Addressing Shared Problems for Solidarity

As a kid , I was really shy and I think I had social anxiety even back then. I didn't know that word . Sometimes neighbors would show up at our door, unannounced, and knock and be like, Hey, you want to play, let's have a playdate. And that was like my worst nightmare to be honest. Do you know your neighbors ? I mean, besides just recognizing a face, do you know them enough to trust them? In a few study from last year, about a quarter of Americans said they knew all or most of their neighbors , and sixty two percent said they knew some . About forty four percent of Americans said they trust all or most of their neighbors , with forty six percent saying they only trust some . These numbers are on the decline. The share of Americans who know and trust their neighbors has dropped since twenty eighteen, according to the same study. There are actually a lot of structural reasons why we might not trust the people around us, but it's also hard to put ourselves out there with people we don't know and don't want to bother . Today, I'm exploring what keeps us from the positive neighbor relationships we might want , how to forge these relationships, and why getting to know our neighbors might bring so much more safety , power , and connection to our lives. Hello, hello. I'm Britney Loose and you're listening to it's Ben Amin from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Okay, so when I first started thinking about this idea that a lot of us, including myself, don't know or trust our neighbors as well as we might like , I wanted to talk to someone who already built a flourishing neighbor community, brick by brick. So I called up my NPR colleague, Katie Montalion, a producer at NPR's Ted Radio Hour. She's become something of a neighbor whisperer , but that wasn't always the case. So I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts on like a dead end street and there were probably like ten families that had kids my age as my neighbors. So there definitely was a culture of neighbors. As a kid , I was really shy and I think I had social anxiety even back then. I didn't know that word . Sometimes neighbors would show up at our door unannounced and knock and be like, Hey, you want to play? And that was like my worst nightmare to be honest I just I didn't like kind of feeling like there was an intrusion that could come without me consenting, and then I was so shy that I wouldn't know how to set a boundary if I was like, Actually I don't want to play right now. Fast forward twenty years or so, she moved to an apartment in Washington DC and she still was scared a knock would come. And it wasn't that I disliked my neighbors , but I think I did have some of that energy I had as a kid where I felt like if my neighbors know too much about me , it might intrude on my peace of mind. Katie started dating someone during the pandemic who eventually moved in with her . And she says her social life didn't extend very far past the relationship. It was a four year relationship and like there were definitely moments where I felt lonely and kind of wish for connection and wished to build friendship or even be able to like start a run club in my neighborhood or a hiking group or things like that . But I just felt like I have no idea where to start , and I think the isolation just kind of snowballed . And it wasn't really until that relationship ended that I then took a look at my life and realized I had no friends and certainly didn't know my neighbors. I maybe knew two or three of them, but didn't know their names, didn't know anything about them . The idea of a loneliness epidemic, we've covered it on this show and I think we've all heard a lot about it by now . And I think that when we talk about it, we discuss it in terms of a lack of friends, as Katie's described. But I've heard less about the loss of neighbor relationships too. Neighbors can be friends, of course, but even looser ties with neighbors. People used to have more of those. I grew up in Buffalo , and my folks grew up in Cincinnati and on holiday breaks when we went back to Cincinnati, I'd get in the car with my grandfather and my uncle and my dad and sit in the back seat of our minivan . And they would drive very slowly up road where they'd lived and they knew the name of the family that lived in each home and they would talk about what had happened to that person since then. That's Mark J. Dunkelman, fellow at Brown University'ss Waton School for International and Public Affairs and author of the book The Vanishing Neighbor, The Transformation of American Community . And I presumed for most of my life that the distinction was between Cincinnati and Buffalo . And then when I ran into a sociologist at one point who had grown up in Buffalo and was a little older than I was , I realized the distinction was not about geography but about chronology , that there was a period in American life where the norm was that you were neighborly in the sense that you knew the people who lived nearby . And then some point during the late twentieth century, maybe the early twenty first , the definition of neighborly changed. Neighborliness means giving people their space . And that's a big change in America. That's a phrase I think most of us have heard. Good fences make good neighbors , like having solid boundaries is a good thing, for sure. But what happens when your fence becomes a fortress? That sense of distance Mark is talking about , some of that is actually physical. Here's Sam Presler. He's a fellow at the University of Virginia's Karsh Institute of Democracy and writer of the newsletter Connective Tissue. The study I'm thinking about is from I believe Patrick Sharky at Princeton and I think he starts with kind of time use data starting in early two thousands, maybe two thousand three. And what he sees is a pretty sharp decline in leaving the house starting then. And Bob Putnam, the guy