Go Befriend Your Neighbors In This Season

It helps with some of our societal ills.

Probably around early June, I did a ride-along with Fort Worth Police because I was going to be a neighborhood volunteer, cruising and looking for anything off-kilter. I was with the cops for six hours. We almost exclusively got “welfare check” calls, some of which were obviously pretty depressing. No one was dead, but someone had been living essentially in their own filth for two weeks, with no one reaching out to them except whoever called the cops to get the welfare check. That particular house was on a street with 12 houses on each side, so 24 in total. As I sat in the car, I thought to myself: “Couldn’t one of the people in these 23 houses have checked on him before the cops were called?”

That’s a simplistic discussion, without question, and I know people lead busy lives, or potentially some of those houses are vacant or have renters or whatever. I get it. It’s not a perfect argument. But I think about this stuff a lot. In September 2020, I moved to the Oakhurst section of Fort Worth, which is kinda north and east of downtown. I actually wrote an article for a local paper about the neighborhood. The neighborhood has definitely been a strong addition to my life in a time of lots of other bullshit and chaos. I know a lot of my neighbors, I check in on some of the older ones, and there’s a Friday night dinner group which is pretty cool. It’s a good place. At this moment, I cannot and could not imagine living anywhere else.

I probably know 25–50 of my neighbors all-in, which is still a small number when you consider that there’s 750–1,000 people living in the area. So it’s not massive, no. But it makes a difference, yes.

This, however, is not common in America: 1 in 6 people don’t even know their neighbors’ names. Now there’s an argument that “the traditional myth of the American neighborhood has eroded.” 57% of Americans in one survey say they know 0–1 of their neighbors.

So why is this happening?

The culprits I think most people would point to would be:

• Polarization

• People lead busy lives and are stressed

• Desire for privacy

• COVID aftermath

• People don’t see “being a good neighbor” as in the “This makes me successful” bucket

• “Stay on your side of the fence” attitude

All those reasons have merit for a decline in neighborly behavior. I would definitely say COVID shifted a lot of things, where if you had 12 houses on one side of a street, the residents of six houses were down to meet up and do a firepit, and the residents of the other six houses were wearing masks alone in the tub. That does happen, and that can divide the ethos of a block/neighborhood.

One nation, under convenience

The bigger picture to me is that we used to desire to live in community, and now it seems like writ large we desire to live in convenience. Many people I know want a newer build, with a few bedrooms, in a gated subdivision with fence lines. You add Amazon boxes on the porch, DoorDash, etc… and who has the need to interact consistently with neighbors? I know one couple who moved 1.5 years ago to a new neighborhood and regularly report they know “no one.” If you ever see this couple’s garage, it’s all Amazon boxes waiting for recycling. There’s nothing wrong with that — they chased convenience, and affluence and hard work supposedly begets that right. But if you don’t outsource the mowing of your lawn, maybe wave at some people and casually interact. It’s a start.

You will see some articles frame the decline of the neighborhood as akin to “the decline of democracy,” and that’s a little sky-is-falling for me. If democracy is declining, it’s because of money and because people in power want to hold on to the bitter end, which prevents new ideas and approaches from getting anywhere except a bunch of likes on Twitter and Instagram. Neighborhoods where no one knows each other won’t destroy democracy, but they’re also depressing places to live. They’re only “neighborhoods” in a physical place. Not in any real sense.

We could solve some problems by being more neighborly

Neighborhoods are micro-interactions, which is the only place we can start to solve polarization. I don’t agree with everyone I live near on everything, but that’s OK. Just listen and sometimes ignore or roll your eyes. That’s life. We’re not, repeat not, going to solve polarization issues on echo chambers like social platforms. You only solve it breaking bread with others, and your friends probably mostly align with you on a lot of life topics, so break bread with those who bought or rent around you. That’s a bit more diverse, potentially, and that’s where the issues can start to become “two-sided.”

Now, do I think we can solve crime and police necessity if more people act neighborly? Yes, I actually think we could see a decline in some pointless calls that police go on if people just cared for those on their street. I think the “decline of knowing your neighbors” is a bigger reason for some crime upticks than “liberal DAs letting people out of jail en masse,” but I know that latter argument will always win the day in an ideological time.

So, if you read this far, go talk to a neighbor or two across the rest of this week. Just learn a sliver of their story. It’ll make you feel better, and it might make societally .0000001 percent better in the moment too.