Why don’t more people live close to friends?

I've been working remotely since long before the pandemic; perhaps my experience at remote-friendly companies has skewed my experience, as only a minority of my coworkers are in the bay area. I'd say the mode for my coworkers is living in a smaller/cheaper (non-SF, non-NY) urban center. Could just be a fluke, though; it's not as though the sample size is particularly large.

Ah, that's a fair point! I meant I was unusual in that I live in a suburb now, not that it was unusual to grow up in a suburb.

> why don’t we do this? The fetishization of the nuclear family, of course, as well as the building and zoning codes that facilitate that fetishization.

Zoning calls them "single family homes" but it doesn't call it "nuclear family homes" or anything like that. Single family homes are more about American individualism[0] and not wanting to share anything if you don't absolutely have to. That's why, outside of at most a couple aberrations like NYC (where multi-generational families live in condos all together or else fragmented around a neighborhood but still within walking/subway distance of each other), we have a fetishized (less so in recent decades) car and road culture and insane density-averse zoning policy instead of shared infrastructure and dense, affordable housing.

[0] or at least, as idolized by those who made the zoning rules so long ago. so... go change them! Get into local office. Get into state office. I'm no iconoclast, but there are definitely some long-standing norms and "traditions" in our society that could stand to go.

There is another answer to living close by. If VR and AR one day meet the promises of old sci-fi, distance will be less of an issue. It will be a dramatic improvement over phone calls and FaceTime / zoom.

Unfortunately, the current form factor of affordable units (sub $500 standalone units like the quest2) intimidates nearly everyone including techies on HN; most people refuse to even try it. Of the few brave people willing to try it, most don’t go beyond 10-15 minutes.

The other major problem is affordability. While it isn’t a problem for many people in our bubble, most people will balk at spending $2000 or more on bleeding edge tech.

AR and VR currently are at the same stage of personal computers in the late 1970s, only a few die hard techies like me can see its current and future potential

> about American individualism[0] and not wanting to share anything if you don't absolutely have to.

I don’t know if this is an American quality specifically. It could just be that Americans can (or used to be able to) afford it, whereas most other people in most other societies never could.

For example, what young married couple would want to live in their parents house if they can afford their own? All of my extended family grew up in intergenerational households because they were poor immigrants who had to make do, but all the cousins became doctors/lawyers/engineers/etc and got their own house.

That is not to say that my cousins would not let their elderly parents stay with them if the need arises, but being financially independent does allow people to do what they want.