who wrote Bowling Alone, what his hypothesis is for the decline of community in the United States, his primary hypothesis is the introduction of television, right? Because television became competition for a leisure time that was much more frictionless than kind of leaving the house, going to the movies, going to a club, those types of things. Yeah. And if you think about what smartphones, what social media, what streaming services, all of those have done, has made it even more frictionless to stay in our homes and to not leave. And so I think it was already going down before COVID and in the years since people have not necessarily rebounded and left the house. As Sam is saying, you have to leave the house and be around other people to even begin thinking about having relationships in your community. Relationships breed more relationships, right? When I am in a friendship with someone, it kind of greases the wheels a little bit in terms of being involved in community. That friend is probably going to be the primary connector to other friends . And the same thing goes when you're not in relationship, when you're not leaving the house, you bec ome isolated , you become less confident in your ability to interact with others. It's a practice, it's a muscle that's developed . And when we are not in that practice and we're not developing that muscle, it can atrophy. This reminds me a lot of something Katie said when reflecting on her own isolation. I feel like the more isolated we allow ourselves to be, it just can feel really hard to pierce through that bubble . And so we can get really comfortable in our habits of, you know, staying home and watching TV instead of hanging out with people . And I think it can be really tough when you don't have like those third spaces where you can naturally gather and just see people without planning . I think we all are craving that connection , but sometimes it might feel like talking to my neighbor is not going to change how lonely I feel. Katie mentioned not having third spaces. These are places people can go to gather outside the home and outside of work . And the other aspect of that physical distance we have with our neighbors is the disappearance of these third spaces. Here's Sam again. We've seen kind of what I've called like the priv atization of community once more accessible forms of community have declined and what's taken their place have higher financial and geographic barriers to entry. It costs a lot of money to run cafe, to run a gym, to run one of these third places . If you put it in a place where people have fewer financial resources, it's going to be harder to sustain those businesses. And so what we've seen also is kind of this great sorting where we have on one hand , premium third places, so like your cafe where you can get a six or seven dollars latte, or your gym that has a hundred fifty dollars a month membership, whatever that may be. And then in places that are of lower income, you just don't have any third places . And according to Mark, who wrote a book about vanishing neighbor relationships, this distance between ourselves and our neighbors is more than physical. Often when we talk about neighbors, we sort of talk about it in the mister Rogers sense of all being happy, progressive, thoughtful, warm . We're holding hands. We're singing songs. Holding hands, singing songs, being supportive . And there are obligations that come . And I think in many cases people don't want strangers or people who simply are in your life because of physical proximity to have that much purchase on your time. Our cultural proclivity is to want to have more autonomy within our family and more protection against the sort of judgement that might come in neighborly relationships. And Katie realized that this was the soup she was swimming in, but I wanted to know how she got out of it. I wanted to kind of reinvent myself and my story and my whole life and start to get to know neighb ors and start to build friendships as like the central part of my life instead of an afterthought . After the relationship ended, I went to visit my family in Massachusetts while my ex was moving out of the apartment we had shared . And during this time, I had this little ritual that I started doing where I liked to run so I would run to this reservoir a couple miles from my parents' house and when I got there I would pick up a rock from the ground and look out at the reservoir. I sometimes have these like woo woo practices and is a disclaimer , but I would like look out at the water and then close my eyes and for a couple minutes I would visualize like really vividly what was missing from my life that I wanted to rebuild when I got back to DC . And just one of the main images that I would picture so vividly was like talking to neighbors on the street , inviting people into my home, hosting dinner parties, hosting game nights, like having this vibrant life full of people that live right near me in these friendships that would feel very effortless . But getting to that place took a lot of effort after the break. I had a spreadsheet which feels like so embarrassing to say on a podcast , but I did have a spreadsheet. Stay with us . So to get to know her neighbors , Katie had tactics . I got back to DC and I am type A . So I really approached this like a project. I had a spreadsheet which feels like so embarrassing to say on a podcast , but I did have a spreadsheet. There were like multiple tabs to the spreadsheet too . I made a list of like tiny actions that I could literally do from my apartment . So that included like I can just text this person that I haven't spoken to in like three years and be like, Hey, do you still live in DC? Do you want to get coffee? Things like I can host a small dinner with neighbors. But I was still unsure of like the mechanics of it. So I asked her to show me. Let's do like almost like a role play . Okay. , okay I'll be the