In 2023, the US Surgeon General announced that social isolation is more deadly than smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.¹ Phones got the blame. Social media got blamed. The collapse of human decency and manners got the blame. Yet, nobody looked at the road.
But maybe we should?
Two Kinds of Streets
Older American neighbourhoods were built on grids - straight, connected streets where you could walk to a shop, a park, or a neighbour’s house without any particular effort. Then after World War II, some foolish rando decided that what people really wanted was to live at the end of a winding road, tucked behind three other winding roads, a good fifteen-minute drive from anything useful.² How thrilling. That design is called curvilinear. It is very popular. It is also, as researchers are increasingly finding, kind of a disaster.
The Problem
Curvilinear suburbs separate homes from shops, parks, and pretty much everything else through a combination of zoning laws and sheer distance.³ The assumption baked into the design is that everyone has a car and is happy to use it constantly. For getting groceries, sure. For accidentally running into your neighbour and having a five-minute conversation that makes both of you feel slightly more like humans, less ideal.
Those small, unplanned interactions turn out to matter enormously. Researchers have found that walkable neighbourhoods build informal social trust almost automatically.⁴ You pass someone on the pavement. You nod. Eventually you know their name. It sounds unimportant. Think again.
Who Actually Pays for This
The people most hurt by car-dependent design are the ones who don’t have cars: kids, teenagers, elderly residents, young families stretched across one vehicle. Research confirms that traditional neighbourhoods with grid streets offer significantly better walking and cycling access to community spaces than their curvilinear counterparts.⁵ A middle schooler who wants to meet friends at a coffee shop is simply out of luck if there’s no safe way to get there on foot.
Some suburbs try to patch this with Homeowners Associations (HOAs) - organised events, shared amenities, community newsletters slid under doors. Research from Duke University and the University of Calgary suggests HOAs mostly generate tension and paperwork, with restrictions on large gatherings actively undermining the community bonds they claim to foster.⁶ Surprising to no one.
The Fix
You don’t need to tear anything down. A footpath connecting a neighbourhood to the nearest park or A pedestrian crossing over an arterial road. A sidewalk that goes just somewhere. These are not radical infrastructure proposals, just the basic conditions under which people can exist near each other without a vehicle as an intermediary. Zoning reforms allowing small commercial spaces closer to residential areas would also help, though anyone who has sat through a city council meeting knows those move slowly.⁷
The Bottom Line
Fifty-five percent of Americans say they’d prefer a bigger house far from amenities over a smaller one close to everything.⁸ That’s a reasonable preference. It just doesn’t have to mean total social severance.
Somewhere along the way, we built neighbourhoods optimised for privacy and called it community. The loneliness epidemic is, in part, the receipt.
¹ Office of the Surgeon General of the United States, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023), 25.
² Hildebrand W. Frey, Paul Baggoley, Tony Edwards, and Kevin Leyden, “Suburbs Reconsidered: Form, Mobility and Sustainability,” Built Environment 32, no. 3 (2006): 255.
³ Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, “Neighborhoods and Suburbs,” Design Quarterly, no. 164 (1995): 10–11.
⁴ XiaoHang Liu and Julia Griswold, “Pedestrian Volume Modeling: A Case Study of San Francisco,” Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 71 (2009): 164.
⁵ Mika Moran, J. Aaron Hipp, Adina R. Eisenstadt, and Orna Baron-Epel, “Do Children Walk Where They Bike? Exploring Built Environment Correlates of Children’s Walking and Bicycling,” Journal of Transport and Land Use 9, no. 2 (2016): 48.
⁶ Martin Ruef and Seok-Woo Kwon, “Neighborhood Associations and Social Capital,” Social Forces 95, no. 1 (2016): 164.
⁷ Kevin M. Leyden, “Social Capital and the Built Environment,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 9 (2003): 1546.
⁸ Ted Van Green, “Most in U.S. Prefer Big Houses, Even If Amenities Are Farther Away,” Pew Research Center, August 2, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/02/most-in-u-s-prefer-big-houses-even-if-amenities-are-farther-away/.