311–320 of 517 posts
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good catch, fixed! thanks :)
no problem :) just curious, what neighborhood of SF are you in?
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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.
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.
It's interesting how different people can be, and what energizes us. The coffee on the stoop seems incredibly nice, and I love that they acknowledge that the simplest events are some of the best ones. Once they start taking about "watch parties" and potlucks I personally check out completely, that's way too much for me. The less official stuff sound really great though, just sitting down for one cup of coffees time,…
You say the 'watch parties' are too much, but these are actually the events that are the best. They are at 8p, people come over when their kids are in bed, we have 4-10 people show up, everyone's in their sweat pants, and we watch a TV episode. We discuss it for 10-15m afterwards, and we generally part ways. It's such a low-effort and small event, and it allows people to get into other people's homes in a low-judgeme…
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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…
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.
> We met Luke a month or two after we’d been “stooping” on a regular basis. He came by to introduce himself and asked to exchange numbers so we could let him know if we’d be out there in the future, he’d love to join. At the time we didn’t realize how important this moment was for us. We’d been meeting many neighbors in passing but Luke was the first person to offer to sit with us and he wanted to know how to coordinate. In retrospect we should have been trying to get peoples’ numbers all along but hey, we were new to this!
I feel like the last sentence is a mistake. I think it works way better that they let the first person come up to them first of their own accord. If they'd been pushing for numbers from the get-go, the stoop coffee definitely would have a different feel to it. I think it's important that the first people who want to be there are people who _really_ want to be there, and thus take the initiative to initiate contact. That way you (potentially) start your group with a set of strong connections.
> 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…
>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…
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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 nei…
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…
I mean, that's a circle with a diameter of two miles - it's basically "entire city" for many cities.
This rules. I want to do it, but I know I can't personally, because I'm not awake at the hour people normally want coffee. Maybe I can figure out stoop whiskey. Another thing that works for meeting and talking to your neighbors, and has the benefit of attaching you to people who live blocks away from you and not just the people you see getting into the car every morning, is local politics. I've met more people being…
If you figure out stoop whiskey, let me know. I'm all in for sure on the idea.
I'm the co-author of Supernuclear and editor of this post. We've been writing the blog for almost five years now, you never know what will go viral! I've spent my adult life living in Istanbul, New York, San Francisco, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. In Istanbul it sometimes felt like my neighbors knew too much about me - they would comment on who slept over (I had a lot of friends visit!) and once when I went out of town…
> landlady said she nearly let herself into my home to make sure I hadn't died because no one had seen me in a few days.
You sound way less bothered by that than I would be. I'm annoyed just reading it.