neighbor. Okay, you be you. Okay Hey, how's it going? Good, how are you doing ? I'm good I feel like I've seen you on this block many times, but I admittedly don't know your name. What's your name? I'm Brittany. What's your name? Katie . So actually I saw you and I wanted to come up to you because I am hosting a little gathering with neighbors and wondered if you'd want to come on Friday . Yeah, I would definitely be interested in that I might be free. Amazing. Well, we could exchange numbers if you want and I'll send you more info. Bet , wow , first of all, how did that feel? And and see you . And this approach , it got results . I went from knowing probably three to four neighbors in my building before I started this whole project to knowing more like twenty to thirty neighbors and then a lot of it was also like neighbors then introducing me to other neighbors that they were friends with and it kind of expanded from there. I would say now I know like forty people in my building like pretty well . But was it all so simple? Did she never get that feeling of being like kind of uncool for asking . I felt that so strongly . Especially having lived in DC for many years , I felt like I have no excuse to feel this lonely and isolated And so I did feel a lot of embarrassment and when I hosted that first dinner with my neighbors , I just felt so anxious in the days leading up to it because I was like, my neighbors think I'm so pathetic because I have no other friends to invite over but them . And like I look back on it and I don't think there's any way they would have known that . And I think actually the way they all received the invite was like, oh my gosh, this is so cool that she's having a neighbor's dinner and I've been wanting to get to know my neighbors too. When everyone showed up I think I realized like, oh wait, they all want this too. We're all like the main character of our inner narrative and everyone else is thinking, I hope these neighbors like me. I hope I make friends here. Like they're not thinking that's so embarrassing that Katie invited us over. What Katie's done here, being able to get vulnerable and ask people to hang out is honestly so impressive to me . I talk to people for a living. I can gab with anyone, but turning that into a deeper relationship , I'm still working on that. And this is actually a big barrier for developing neighbor relationships. It's one that Sam had to think about overcoming when he started a microgrant program to promote gatherings where he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. I didn't invent the idea of a microgrant for neighbor gatherings. There's really cool groups out there . Bost Inon , they do a five hundred dollars microgrant to seven hundred and fifty dollars microgrant for block parties through the city. I have friends who run a group called Warm Cookies of the Revolution who give micrograms of two hundred fifty do andllars to five hundred dollars for civic house parties . I'm drawing on a base of things that have already been done, but you know, I gave out my grands of about a hundred dollars and what makes that work is you're giving people a permission structure, right to invite people over because it could be really scary to invite people over. It's for the person who's like on the sideline and has been wanting to like host something, but they need a little kick in the butt, right? It's like, oh, well, they're going to give me money to do this. It's more of a mental thing than it is an actual resource. No, one hundred dollars is enough to start a little something. You can make something shake with a hundred dollars. Yeah. And so it's that first permission structure. What the hundred dollars also does is it gives a little bit of an accountability structure. It's like, oh, I've been entrusted with this hundred dollars . And so I can't back out now. And so what we found is all the people that we've given Microgsrand to follow through on hosting their gatherings. Wow . The last thing I think is interesting around like these microgrands is there's this question of the next step, right? Like you can bring people together , but it could also always fizzle. The very small design thing we've built in is like what we call a commitment structure where at the end of the gathering, the host just has to say like what's the next step that we want to take together? And what we've seen is like people identify kind of neighborhood improvement projects that they can work on. They say, why don't we host another gathering in three months here? It starts to create the snowball effect for kind of continued interaction. That worked for Katie. That first neighbor dinner she hosted turned another gathering and then another . I really became known as someone who host dinners and gatherings all the time . And there was this one night where a bunch of friends from around my building and in DC at my house for a dinner party . And one friend who didn't live in the building remarked like, Oh my god, it's like you guys live in a college dorm or something and I can't believe you're all such good friends like this . And then you're walking back to your apartments and you're literally like ten feet away . And we would have often when my neighbors come over, we have a joke where it's like get home safe and then they're walking a couple feet . But I just felt like so happy to like I actually have these close, meaningful friendships and it is so easy for us to stay friends because we live like in this same building . I have this really close friend who lives right down the hall , Samuel and I'm really grateful to Samuel showing me how when you're friends with your neighbors , you can just like fill these little moments in your life with meaningful connection where it's like I have fifteen minutes before I need to head out to this event and he'll like invite me over to play guitar for a couple minutes and then it's like all right see you later. And