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Why don’t more people live close to friends?

annehelen.substack.com

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Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#311

Post by nicbou »

mantas wrote: post #301
nicbou wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Europe has a café culture. It is sorely missing from North America. You just sit outside and watch the world go by. Berlin in particular has lots of parks, and people can go there with drinks, grills, frisbees etc. The sheer number of them means that most people are within walking distance from one. It’s great to meet without spending money. Again, those are almost absent in most of North America. You have to…

More like sit and scroll on your phone... :D I love the idea of what cafes were supposed to be a century ago. But nowadays HN or some subreddits plays the same role. Now I can live in bum-fuck-nowhere and interact with other people from wherever. While saving on exorbitant rent just to be close to meeting points. On other other hand, this kills the romanticised idea of the cities. But are we after „city life“ as a ca…

If you think that meeting someone over drinks is equivalent to exchanging a few comments asynchronously, one of us is blissfully unware that they're missing out.

Café culture simply means that you have a convenient place to meet with other people with some regularity. You really don't need to be judgemental and dismissive about it.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#312

Post by gnz11 »

72f988bf wrote: post #195
Gigachad wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I love living in a city with a reliable train network. So many times I have left a party completely drunk late at night, and been perfectly able to manage my way back home. Seems like Americans are left with the choice to either risk killing someone/themselves driving home or just not going out.

> Seems like Americans are left with the choice to either risk killing someone/themselves driving home or just not going out. If only there was a service where you can pay money to be driven somewhere... I heard Americans invented these smartphones with apps, Maybe they can even invent an app-based version of that paid ride service!

Taxis are incredibly cumbersome to hail, if not impossible, in less dense areas. Uber is also relatively new on the scene in the grand scheme of it. You didn't always have that option.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#313

Post by alwayslikethis »

OJFord wrote: post #281
theshrike79 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't walk to a corner store, you're not living in a "metro area" in my opinion.

In the UK you would barely even have neighbours if that were the case, it would be properly rural, US 'suburban sprawl' needs a different word IMO, it's a housing estate basically (though that implies social housing) but a spectacularly isolated/car-assuming one.

Yeah. In other countries, suburbs are essentially just less dense parts of the town, but still has most of what makes a town a town. Suburban US is not much different from desolate rural areas minus the farms.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#314

Post by watwut »

btgeekboy wrote: post #241
bspammer wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that there’s some agenda against friends out there. What I find much easier to believe is the auto industry lobbying against public transport and for urban sprawl.

Agree; I'd actually theorize that the parent's comment has cause and effect backwards - when church is something you're compelled to attend, you overcome the heavy lift of having to load the family up into the car, drive, find somewhere to park, and attend services. And once you're there, conveniently, you're surrounded by people with at least one thing in common.

It heavily depends on church. The ones on more radical side really try to isolate you from the outside as much as possible. Not all of them tho.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#315

Post by balfirevic »

syndacks wrote: post #307
balfirevic wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People really like having a 3,000 square foot detached single family home with a 2 car garage. Sure, I'd like that too. But also, how about 3000 square feet apartment with top-notch sound insulation and a balcony, with an underground garage? That sounds like it would have most of the benefits, I would actually prefer it, as I don't care about yards. And with 10-20 story buildings, you could still have quite a large…

The latter will cost you about 5-7million, the former, 5-700k.

I know that's how it currently is, but that's in large part due to limits on how many of those kinds of buildings are allowed to be built (and where).

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#316

Post by watwut »

irrational wrote: post #194
kortilla wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> less superficially and more importantly, they would not be particularly honest or open or intimate with each other within the parameters of social norms This is more of a product of the time. My parents weren’t that open with close friends either back in the 70s when I was growing up. Fast forward to today and my friends are all quite open about personal things. And the one I know who is friends with his neighbor i…

This is probably a generational thing. I’m GenX. Growing up I never heard anyone talk about being depressed, having anxiety, etc. If someone today started trying to talk to me about mental health issues, I’d probably just have a deer in the headlights look since I have no clue how to respond to that sort of topic.

