his dog. A dog that barks constantly, for little or no reason, at all odd hours. Or, something that happened to me, a neighbor with a rooster. A rooster that loved to start crowing at about 4 or 5 AM!

Re: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

#12

Post by JoshTriplett » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 6:33 AM UTC

zyxley wrote: post #10

krasin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd have less problem with dense housing (especially since I don't actually care about the stereotypical "yard and a white picket fence") if said housing started including -90dB or better soundproofing. Yep. Instead of having a thousand of single-family houses, I would rather have a beautiful 30+ stories castle surrounded by a park of ~1 km radius. Cars are expected to live underground and reach the surface outside…

> a beautiful 30+ stories castle surrounded by a park of ~1 km radius The problem with this is that you're basically getting the worst of both worlds. You lose many of the real benefits of dense development because there's no space for jobs and shopping, and you lose the benefits of privately kept land like customized yards and broken-up sightlines and so on. The "giant building separated from everything else by a gi…

Exactly. One of the things that urban planning sometimes gets right and sometimes gets wrong, and that suburban planning is just barely starting to figure out in experiments, is that residential and commercial should be relatively closely interspersed, not separated.

Re: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

#13

Post by PhantomGremlin » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 6:34 AM UTC

Something that I haven't seen mentioned here is online communities. E.g. HN. Or the thousands of other websites that cater to the varied interests we have.

It's not the same as real life, in person interaction. But it does result in "friendships" of a sort. It allows people to interact with like minded individuals. Much different than everyone being passive consumers watching the boob tube.

Re: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

#14

Post by topspin » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 6:36 AM UTC

muddyrivers wrote: post #8

topspin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's 100% out of phase with my experience. I just ended 21 years in the "Front Range" area; Boulder, Fort Collins CO. Bike trails and bikers abound, anti-car municipal governments impeding road development, everyone living on anti-sprawl 0.2 acre plats. However, actual contact with neighbors was very sparse; a service for every need, everything on auto-pilot. The last three months I've been living semi-rural i…

Agree. I don't think physical distance and density are important factors. Culture might be. People are more friendly in the midwest, and they are more open to talk about family matters. Family matters are in essence intimate, and the topics draw the people in the conversation together. In the big cities, these topics are regarded as "more" private (they are indeed private). It is a social norm to not share them unles…

Culture? Hmm. Maybe. These highly ordered, dense and costly neighborhoods are hostile. Anxiety is high among residence. Remove that and replace it with a degree of liberty, some space and the need to collaborate to keep the road open and people connect naturally.

The 'urban planners' and their cheerleaders have it wrong. They've decided that downsizing everyone and making them live in each others laps will end with Kumbaya. In fact it ends with everyone on edge, peering at each other silently as they sweat the value of their tiny piece of it.

Re: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

#15

Post by TulliusCicero » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 6:38 AM UTC

topspin wrote: post #4

TulliusCicero wrote: post #2

Note that it's not just individual choices that have led to this. Minimum parking requirements, anti-density zoning laws, and other car-first regulations have forcibly shaped our communities to be hostile to walking, biking, and transit. A huge loss in spontaneous community interaction is the inevitable result.

Well that's 100% out of phase with my experience. I just ended 21 years in the "Front Range" area; Boulder, Fort Collins CO. Bike trails and bikers abound, anti-car municipal governments impeding road development, everyone living on anti-sprawl 0.2 acre plats. However, actual contact with neighbors was very sparse; a service for every need, everything on auto-pilot. The last three months I've been living semi-rural i…

> anti-car municipal governments impeding road development

In my experience, this translates as, "governments who think non-car transportation modes should be treated as seriously as cars."

> However, actual contact with neighbors was very sparse; a service for every need, everything on auto-pilot. The last three months I've been living semi-rural in the midwest; all the households are on two acres (minimum, due to to well and septic density.) I've had more direct contact with my neighbors in these 12 weeks than the previous 21 years put together. Maintaining larger properties that are much more distant from the urban core invites collaboration. Household attendance at the HOA meeting last month was almost 50%; waaay more than I saw back in the Front Range burbs.

Honestly, this just sounds like your personality is more attuned to a rural area; you're fitting in better, and therefore socializing more. There are certainly people like yourself for whom this is the case, and that's absolutely fine. The problem with the regulations I mentioned isn't that they allow for low-density development, it's that they enforce low-density development.

Also, what you're describing still matches the article more or less: you don't really have spontaneous interaction in the community, but you do have intentional/planned interaction.

Re: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

#16

Post by zyxley » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 6:41 AM UTC

topspin wrote: post #14

muddyrivers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I don't think physical distance and density are important factors. Culture might be. People are more friendly in the midwest, and they are more open to talk about family matters. Family matters are in essence intimate, and the topics draw the people in the conversation together. In the big cities, these topics are regarded as "more" private (they are indeed private). It is a social norm to not share them unles…

Culture? Hmm. Maybe. These highly ordered, dense and costly neighborhoods are hostile. Anxiety is high among residence. Remove that and replace it with a degree of liberty, some space and the need to collaborate to keep the road open and people connect naturally. The 'urban planners' and their cheerleaders have it wrong. They've decided that downsizing everyone and making them live in each others laps will end with K…

> Anxiety is high among residence.