I just in my previous chapters had these like easy friendships that didn't have to be stressful and didn't have to be planned out or putting something on the schedule like months in advance to catch up, but it can just be these little interactions that are like built into your routine. And Katie's not afraid of the knock anymore. In fact, she feels more secure than ever. I have grown to love my neighborhood and my neighbors so deeply and I just I feel a lot safer happier knowing all of them and having them actually know the intimate details of my life instead of just like staying anonymous . I like recently had an experience where I got really sick and my neighbors, Liz and Alex that lived down the hall like just came to my rescue and were helping me take my dog out and make sure I have food and checked in on me. And it just felt like so grounding to know like there are people right down the hall that care about me and I'm not alone . And even like having a community of people that can talk about like an issue going on in the community or in your building and not just being like alone with your own questions and thoughts about what's going on, but having people to kind of like band together with, you realize we're all living here and we all want to feel safe and feel supported and happy and have a good quality of life . And so when you're like a collective of neighbors instead of complete strangers , there's just so much power in that . That idea of neighborly power that Katie's talking about, I learned that this concept has a name collective efficacy. Collective efficacy is interpreted as people's perception of clos eness or connection with their neighbors and the capacity of neighbors to intervene on behalf of their community to reach common goals. That's Roman Pabio, professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta. He studies collective efficacy and health. Collective efficacy is comprised of both social cohesion and social control . The first one , perception of closeness or connection with their neighbors is social cohesion . Think of it as the glue between members of that neighborhood and the capacity of neighbors to intervene on behalf of their community to reach common goals. So that's something along the lines of what was defined as social control. Research has found that the elements of collective efficacy can have real individual benefits. We've seen benefits of social cohes ion. Oh, say more about that. You know, better health mental health outcomes, so decreased likelihood of depression and anxiety . We've seen that social cohesion could lead to better physical outcomes. For example, when you're feeling more safe in your neighborhood , then you're more likely to, you know, go out, go for a walk, you know, exercise outside . That's interesting. I mean, it's like you might join a run club. Maybe you'll take your dog out more than you might if you live someplace else or like I live not too far from like a community garden. You might be more likely to go hang around there or get a plot or something like that. Right . But the real big social benefit of also having social control or the existence of norms and the power that gives neighbors agency is the ability to solve problems collect ively. And it's definitely not a given for every neighborhood. Roman co authored a big study in Boston studying what helps or hurts collective efficacy. What was most associated with low collective efficacy , instability . And that is a class issue. So when you have populations of instability, people are, you know, they're not living in the same spot. If people are constantly moving in and out of your neighborhood, it's very hard to make those long term connections When housing rent goes up, people can't afford it, so they have to leave, right? So some sort of stable , you know, public housing, affordable housing , these things have been advocated for in order to decrease social fragmentation . Katie talked about feeling safer now in the place she lives, but developing that trust isn't always easy , especially when social fragmentation is already at play. Here's Sam again . When you have these conversations, there's a way in which it could become seen as like a middle class or upper middle class lifestyle issue and like, oh just throw a block party. Just bring your neighbors together. And I think that assumes some baseline of interpersonal trust that's already there and interpersonal interaction that's already there. And what we do see is that in communities that have higher poverty, higher crime, it's a lot harder to get to that starting point because I have a friend he runs a group in Birmingham, Alabama called Renew Birmingham, his name's Jerry Jones, and he moved into the most high crime neighborhood in Birmingham. And he talks about like what happens when there's a drug dealer that posts up on the block and like how people kind of go into their houses and leave their porches because of this kind of sense of fear. It's not as easy as just throwing the block party because is that block party going to be safe? It's not that simple . The other side of it though is like I, think also in , let's say, higher income communities there's a sense of like what it means to be a good neighbor sometimes isn't so much the Mr Rogers view of hospitality and view of welcoming. It's a good neighbor is someone who minds their own business and we kind of all stay within our little homes and our little platoons . You know, we don't see the well being of our neighbors as tied to our well being. You brought up so many good points, and I want to touch back on something that you've hit on that also to me seems like, I don't know, it's one of the bigger questions that I have about how people connect with their neighbors. Like I think it's true that America is still very segregated both by race and by class. It affects pretty much how all Americans live, I think, to a certain degree . When