241–250 of 517 posts
Really heart warming story. My 2 cents: The group is at a critical point now, having ~100 Whatsapp members. From what I've seen this creates a chilling effect where you inevitably end up with cliques and social cooling. No new members will feel like they can actually send a message into a 100+ person group, while the old guard starts to use it as a notification board, rather than a real chat. Eventually, newer member…
> 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…
It's not like communal behaviors or venues in SF/Oakland/Berkeley did not exist prior to 2025...
Really heart warming story. My 2 cents: The group is at a critical point now, having ~100 Whatsapp members. From what I've seen this creates a chilling effect where you inevitably end up with cliques and social cooling. No new members will feel like they can actually send a message into a 100+ person group, while the old guard starts to use it as a notification board, rather than a real chat. Eventually, newer member…
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Yes, but the geographic scale of suburbs just puts limits on this type of thing. “Everyone with a five minute walking me” is a very different number of people in Brooklyn vs the suburbs. Let’s say 50 vs 500? I think it’s way easier to end up on an anti-social block than in a city, where the law of large numbers draws blocks toward the average.
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 s…
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.
Awesome article. Inspires me to try to form better relationships with my neighbors. nit: the header "Where We Today" seems like it's omitting an "Are"
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>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 thei…
Very much so. 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…
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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.
> 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…
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