Comment by generalenvelope
2 days ago
It feels ridiculous not to mention car dependence and the things that enabled it: restrictive zoning, parking minimums, the car lobby.
In the last 50 years, the US has bulldozed dense, mixed used housing that enabled community and tight knit neighborhoods. More economically/socially viable housing (read: an apartment on top of a business) has literally been banned in much of the US. Ensuring that there's a large plot of asphalt to house personal vehicles that are ever increasing in size is baked into zoning laws (though some cities have finally banned parking minimums). Suburbia sprawls, literally requiring most of the country to own a car.
I would love to see some data on this, but my intuition is that everyone is physically farther away as a result, which weakens their general connection and likelihood to party together, and makes it harder for them to get to/from a party in the first place.
There's other feasible side effects too like less savings due to the cost of owning a car (I've seen estimates of the US average exceeding $10k/yr), or expensive housing exacerbated by all of the above - less space for housing due to roads/parking (and the cost rising as a direct result of a developer needing to include parking), and rising taxes to finance more and more infrastructure: suburban sprawl means more roads, pipes, electrical lines, while contributing significantly less economic value (Strong Towns has done some great graphics on how much dense urban areas subsidize their sprawling single family home filled counterparts).
It feels ridiculous to bring up car dependence in an article about 1980-2020 social trends, when the US was car-dependent the entire time, and the big drop was in the 2010s in particular.
It’s car dependence, but the impacts were delayed because people used to just drink and drive. Now that’s rightfully seen as unacceptable, but we are still left with car dependence. So people just don’t leave home now.
It was totally unacceptable to drink and drive in the 2000s, and the sharp decline didn't start until right after. You'd also find a similar decline in socializing among non-driving-age children.
It was totally unacceptable in the 2000s, but there still remained a lot of "...but I can probably get away with it". That has declined in the interim.
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The sprawl of suburbia isn't so much outside the top 5-10ish cities. Even "growing" places like Columbus OH in the midwest, you can go from cornfield to cornfield across the built environment in probably 25 miles and about as many minutes on the freeway network that is entirely uncongested since it is so overbuilt for the population (unlike in those top 5 places where it may be underbuilt). By and large that is how the bulk of the country looks and operates. The idea that you'd drive an hour and still be in the same metro region is this big exception that people living in that exception assume must be the norm, but really isn't.
I mean, ~90M people live in one of the top 10 metro areas, which is about ¼ of the country. Not sure that I'd necessarily call that an "exception".
So 75% lives outside of it. Yeah I'd say the majority lives this way and to live otherwise is an exception for the remaining 25%. And even within those top 10 some are more like what I describe. There are definitely parts of those metros where the "mile a minute" travel estimation from uncongested highways applies. Certainly true for philadelphia outside the ~50sq miles of the gridded central city. Places like Houston average home is only like 250k pretty much at parity with midwest prices.
But that hasn't changed much between the 80s and now. It was bad then and it is bad now. So I don't see it being a significant factor for change in socialization on that timescale.
According to the US Census Bureau, the median house age in the usa is 1980. I live in a 1960 house of the type that is supposedly illegal, although every house in my suburb built since then has had building codes and planning regulations forcing walkability. Cars are forced for specialization. I had a 20 mile each way commute to an absolutely horrible neighborhood but a very high paying job. I am in walking distance of some minimum wage manual labor jobs. I can't afford to work at those minimum wage manual labor jobs and live here, and a car is incredibly cheap compared to my higher income. No one can explain why an architectural movement peaking in 1950s-1970s had no effect on socialization for decades until the smartphone era. Multiple entire generations lived in "soulless car filled suburbs" and socialized wildly according to the data in the article... until smartphones... There's an entire mythology built around the idea that any new problem that occurs began coincidentally with the construction of suburbs in the 1950s, even if the new problem didn't appear for the first 75 years of suburban living.