5 ms·

For what it's worth, as the rare suburbanite HNer, I fondly recall my family having the same sort of relationships with neighbors in the late 80's and 90's; unf

by clipsy 4y ago

For what it's worth, as the rare suburbanite HNer, I fondly recall my family having the same sort of relationships with neighbors in the late 80's and 90's; unfortunately the same just doesn't seem to happen even in socioeconomically comparable suburbs today. Even just attempts to strike up small talk with a neighbor when we both happen to be outside at the same time are usually rebuffed, and the idea that anyone would invite neighbors to (eg) a barbecue seems frankly impossible. Even when neighborhood kids play together the dynamic is usually their parents keeping minimal contact with each other and not trusting each other to keep an eye on the kids. I wish I had more insight to offer into why things are like this nowadays, but it's frankly just baffling and depressing.

maxerickson 4y ago
rare suburbanite HNer I bet that's pretty wrong.
- clipsy 4y ago
  You could very well be right; I was just putting together a gut feeling about the HN community and anecdotal knowledge of where my coworkers in the industry live.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Most of the people who work for large tech companies in the Bay Area live in the suburbs.
    - clipsy 4y ago
      I've been working remotely since long before the pandemic; perhaps my experience at remote-friendly companies has skewed my experience, as only a minority of my coworkers are in the bay area. I'd say the mode for my coworkers is living in a smaller/cheaper (non-SF, non-NY) urban center. Could just be a fluke, though; it's not as though the sample size is particularly large.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    I doubt most HNers actually grew up in large cities. I would guess most were in the burbs or smaller cities (although they may be in large cities now). Just given the demographic distribution of cities (younger, less kids) and the urbanization trends over time (was more distributed 20+ years ago).
    - clipsy 4y ago
      Ah, that's a fair point! I meant I was unusual in that I live in a suburb now, not that it was unusual to grow up in a suburb.
- jader201 4y ago
  I don’t think so. I’ve seen countless threads and front page articles about more bike-friendly, anti-car city development, as well as how suburban and rural cities requiring cars and more driving is definitely not a good thing. It’s very hard to find anyone coming to defense of the allure of smaller, more open developments with actual land between your neighbors. If you want to find rural or suburban folks, HN is not the community to engage with.
  - briantakita 4y ago
    I'm into rural living myself. Spent enough time in cities & suburbs to appreciate wide open spaces without nosy neighbors & HOA rules. I also appreciate cars & the freedom they enable. Re: anti-car people, one thing that is not acknowledged about America is that America is very large & people like having their own land. Public transportation is not a feasible option for mountain communities, low population density areas, & quiet areas with nature. I was also attacked, though I got away, while riding my bike from BART in Hayward coming home from work. Havn't rode much public transportation since that experience. Public transportation is often in high crime areas. Car accidents do happen, so there's danger there as well. I only had accidents in urban areas. Stressful conditions coupled with bad driving practices I suppose.
    - hooverd 4y ago
      To paraphrase Bill Gates, "nobody needs more than 640 square feet".
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Because so many of urbanite anti-car commenters are so strident that there’s very little point in engaging with them. (HN probably is younger which tends to correlate with more urban these days but it’s generally not worth trying to have certain discussions that will change no one’s mind.) As a peer commented if you live in Silicon Valley, among other places, you live in the suburbs even if you can maybe walk to a few places.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Yeah you’re not wrong. It’s certainly part of a larger trend towards being less connected to your community. Some of that is obvious with large urban areas. Less personal space at home. No yard. Higher crime/distrust of strangers. You need tons of influence/power to be a leader in your community. But the suburb example is less obvious. Perhaps connecting with the world through your computer/smartphone more than 1:1 is one reason. Although not all suburbs are the same. In larger cities the population is high enough that they fit the same profile I described above for the city proper.
com2kid 4y ago
> For what it's worth, as the rare suburbanite HNer, I fondly recall my family having the same sort of relationships with neighbors in the late 80's and 90's; unfortunately the same just doesn't seem to happen even in socioeconomically comparable suburbs today. I used to live in a townhome in Kirkland Washington, ~10 minutes from Microsoft's main campus. One year my wife and I made Christmas cookies and went door to door to hand them out. The vast majority of people shut their doors on us without saying a word, including some of my (at the time) fellow MS employees still wearing their badges from work that day. A couple years ago I moved to Seattle proper. When we moved in, neighbors brought us over cookies. The difference is astounding. People here talk to each other with quite a bit of frequency, neighborhoods organize block parties, BBQs, and other such events. It isn't like the demographics of the people around me have changed, it is still largely engineers! Edit: When looking at houses in Seattle, we went and visited this one house 3 times in quick succession, and on the 3rd visit neighbors came by and talked to us and told us about the neighborhood and said how much they'd love to have a young new family move in. Another couple with a young child across the street from the house went over to talk to us and described what it was like raising a family in that area of the city (all pleasant things, the house was in Magnolia for anyone who knows Seattle!) I have a good friend who live in a suburb north of Seattle, he is one of the most outgoing and social people I know. Even he doesn't know his neighbors. IMHO something about 10,000 sqft yards and deep setbacks destroys any hope for communities.
- clipsy 4y ago
  > IMHO something about 10,000 sqft yards and deep setbacks destroys any hope for communities. It certainly does not intrinsically do so; this was absolutely not my experience growing up in suburbia, and I don't appear to be alone in that. I'm glad you've had a better experience in Seattle proper, though; perhaps there is just some sort of urban/suburban culturual inversion at play!
  - com2kid 4y ago
    > It certainly does not intrinsically do so; this was absolutely not my experience growing up in suburbia, None of my suburban friends report knowing their neighbors. OK, so, in Seattle, I can walk to 3 different, large, parks. In the morning, I can choose which of the 2 local bakeries I want to walk to if I want to buy some fresh bread. No big surprise, with all that walking going on, you see the same people day after day, and eventually you say hi. You pet their dog, you talk about how gardening is going, you invite people over for board games outside on the patio in the summer. Meanwhile my friends outside the city have to drive to their "local" park and drive to their "local" stores. They don't know their neighbors because their lives consist of house->car->destination. And while they are driving, I've stopped to pick berries from the tree hanging out of my neighbors yard (he doesn't mind, he loses more berries than he could ever pick himself) on the way to the grocery store to pick up whatever I need to cook for dinner that night. Don't get me wrong, I spent over a dozen years living in Seattle's suburbs, there are advantages (40MPH speed limits! Get everywhere fast! The police are legit super nice to you if your driver's license has a local address on it!), but I feel more connected to people in the city.
everforward 4y ago
I'm also in the suburbs. A couple of thoughts there: HOA's are far more common than they were in the 80's/90's (Google says they went from ~20% of homes in 1990ish to ~50% now). It really changes the risk/reward of friendship when your neighbors can arbitrarily force you to spend a whole weekend doing something dumb to please the HOA. It has happened, and I'd rather not repeat it. The explosion of culture the internet brought on has also fragmented us. Shared interests are fairly uncommon because everyone is watching something different on Netflix, doing different hobbies because they can, etc. That's not totally a bad thing, but it does tend to make smalltalk bland. Income inequality has also changed demographics. My neighbors are substantially older than me. There aren't even that many children in the neighborhood, a lot of them are retirees that presumably bought when the neighborhood was cheaper. Again, not totally a bad thing, but it means we don't even share nostalgia.