we're talking about neighbor relationships , are they generally between people of similar backgrounds and what happens when they're not ? Our neighbor relationships are going to be contingent upon who our neighbors are . And who our neighbors are has become much more sorted by class and income over the last fifty plus years . The kind of reality is that we have more high income neighborhoods and more low income neighborhoods and fewer mixed income cross class neighborhoods. And those mixed income cross class neighborhoods aren't just bridging class, they're bridging by race, they're bridging by all these other areas . And so our neighbor relationships are, I believe, downstream of the sorting of our neighborhoods. And I mean, that leads me to think about how important building more cross class mixed income neighborhoods are for the potential of undoing some of the sorting. This might This might undo some of the stratification of third spaces. People paying higher taxes in mixed income neighborhoods could fund better parks, libraries, public programs for everyone. There's also some evidence that mixed income neighborhoods can alleviate some of the effects of poverty for low income residents. But for those living in areas of more concentrated poverty , Sant told me that while it might be harder to get to a place of trust and to that place of collective power , it can still be done . In some ways, it's hard to imagine people of different backgrounds coming together , within neighborhoods or across them, but there are communities where we've seen this happen . I thought a lot about the neighbors who banded together in Minneapolis and other cities who were targeted by the Department of Homeland Security to try to keep their fellow neighbors from getting picked up or harassed by or killed by ICE agents . When I brought that example to Sam , he said this What brings people together is oftentimes a shared interest or a shared challenge . And when you can feel like you're working with people near you to solve a problem that's affecting all of you , that gives you the foundation for building relationships through those shared projects. And I think particularly when we talk about, you know, what's been most effective in places that aren't operating on the foundation of high resources , existing, high interpersonal relationships, existing high trust, it's oftentimes addressing those shared problems. I think about my friend Teiju Revolution, he has this organization called Gather four , and he organizes in the housing projects in Brownsville in Brooklyn. And he's just this wonderful, like joyful man. And he's like, Oh, I'm just going to bring these neighbors together and it's going to be so wonderful . And very few people were interested in doing that. And then he started having the neighbors canvass one another of what their needs were. And the big thing that came up was that NICHA New York City Housing Authority hadn't fixed repairs in these buildings for thirty years . And so what he did was he brought the neighbors together and they just canvassed all their neighbors to identify all the repairs they had . They documented it. And they go to and this is the brilliance of the plan. They go to Nasha and they say, guys , we're so excited. We're going to plan a party for you in five months to celebrate the repairs that you're making. We're going to have balloons and we're going to have food and we're inviting the local news and it's gonna be amazing . And we're so excited to see you there . And what happened after thirty years of not having those repairs made . Nice made those repairs. Really? That win, that victory of solving a shared problem brought the neighbors closer together for like deeper interpersonal relationships and deeper interpersonal organizing in a time of challenge or in a time of threat, you can build relationships and solidarity that last beyond that moment of addressing shared need. I wanted to know what Sam thought we needed to do to get back to a place of better neighbor relationships , beyond the practical stuff of working on a shared problem or finding an excuse to have a party. Here's what he said. I think there's also a cultural element of this, right? I think part of this is a cultural shift that involves recovering a sense of what it means to be a good neighbor, recovering a sense of hospitality, recovering a sense of welcoming. And I think that can sound polyanish, but like it's also just recognizing that like our lives are better when they are shared with the people that are proximate to us and we see that our neighbors and our community members are part of a shared destiny with us . And so we then see ourselves as inviting them in and being invited in to that shared project . As for Katie, she sees her project still going . I'm still in the process of continuing to make friends and build these connections, but I hope for myself that I always maintain this effort of knowing neighbors and making it such a central part of my life because it's been the greatest gift truly. Oh my god, Katie, I need to hear I needed to hear this at the beginning of the summer. You've inspired me , you've inspired me. This year is gonna be the year that me and my husband go beyond just like saying hello and chatting and actually invite our neighbors over to hang with us in our backyard. Yeah , I really appreciate this, Katie, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you. It's been so much fun. That was Katie Monte Leone, producer at NPR's Ted Radio Hour. This episode of It's Vitamin was produced by Liam McBain. This episode was edited by Lina Potuck. Engineering support came from David Greenberg. Our supervising producer is Sheriff Vincent. Our executive producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VPA programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right, that's all for this episode of It's Bit Amin from NPR. I'm Brittany Luis. Talk soon