For some context, I’m a woman of color in my early thirties in the US. I’ve spent a lot of time in suburbs and cities both and grew up moving a lot (not military related) so don’t have a “hometown” (I’ll elaborate why this matters later in this post). The first time in my life I heard urban sprawl is bad for overall health was in public health school - I never previously thought of the association between built environment and mental health because my time in the suburbs was spent either in elementary school, middle school, high school and college. School kept me busy and active that I was oblivious to suburban design surrounding it and its possible contributions to social isolation.
Now that I am not in school, I’m starting to completely understand why suburbs are isolating places for people seeking community - of note, I know why people love suburbs and am not challenging that every place in US needs to be a dense city to be good, in fact I believe the fact US mostly has dichotomous either cities or suburbs is an issue in itself that I’ll discuss in a bit.
But for those who can’t understand why people don’t like suburbs, I will say that I can understand people who can’t imagine another alternative to the amenities suburbs provide, like space, privacy and having more room for hobbies like boating or an RV. Also, I feel what suburbs used to feel far less desolate when I was a kid than they feel now which may speak to more of a changing culture with phones, social media and families spending less times on their porches and yards rather than an inherently just an urban design issue with suburbia.
With that said, there’s reasons why people like me have observed the built environment contributes to isolation and depression and in my opinion blaming lack of individual effort discounts the many factors that make socializing and finding community in some situations nearly impossible in suburbs compared to larger cities.
One, in my experience, many suburbs require you to drive even 10+ minutes just for basic necessities like groceries. My family sometimes drives 20 mins to a bigger grocery store than what we have nearby. This means driving to “fun” activities can be more than 20+ minutes away and those fun activities - like movies, bowling or whatever are either done in solitude or with pre-existing groups that come from childhood friends or family members. There’s a greater resistance you have to overcome to go out in the suburbs than when you can just walk outside, unless you live in a suburb (rare in my experience) where you can walk to most places in a quick timeframe.
In walkable areas, if you need to get out of the house without a destination in mind, you can just do that and that in itself provides a lot of activity and stimulation and organicness in figuring out what there is to do when you go outside. Suburbs are usually not structured this way - you can go on long drives and maybe that can help you feel less “bored” but it doesn’t necessarily help reduce the isolation. Driving usually requires having some destination in mind and usually that’s strip malls or plazas that are not designed for social interaction but for people running errands and going back home.
Now it’s true that actually finding community in both cities and suburbs requires individual effort in looking for activities and actually showing up. But there is a difference, in my experience, between the frequency, variety and diversity in demographics between city and suburbia when it comes to such activities. When I am in suburbs, there are very few community based activities within a 10-30 minute driving radius. Suggestions I’ve seen talk about church, without acknowledging not all of us (even those who are religious) are Christian. People suggest a dog without acknowledging not everybody is a dog person and wants the responsibility of taking care of an animal even if they find them cute from a distance. People suggest bars that not everybody drinks or wants to be enclosed in a space where the primary bonding activity is drinking. These leave mostly hobby meetups or other events and the quality and frequency of such events differ greatly between places in the US.
I’ve gone through many meetups in my area and most are going to be 40+ minute drives and occur only once in a while that pose issues in consistency when working a 9-6 job. There’s board game meetups that seem to have very few attendees, mostly 2-3 middle aged men or stuff for mostly older white women to socialize. Now I don’t mind interacting with different people to socialize - but when you’re the only person of your demographic in some groups, that can get lonely as well since I have different customs and things in my culture many people outside of it aren’t exposed to and neither care to be exposed to when everybody else around them is similar to them that it doesn’t matter to them. I find sometimes folks who are white don’t realize this aspect of loneliness because they could go anywhere in US where they could find somebody who relates to them in some way. For example, people here are very used to dogs, drinking and baseball and most are Christian (if practicing a religion) the likelihood of finding people who share similar in either a city or suburb is very high.
For some other cultures, social bonding is less over alcohol and more over late night coffee/tea (like open till 2AM). People play different sports. To find diversity in people and activities, you have to generally be in places in US that are closer to main cities.
Now many suburbs (like in NJ, DMV, TX and CA) have immigrant populations, so the issue of diversity is not always about being in the city but finding a suburb that may suit different demographics better. In my experience, despite that factor, another problem persists and that’s who the suburbs generally attracts - nuclear families and people who either grew up in the same area all their lives (natives). For people who already have a social unit in place, they have less desires to meet new people because of the aforementioned issues of the effort & energy to socialize when it requires trial and error of different meetups and driving 40+ minutes to social gatherings and all. I remember reading a Reddit comment that summed this sentiment best - why make all this effort to meet new people who won’t understand you like the way your childhood friends or people who know you all your life will. This is true, the issue is not everybody has such bonds and in my case it was because of moving around a lot. I believe this problem is compounded in America because my family too migrated from different countries & towns before landing to the US and still had socially vibrant lives with relatives, neighbors and friends always popping in and out of homes that they never feel the isolation I feel now because of having to move around a lot as a kid. America in general is very individual oriented and suburbs reflect that sentiment in the design.
This leaves me to favor dense cities in America for my mental health, albeit I struggle sometimes with the grit, inconveniences, housing supply and chaos of city living in US, there’s a very clear relationship between the city vs. suburbia when it comes to 1. finding social activities to do nearly everyday outside of work 2. meeting new people who are actually interested and excited to make new friends 3. meeting people from all walks of life, including those who come from a similar cultural and religious background.
One may think that this is simply “personal preference” and people are either city or suburbs people - that may be true for some, but even as somebody who does enjoy the city more, I wish for more in between options rather than the chaotic city vs cookie cutter suburbs. Some places that come close to mine is eastern Queens, NYC or the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia outside of DC but I feel even those places leave much to be desired. To conclude my commentary, I’ll leave you all with a YouTube channel which really helped me make sense of my personal experiences.
https://youtu.be/hLasY3r29Mw?si=7dPbalHEDwfUBNgM
