I already posted, but this post bothered me so much that I wanted to say my peace. You can tell that OP and everyone resonating with them is from Canada or the US. How? Because our urban environments are uniquely awful, since they’re built for cars, not people. The suburbs are far from anywhere you’d like to go, and even if you had the gumption to walk or bike a mile or more each way, the infrastructure to do so is flat out dangerous or hostile in a lot of cases. The suburbs keep a low population density, and there’s no real cause to meet anybody else ever since they have no third spaces, so unless you hit the neighbor jackpot, the suburbs are a super lonely experience. Big box stores, chain pharmacies, and chain restaurants being the dominant businesses in your area is also a car-centroc urbanism thing, since if you have to get in your car to go shopping, you’re just going to go where you’ll only have to make one stop or where you won’t have to leave the car. It’s even in the meme: parents too busy to teach [them] how to drive, which matters because the city is fucking inaccessible otherwise.
I live in a city of 90,000 in California and, while California is generally head and shoulders above the rest of the US in bike infrastructure, it’s still goddamn hostile to try and get across town on a bike or on foot, and that’s assuming the weather isn’t miserable. I’ve had five exchange students from different countries (Japan, HK, Russia, Netherlands, etc) and they all found the suburbs / US urban design to be isolating. All of them were used to just being able to bike/tram/bus/train across the city and even between cities completely on their own and it was no big deal at all. It’s easily the hardest thing for them to cope with.
It’s not this way in the rest of the world, and it hasn’t even been this way forever. It got this way due to decades of deliberate policy choices, and it can be changed. Your local city and county government has a shocking amount of power over this kind of stuff, and those are levels of government that, unless you live in a big metropolis, are actually accessible to laypeople. Start organizing, get your friends together, make some noise, let them know what you want; local politics can actually be pretty responsive to this stuff.
Edit: in case you want more information, there’s several really good channels about this stuff, but I’d recommend NotJustBikes and AlanFisher on YouTube for a start.
Australia is, to my understanding, not as bad as America, but roughly on par with Canada. I believe NZ might also be very car-dependent. It’s definitely not just those two countries
so unless you hit the neighbor jackpot, the suburbs are a super lonely experience
Everything else you say is right on, but this is the one that annoys me. I’ve had shitty neighbors. I’ve had neighbors that were constantly committing domestic assault and having the police called on them. Overall though, I knew and spent time with my neighbors because we all made the effort to be a community. I’ve recently moved to take care of a dying family member, but even in the few months I’ve been here there have been improvements in the relationship with the neighbors because we made agreements to have a block party once a month, have the husband/wife lunch every few weeks, and generally socialize. It sucks to start if no one on your block is talking, but most people are pretty happy to start building a relationship with their neighbors. You just have to put in the effort.
I already posted, but this post bothered me so much that I wanted to say my peace. You can tell that OP and everyone resonating with them is from Canada or the US. How? Because our urban environments are uniquely awful, since they’re built for cars, not people. The suburbs are far from anywhere you’d like to go, and even if you had the gumption to walk or bike a mile or more each way, the infrastructure to do so is flat out dangerous or hostile in a lot of cases. The suburbs keep a low population density, and there’s no real cause to meet anybody else ever since they have no third spaces, so unless you hit the neighbor jackpot, the suburbs are a super lonely experience. Big box stores, chain pharmacies, and chain restaurants being the dominant businesses in your area is also a car-centroc urbanism thing, since if you have to get in your car to go shopping, you’re just going to go where you’ll only have to make one stop or where you won’t have to leave the car. It’s even in the meme: parents too busy to teach [them] how to drive, which matters because the city is fucking inaccessible otherwise.
I live in a city of 90,000 in California and, while California is generally head and shoulders above the rest of the US in bike infrastructure, it’s still goddamn hostile to try and get across town on a bike or on foot, and that’s assuming the weather isn’t miserable. I’ve had five exchange students from different countries (Japan, HK, Russia, Netherlands, etc) and they all found the suburbs / US urban design to be isolating. All of them were used to just being able to bike/tram/bus/train across the city and even between cities completely on their own and it was no big deal at all. It’s easily the hardest thing for them to cope with.
It’s not this way in the rest of the world, and it hasn’t even been this way forever. It got this way due to decades of deliberate policy choices, and it can be changed. Your local city and county government has a shocking amount of power over this kind of stuff, and those are levels of government that, unless you live in a big metropolis, are actually accessible to laypeople. Start organizing, get your friends together, make some noise, let them know what you want; local politics can actually be pretty responsive to this stuff.
Edit: in case you want more information, there’s several really good channels about this stuff, but I’d recommend NotJustBikes and AlanFisher on YouTube for a start.
Australia is, to my understanding, not as bad as America, but roughly on par with Canada. I believe NZ might also be very car-dependent. It’s definitely not just those two countries
Anyway, shoutouts to !fuckcars@lemmy.world and !notjustbikes@feddit.nl.
Everything else you say is right on, but this is the one that annoys me. I’ve had shitty neighbors. I’ve had neighbors that were constantly committing domestic assault and having the police called on them. Overall though, I knew and spent time with my neighbors because we all made the effort to be a community. I’ve recently moved to take care of a dying family member, but even in the few months I’ve been here there have been improvements in the relationship with the neighbors because we made agreements to have a block party once a month, have the husband/wife lunch every few weeks, and generally socialize. It sucks to start if no one on your block is talking, but most people are pretty happy to start building a relationship with their neighbors. You just have to put in the effort.