
How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult - jseliger
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship
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Nzen
tl;dr studies show friendships form from unplanned proximity; cities are no
longer human sized; hence, we are (more likely) lonely and should invest in
walkable, noncommercial spaces.

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hkmurakami
Yep many a times our fried group has discussed how nice it would be if we had
college like proximity again with adult level accommodations.

Coincidentally I think Tony Hsieh went for that arrangement with his friends
in the early 2000s, urging his friends to live in the new condo building built
in SF wherein he owned the penthouse.

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gozur88
I wonder if changing housing would make any difference. Whenever I'm around
strangers they're all flipping through apps on their smartphones, ignoring
everyone around them.

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kwhitefoot
The first picture shows a place that I would hate to live in. All those almost
identical boxes! I'm glad I live in an area where every house is different.
Even those built at the same time by the same builder have accreted
idiosyncratic additions and even when they were new were just a small number
of similar buildings surrounded by others of various ages, sizes, and details.

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quietbritishjim
I've seen this reaction before and it always puzzles me. I can understand why
it's (marginally) more interesting to walk down a street with varied houses
than uniform ones, but not why it's better to live in such a street. If you
moved to the next house along every few days specifically to get a new
environment I could see the problem, but since you're only living in one house
in the long term it makes little difference what the others are like when
you're inside (or when you're in the hypothetical shared social space), which
is almost all of the time.

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matty22
For the same reason that The Stepford Wives was a creepy movie? There's a
place near my town where they clear cut all the tree off the top of a
mountain. Then, they built hundreds of houses and townhouses that all look
exactly the same. Every time I drive through there I feel like I'm in the
Twilight Zone. The entire place makes the hair on my neck stand on end just
due to the sterile and fake nature of the entire place. It feels planned by
committee, abnormal, and out of place, not like a place that grew up naturally
over time.

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Odenwaelder
Nobody forces anybody to start a family, though. The author talks about it as
if it was mandatory, and then puts it as some chore.

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ndh2
Your comment implies that you have started a family, and want to state that
you don't regret it. That's great. What does that have to do with where you
live, which is what the article is about?

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trendia
Not OP, but:

"But when we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and
expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find
ourselves tied to those houses."

