Yeah the point of apartments is not to socialize with the neighbors specifically, it's more that the increased density gets you walkability and density.

It's much more appealing to get to the street and walk when you have 4 cafes, a theater, two libraries and a gym in a 10 minute radius than when you just get to walk next to lawns for an hour.

And there's a point to be made for the added friction of a small home. The more self sufficient your house is the harder it is to convince yourself to get out.

Taking care of the lawn, etc, you will definitely meet your neighbors.

I live in a suburb by a major city in the US, and know so many neighbors. The sense of community is really strong. I help my neighbors remove snow and take their trash out as they are old.

I feel like some people are just making assumptions or are extremely introverted.

This has largely been my experience as well but in the US. However, a new couple moved in next door to my apartment. We’ve done happy hour with them and I share the fruits of my cooking/baking adventures. Stop and chat when we are not in a hurry. For whatever reason we’ve not gotten to be much closer than friendly neighbors. Could be the woes of young professionals in their 30s without kids but the effort definitely feels greater than at other points of life.

That's not a universal truth. I grew up in the suburbs and I've lived in a city for my whole adult life. I feel a MUCH stronger sense of community in the city. I know so many of my neighbors that it's hard to leave my house without running into somebody I know.

It's funny that as a child in the suburbs I had maybe 10 neighbors within a half mile and we only knew 2 of them. I never saw them. There were no sidewalks and people didn't walk around.

In fact, in our typical suburban boredom, sometimes we'd sneak around our neighbor's properties to see if we could learn who they were. We were pretending to be spies. One time we discovered that our closest neighbors had goats and we were blown away. I never did meet the people living in those suburban houses in the 10 years we lived in that house.

I've had far easier experience joining my neighborhood community in a city as many of my neighbors are literally walking around. My last 2 suburban neighborhood communities were on Facebook and the groups were less "lets get coffee" and more "that car that drove by is suspicious". One of my old neighbors in a city occasionally had a TV and cooler set up outside for people to drop by to watch baseball.

This sounds less like "mass transit culture" and more like extroversion.

I grew up in suburban Wisconsin. The at-home bar was and is common there too.

People don't throw parties with them nearly as much any more because throwing a party with an at-home bar in a suburban house essentially requires drunk driving. We've gotten much more strict about since 1980 for very good reason.

Happy hours are still relatively common in cities because you can get home without driving.

On a larger scale I think it's _a_ factor, but not the only factor.

It's partly a numbers game. There are definitely amicable cul-de-sacs but if you are in an apartment complex there's 100x more "neighbors" you could interact with.

Suburbs also come with the tradeoff of driving, at least in America. It's a lot easier to socialize when you can put on some flip flops and walk to a friend's place or an event than it is to drive.

It can be hit or miss in either case, and there's socioeconomic and cultural forces that make real world interactions more scarce. If more of my income goes to rent and inflation is too high why would I burn through money on going out when I can stay home and watch a show or be on my phone

So many of my neighbors never go out side except to get in their car.

My experience is literally the exact opposite. Suburbs were lifeless, soulless places and the city is where my social life got measurably better. There's no way I can ever go back to the suburbs now

I live in a city similar to NYC (but not quite as dense) and IMO it's far better for kids than the suburbs.

I grew up in the suburbs and it was a miserable experience. If I wanted to go anywhere I had to ask an adult to drive me. There were no sidewalks. Nearest friend's house was a mile away, and my parents were understandably afraid of letting us go there alone. It was a 100% car-dependent suburb. Everything was so spread out. Nobody wanted to live on a main road with cars, so there were endless dead-ends and culs-de-sac so everybody can have their own little traffic-free neighborhood

One time I literally WALKED SIX MILES to the mall because I was just so bored. I literally spent about half a day just walking on streets with cars going 40+ miles per hour with no shoulder. What's worse is that I had to go behind my parents back to do it because who wants their kid walking next to F-150s going 40 miles an hour?

I thought things would get better once I could drive. Things improved a little bit, but it's hard to afford a car + insurance + gas at 17 years old. The car was a huge drain on my limited resources. I was so eager to get rid of it

Once I discovered the "rat cages" you're deriding, life became a whole lot better for me. I refuse to raise my kids in the suburbs. Kids deserve better than that.