[citation needed]

Re: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

#17

Post by TulliusCicero » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 6:41 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #5

TulliusCicero wrote: post #2

Note that it's not just individual choices that have led to this. Minimum parking requirements, anti-density zoning laws, and other car-first regulations have forcibly shaped our communities to be hostile to walking, biking, and transit. A huge loss in spontaneous community interaction is the inevitable result.

> Minimum parking requirements On the flipside, if you have friends who aren't right next door (or perhaps who once were and you don't want to write them off because they moved), it helps to have the ability to drive to their place. I'm not arguing for "car first", but I don't think "pedestrian first" makes sense either. Most of my friends are scattered around a 20-minute radius. (And quite frankly, you can choose yo…

> On the flipside, if you have friends who aren't right next door (or perhaps who once were and you don't want to write them off because they moved), it helps to have the ability to drive to their place. I'm not arguing for "car first", but I don't think "pedestrian first" makes sense either. Most of my friends are scattered around a 20-minute radius.

A good transportation policy takes all major modes seriously. If you look at a biketopia like the Netherlands, they still drive as much as they bike. Nobody wants to completely get rid of cars, transportation nerds like myself just want the different modes to be on an even playing field, rather than cars being always hyper-dominant like they usually have been in the US. I expect to continue to own a car for a long time.

Also note that, assuming everything transformed overnight into an urbanist's paradise, that 20 minute radius would shrink considerably, and many of your friends would be reachable by bike. I'm paraphrasing a quote I heard before: "Car-first planning creates distance that only cars can solve."

> I'd have less problem with dense housing (especially since I don't actually care about the stereotypical "yard and a white picket fence") if said housing started including -90dB or better soundproofing.

Agreed. This is one regulation that I am all for.

Re: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

#18

Post by TulliusCicero » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 6:51 AM UTC

topspin wrote: post #14

muddyrivers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I don't think physical distance and density are important factors. Culture might be. People are more friendly in the midwest, and they are more open to talk about family matters. Family matters are in essence intimate, and the topics draw the people in the conversation together. In the big cities, these topics are regarded as "more" private (they are indeed private). It is a social norm to not share them unles…

Culture? Hmm. Maybe. These highly ordered, dense and costly neighborhoods are hostile. Anxiety is high among residence. Remove that and replace it with a degree of liberty, some space and the need to collaborate to keep the road open and people connect naturally. The 'urban planners' and their cheerleaders have it wrong. They've decided that downsizing everyone and making them live in each others laps will end with K…

Ok, it's pretty clear now that you just have a personal grudge against any sort of density, man. You need extra space to be happy, that's fine, but you're not everyone. Look across the pond at Western Europe or Japan: two very different cultures, both higher-density than the US, both tend to have higher social cohesion than in America, not lower.

> Remove that and replace it with a degree of liberty

Do you know what liberty is? It's letting the market have a say in how dense developments can be, so that people's individual choices dictate what's available, rather than the law. It's supporting all modes of transportation so that people have an actual choice in how they get around, instead of being required to drive to do anything or go anywhere. Forcing everyone into what topspin thinks is best isn't liberty, it's coercion.

Re: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

#19

Post by TulliusCicero » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 6:52 AM UTC

hugh4 wrote: post #7

TulliusCicero wrote: post #2

Note that it's not just individual choices that have led to this. Minimum parking requirements, anti-density zoning laws, and other car-first regulations have forcibly shaped our communities to be hostile to walking, biking, and transit. A huge loss in spontaneous community interaction is the inevitable result.

On the other hand, people in rural areas tend to be on friendlier terms with their neighbours than people in high-density areas. For various reasons, including the fact that it's much easier to be on good terms with your neighbour when he lives way over the other side of the hill and nothing he does really affects you or vice versa. Also because of necessity -- if there's only two people in a ten-mile radius who can…

> On the other hand, people in rural areas tend to be on friendlier terms with their neighbours than people in high-density areas.

Ostensibly friendlier, but how often do they actually interact on a day-to-day basis? (I agree with the rest of your post)

Re: How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

#20

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 6:55 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #12

zyxley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a beautiful 30+ stories castle surrounded by a park of ~1 km radius The problem with this is that you're basically getting the worst of both worlds. You lose many of the real benefits of dense development because there's no space for jobs and shopping, and you lose the benefits of privately kept land like customized yards and broken-up sightlines and so on. The "giant building separated from everything else by a gi…

Exactly. One of the things that urban planning sometimes gets right and sometimes gets wrong, and that suburban planning is just barely starting to figure out in experiments, is that residential and commercial should be relatively closely interspersed, not separated.

[deleted]