They used alcohol and drugs to deal with those a lot more. Also, they had higher juvenile criminality rates.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#318

Post by mcv »

hibikir wrote: post #163
zamnos wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of an unconventional POV, but I don't consider large areas of suburban sprawl to be cities but just really big towns. This covers Houston, swaths of Atlanta, lots of Southern California. There are lots of people living there compared to rural areas, to be sure, but without the density to support usable public transportation (once-an-hour buses don't count), it's really not a city at all. It's endless su…

If anything, you are being too nice to US suburbs: It's perfectly possible to have towns that are much denser than any US suburb. My Spanish home town has about 100K inhabitants: You'd not call that a city anywhere in the US. And yet, It's basically a circle with a one mile radius: Yes, just one mile. In that situation, one can walk everywhere, and public transportation is limited to the elderly, people carrying heav…

I always struggle with the difference between a town and a city, because Dutch has only one word for them: stad. A stad (plural "steden" is something that in the middle ages had city rights (or is it town rights?), a dorp (village) does not. And this has lead Netherland to have some steden of only a few hundred inhabitants, while some villages have more than 100,000, which of course makes no sense. The place I grew up in even has "dorp" in its name, so I will always consider it a village (besides, there's nothing to do there, but I guess that goes with suburbs), but it has about 100k inhabitants by now.

I guess to me, the real difference is density and how much there is to do. A city has a bar on almost every street corner, a village, no matter how big, does not.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#319

Post by dugmartin »

jesperlang wrote: post #243
hibikir wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, you are being too nice to US suburbs: It's perfectly possible to have towns that are much denser than any US suburb. My Spanish home town has about 100K inhabitants: You'd not call that a city anywhere in the US. And yet, It's basically a circle with a one mile radius: Yes, just one mile. In that situation, one can walk everywhere, and public transportation is limited to the elderly, people carrying heav…

More Europe anecdata: I live in a small town of around 2000. Within 5-10 minutes walking I got: a restaurant, a cafe, a grocery store, pizzeria and kindergarten. Within 5-10 minutes of biking I have: public library, another grocery store, two bars and a restaurant. Public transport is readily available to take me to the neighbouring hustle-bustle (pop. 600'000) within 35 minutes. So my town is 50 times smaller than y…

US anecdata:

I also live in a small town of around 2000 in rural Massachusetts. Within the same walking distance I have: full elementary school (kindergarten through 6th grade), public tennis and basketball courts, a public indoor gym, a grocery store, several restaurants, several bookstores, several banks, a pharmacy, a bowling alley and a few more misc stores. We also have public transport to the nearest big town but it is only a few times a day.

The only reason my town is dense and walkable is due to geography. It was settled 250 years ago and it is nestled on a river between two "mountains" (really just big hills) so once all the available space filled up 100 years ago it just stopped growing (my house is on the outskirts of town and was built 115 years ago).

In comparison I grew up in a sprawling small town in the US midwest which has embraced even more sprawl since I moved 30+ years ago and I hate going back. Its just souless and unwalkable as it has endless land to expand into and no plan to keep it human scale.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#320

Post by NikolaNovak »

irrational wrote: post #194
kortilla wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> less superficially and more importantly, they would not be particularly honest or open or intimate with each other within the parameters of social norms This is more of a product of the time. My parents weren’t that open with close friends either back in the 70s when I was growing up. Fast forward to today and my friends are all quite open about personal things. And the one I know who is friends with his neighbor i…

This is probably a generational thing. I’m GenX. Growing up I never heard anyone talk about being depressed, having anxiety, etc. If someone today started trying to talk to me about mental health issues, I’d probably just have a deer in the headlights look since I have no clue how to respond to that sort of topic.

Yup; definitely a cultural/generational component (as well as upbringing/personal preference/development); my dad's generation, born and lived in Eastern Europe, and all of them have a physical reaction to breaching certain topics - they will literally push back in their seat trying to physically run away from discussing mental health, inner feelings, social norms & progress, etc :-)

I too was born in Eastern Europe but live in Canada now (and for majority of my adulthood). Took me, dunno, 10-15 years to change some of the subtly ingrained cultural perspectives and open up.

(I still get a deer in headlights look sometimes, but that's just me and my social awkwardness:)

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