It’s interesting that you think the opposite of the suburbs is high rises (I assume that’s what you mean by rat cages).

The reality is that prewar housing in cities in the US was still frequently single family housing. The Chicago Bungalow is an obvious example.

The difference was in how close they were to each other and how much of the infrastructure was given to cars.

I’m not sure I buy that there is some tidy explanation about suburbanization leading to the decline in social interaction but if you think everyone describing city living is describing midtown manhattan you’ve got to myopic view of what urban housing means.

This is true of suburbs as well fwiw. There are lots of walkable suburbs with common community space and not a McMansion or big box shop to be seen.

When families had 3+ kids on average the younger kids would go with the older kids. Now you’re looking at <2 kids on average that doesn’t work.

I volunteered at an old folks home from age 10-16 or so, this was back in early/mid 90s - before the Internet stole my attention - and the old people were of the Greatest Generation cohort (maybe some of the oldest from 1800s). I really enjoyed those talks and have always liked talking with old people since. I can sit with any of them and just talk for hours but rarely ever do this with younger/my aged people. They just chit chat about everything and silence is never awkward, they could talk about anything from the weather to big social/political issues with an open mind. Unfortunately, I fear this is ending soon as this latest generation of old people is kind of vile and not really seeking positive conversation (wild generalization but it's my experience). Instead they tend to want to tell you how to live, what to believe, who to vote for, etc. and then judge/ridicule you when you don't comply or voice a differing opinion.

FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.

When my dad does this it’s mortifying

When I do it though it’s very cool and fun!

Of course I don’t call women “girl” or try to order in languages I don’t speak

Someone commented once about the Trader Joe’s people always flirting with everyone, and a) that’s probably true but b) is just being nice to random people these days so intimate and invasive that it’s equivalent to getting hit on? That would explain people cringing

Everything happened so quickly too. All it took was a couple of decades.

> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.

I doubt that steelworkers around 1920 typically went out dancing after their shifts. Back then, there was a lack of radios or sound systems, and live music was likely reserved for more upscale establishments. The average worker would more likely have gone to a beer hall or pub to have a drink with his mates.

I haven’t been able to quickly find any statistics for the U.S. that go back that far, but in Germany, around 67% of 18- to 25-year-olds were still consuming alcohol regularly in 1973, whereas that figure had dropped to about 28% by 2023. I’m not suggesting that this trend is inherently negative, but there is, at the very least, a correlation with a decline in social activities.

Nobody's commented on your most important point: "city" does not equate to "community involvement." Suburban people statistically volunteer more and join groups more than rural or urban people, and rural people are more likely to meet in person with their groups than suburban or urban people [0].

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/28/how-urban...

> The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people.

When I am tired from work, I spend more time on phone after. And less time doing other more engaging activities. When I had easy workday, I am more likely to do something else.

> Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.

This is what I found: "the social interactions of those from lower-income households tend to revolve around family members and neighbors" and "richer people spend more with their self-selected friends".

This would confirm exactly what OP wrote - people who do socialize do it with people nearby.

> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle.

They are referring to what they see as they do their community organizing. You dismiss it all, because none of that should theoretically matter.

>the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities

You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.

>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people

There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.

>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.

Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.

> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.

You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.

I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.

This has been written about broadly by social historians. This book, in particular, is illuminating: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133867/wh...

Some other links:

https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24906-research-ties-persistenc...

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/white-flight...

https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...

There's also this rather infamous quote by one of the most powerful Republican strategists in the 80s, Lee Atwater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#:~:text=Later%20in...

I won't quote it here but it's very telling.

In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I was the primary author of the National Register nomination for their house).

The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.

What they're describing is well documented, but my understanding is that the reality is a blend of what you're describing and what they're describing.

To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.

In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.

It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.

At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.

In many American cities it definitely was about race. If you look at cities like Chicago you can still see today the effects of decades of overtly racist policies that have shaped the demographic layout of the city today.

People also moved to suburbs in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

Cars enabled people to have free standing houses and work became decentralised, which was also due to cars.

Many people prefer to live in a free standing house.