by clipsy 4y ago

maxerickson 4y ago

rare suburbanite HNer I bet that's pretty wrong.

clipsy 4y ago
You could very well be right; I was just putting together a gut feeling about the HN community and anecdotal knowledge of where my coworkers in the industry live.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Most of the people who work for large tech companies in the Bay Area live in the suburbs.
  - clipsy 4y ago
    I've been working remotely since long before the pandemic; perhaps my experience at remote-friendly companies has skewed my experience, as only a minority of my coworkers are in the bay area. I'd say the mode for my coworkers is living in a smaller/cheaper (non-SF, non-NY) urban center. Could just be a fluke, though; it's not as though the sample size is particularly large.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  I doubt most HNers actually grew up in large cities. I would guess most were in the burbs or smaller cities (although they may be in large cities now). Just given the demographic distribution of cities (younger, less kids) and the urbanization trends over time (was more distributed 20+ years ago).
  - clipsy 4y ago
    Ah, that's a fair point! I meant I was unusual in that I live in a suburb now, not that it was unusual to grow up in a suburb.
jader201 4y ago
I don’t think so. I’ve seen countless threads and front page articles about more bike-friendly, anti-car city development, as well as how suburban and rural cities requiring cars and more driving is definitely not a good thing. It’s very hard to find anyone coming to defense of the allure of smaller, more open developments with actual land between your neighbors. If you want to find rural or suburban folks, HN is not the community to engage with.
- briantakita 4y ago
  I'm into rural living myself. Spent enough time in cities & suburbs to appreciate wide open spaces without nosy neighbors & HOA rules. I also appreciate cars & the freedom they enable. Re: anti-car people, one thing that is not acknowledged about America is that America is very large & people like having their own land. Public transportation is not a feasible option for mountain communities, low population density areas, & quiet areas with nature. I was also attacked, though I got away, while riding my bike from BART in Hayward coming home from work. Havn't rode much public transportation since that experience. Public transportation is often in high crime areas. Car accidents do happen, so there's danger there as well. I only had accidents in urban areas. Stressful conditions coupled with bad driving practices I suppose.
  - hooverd 4y ago
    To paraphrase Bill Gates, "nobody needs more than 640 square feet".
- ghaff 4y ago
  Because so many of urbanite anti-car commenters are so strident that there’s very little point in engaging with them. (HN probably is younger which tends to correlate with more urban these days but it’s generally not worth trying to have certain discussions that will change no one’s mind.) As a peer commented if you live in Silicon Valley, among other places, you live in the suburbs even if you can maybe walk to a few places.

