Yeah tight communities are blessing, nightmare or both. Good luck with privacy, some people are nosy by default or simply self-centered... weirdos to be polite, gossip, looking down on differences, hard to integrate for newcomers, and one has to conform to unspoken rules, like them or not. Not exactly feeling of proper freedom, is it.

If you get into beef with your neighbor for something which is trivial over long time, now you are stuck with an asshole next door for next 30-50 years.

Its not just US, we moved in Switzerland from very cosmopolitan and international Geneva to small village in wineyards and all this applies at least as much.