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.

A lot of people are assuming that the main people you would be interacting with in a city are your neighbors. There are many more positive interactions you'd have, outside.

People often don't socialize with their neighbors in a big city because it's nice to have a place where you aren't expected to socialize.

Sometimes I don't want to have a conversation with my neighbor who I really don't have anything in common with except they live next door.

In a big city you can find people that are exactly your tribe or explore a new one.

Thats wild to me. When I lived in an apartment I couldn’t get out the door without having the crazy cat lady telling me her new smoking spot the cameras couldn’t see (she wanted to smoke on the rooftop). It was a riot, that place had some characters.

The suburbs were soul sucking to me, the people were largely insufferable. I knew my neighbors, but hated them because 90% of our conversations were some form of “I noticed your grass wasn’t cut this week” or “your cans sat on the curb until the morning”. There were some good ones, but like me they mostly hid in their back yard to avoid the Karen’s.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> Atomic family from 50s with their suburb is literally the utopia for American and whatnot family

Where did that "utopia" ideal come from?

> Good luck having that in New York rat cages

Yeah, that isn't good either. That's poverty. Do you think poverty doesn't exist in the suburbs?

It can't possibly be something in the middle! All or nothing.

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

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

My whole life, my mom would talk about how much she hated the suburbs, how she lived in a Chicago suburb and it was a miserable experience, she would never do it again, etc., all the while praising the time that she lived in Tiburon.

I finally went and visited the house where she had rented in Tiburon (it was just a block from the Paradise Loop path, a pleasant bike ride from SF), and I was like, "Mom, Tiburon is totally a suburb." And her response was "Oh, well your sisters could walk to school and I could walk to the grocery store, so it didn't feel like a suburb to me."

> The urban lifestyle is also to blame when it demands a lot of time for work and commute,

ironically, urban commutes are substantially shorter on average

> leaving the individual with little time for self improvement and free time. It deteriorates the third place by not allowing time to dedicate to it.

what? there's so many urban third places.