nonethewiser 4y ago

Yeah you’re not wrong. It’s certainly part of a larger trend towards being less connected to your community. Some of that is obvious with large urban areas. Less personal space at home. No yard. Higher crime/distrust of strangers. You need tons of influence/power to be a leader in your community. But the suburb example is less obvious. Perhaps connecting with the world through your computer/smartphone more than 1:1 is one reason. Although not all suburbs are the same. In larger cities the population is high enough that they fit the same profile I described above for the city proper.

com2kid 4y ago

> For what it's worth, as the rare suburbanite HNer, I fondly recall my family having the same sort of relationships with neighbors in the late 80's and 90's; unfortunately the same just doesn't seem to happen even in socioeconomically comparable suburbs today. I used to live in a townhome in Kirkland Washington, ~10 minutes from Microsoft's main campus. One year my wife and I made Christmas cookies and went door to door to hand them out. The vast majority of people shut their doors on us without saying a word, including some of my (at the time) fellow MS employees still wearing their badges from work that day. A couple years ago I moved to Seattle proper. When we moved in, neighbors brought us over cookies. The difference is astounding. People here talk to each other with quite a bit of frequency, neighborhoods organize block parties, BBQs, and other such events. It isn't like the demographics of the people around me have changed, it is still largely engineers! Edit: When looking at houses in Seattle, we went and visited this one house 3 times in quick succession, and on the 3rd visit neighbors came by and talked to us and told us about the neighborhood and said how much they'd love to have a young new family move in. Another couple with a young child across the street from the house went over to talk to us and described what it was like raising a family in that area of the city (all pleasant things, the house was in Magnolia for anyone who knows Seattle!) I have a good friend who live in a suburb north of Seattle, he is one of the most outgoing and social people I know. Even he doesn't know his neighbors. IMHO something about 10,000 sqft yards and deep setbacks destroys any hope for communities.

clipsy 4y ago
> IMHO something about 10,000 sqft yards and deep setbacks destroys any hope for communities. It certainly does not intrinsically do so; this was absolutely not my experience growing up in suburbia, and I don't appear to be alone in that. I'm glad you've had a better experience in Seattle proper, though; perhaps there is just some sort of urban/suburban culturual inversion at play!
- com2kid 4y ago
  > It certainly does not intrinsically do so; this was absolutely not my experience growing up in suburbia, None of my suburban friends report knowing their neighbors. OK, so, in Seattle, I can walk to 3 different, large, parks. In the morning, I can choose which of the 2 local bakeries I want to walk to if I want to buy some fresh bread. No big surprise, with all that walking going on, you see the same people day after day, and eventually you say hi. You pet their dog, you talk about how gardening is going, you invite people over for board games outside on the patio in the summer. Meanwhile my friends outside the city have to drive to their "local" park and drive to their "local" stores. They don't know their neighbors because their lives consist of house->car->destination. And while they are driving, I've stopped to pick berries from the tree hanging out of my neighbors yard (he doesn't mind, he loses more berries than he could ever pick himself) on the way to the grocery store to pick up whatever I need to cook for dinner that night. Don't get me wrong, I spent over a dozen years living in Seattle's suburbs, there are advantages (40MPH speed limits! Get everywhere fast! The police are legit super nice to you if your driver's license has a local address on it!), but I feel more connected to people in the city.

everforward 4y ago

I'm also in the suburbs. A couple of thoughts there: HOA's are far more common than they were in the 80's/90's (Google says they went from ~20% of homes in 1990ish to ~50% now). It really changes the risk/reward of friendship when your neighbors can arbitrarily force you to spend a whole weekend doing something dumb to please the HOA. It has happened, and I'd rather not repeat it. The explosion of culture the internet brought on has also fragmented us. Shared interests are fairly uncommon because everyone is watching something different on Netflix, doing different hobbies because they can, etc. That's not totally a bad thing, but it does tend to make smalltalk bland. Income inequality has also changed demographics. My neighbors are substantially older than me. There aren't even that many children in the neighborhood, a lot of them are retirees that presumably bought when the neighborhood was cheaper. Again, not totally a bad thing, but it means we don't even share nostalgia.