I've heard that everything is nihilistic. Things are funny when you're life's good. Things are serious when your life's not good but following them will to make it good. Things are nihilistic when your life's not good but gambling has a chance of making it good and that's the best option you see.

Example of past generation seriousness: investing - put all your money in housing or the stock market and you'll get rich and comfortable. Example of current generation nihilism: everyone wanting to be an influencer. Some people will become successful and some more will get by but most will fail at that, by the mathematics of it. Or literal gambling as in the rise of Kalshi - if your life's crap with $0 or $1k but wouldn't be crap with $100k, why not put it all on 100x odds? Or something like looksmaxxing: will doing xyz to your jawline somehow result in success? Probably not, but it might and you weren't going to be successful otherwise anyway.

GP is wrong anyway, comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking.

I don’t have a direct response to your zoning idea but have observed in European cities there seems to be less age segregation.

Why not just make the new neighborhoods walkable with green space too?

People are cynical about your idea, but it's not like it has never been done in society. There are in fact apartment complexes that focus on elderly demographics. Retirement homes are just that. What's a school but a bastion for a bunch of kids of similar age to socialize together (and should a random adult wander onto it, there'd be a lockdown).

Urban planning around these situations would be nice. But the very least we could do is build more third places that tries to attract that last middle demographic to come together; that mid 20's to 40's adults too old for college campuses but too young (and not on social security funds) for older gatherings. That's sort of what some bars can be, but a wide open space with less pressure to spend $15 on a "cheap" beer would be nice.

People stay in the same house their whole lives though. Your young family zone is going to be a retiree zone in 30 years and that’s where the schools and parks will be then. Can’t realistically ask people to uproot and move 3 or 4 times in their life, that’s a very expensive proposition.

we already have it, it's called the Villages.

[flagged]

You should read actual studies on what you're suggesting rather than investing in "controversial takes" that are categorically wrong.

Yes like a suburban housing unit dominated by a particular ethic group.

It’s bleaker because everyone knows a lot more. People back in the day were for lack of a better word- naive. They had no idea what others were doing outside of their neighborhood and what was in the newspapers. There are incredible, chronic hidden pressures in the world now even if you individually disengage from social media and the like.

I’m not arguing that today is the worst time to ever exist in the history of humanity.

I’m arguing there are legitimate reasons why people are exhausted and disillusioned with the current state of the world.

In the Great Depression there was community and hope. People could band together, form unions or political movements.

Today, computers allow for mass dystopian control. Cameras and algorithms everywhere with no chance of appealing to an actual human.

There are multiple kinds of suffering, and even if more people have sufficient nutrition and health than in the great depression, it's much harder to see hope for the future today.

This might be controversial, and I'm not saying it has to be the case, but I believe at least part of it is due to lack of sunlight / outside movement (vs all day in office, car, train, home with stuffy air and sometimes not even openable windows) and nutrition (too much processed and fortified food, not enough protein for many people).

I'm trying to focus on both in my life, and I have become much happier as a result.

20-30 years ago was 1996-2006. Granted, I was younger back then, but in my mind this post Cold War, young Internet, pre-smartphone age was the best of times. Since then life got easier in some ways, harder in others. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about today, but how do you think we're so much better off now?

I think people are actually increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life, but that increase is basically entirely due to spending hours doomscrolling and similar behavior.

One could argue that both parents having to work is much more difficult than when one person could support a household. Houses, healthcare and education are objectively much more expensive as well. It's not "victim mindset", it's literal exhaustion because everything is much more expensive. There's also no way to retire vs pensions and other baby boomer offramps.

I don't need people to tell me. My rent and paycheck are a very convincing argument in and of themselves.

>I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.

There's a lot I can do by myself. But at the end of the day, someone choosing not to ghost me for a hangout or take the time to get together regularly is a 2-way street. Even pre-pandemic, it's been said people are flakier than ever.

There are systematic reasons to explain this, but on a micro level: "just work harder" is not a solution to friendship.

Life has become increasingly expensive. Safety nets that used to be there, aren’t anymore. We’re surrounded by enshittification. Social divides, and antagonism between social groups are high.

Your contempt for humanity is blinding you to real issues people face every day. Yes, some things have gotten better over the years, but some things have gotten a lot worse.