> 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.