A UK perspective: over the past decade there has been an enormous growth in the buy-to-let market and the UK is now overun by the worst type of property owner: the buy-to-let (buy-to-rent) landlord or "property investor". They treat housing as a pure profit-making exercise. When more and more homes in your area get bought by property investors and buy-to-let landlords it can have a detrimental effect (I've seen it happen to my street). The neighbourhood feels more anonymous as people come and go more frequently. Neither the absentee landlord or the tenants have a commitment to the area. If buy-to-let comes to dominate a neighbourhood, can you ever build a community around such a neighbourhood?
Buy-to-let is rampant in the UK. Other European countries sensibly restrict it's growth or they enact strict tenancy laws to deter the worst type of buy-to-let landord (UK laws are weighted in favour of landlords). In the UK, we've lost any sense that housing has a social component.
I write a blog about housing in the UK and wrote about this topic five years ago. Depressingly, the situation is even worse today.
Are you suggesting that people shouldn't have the flexibility to move easily if they get a new job/partner or have a change in circumstances? That's what happens if every home must be owner-occupied and there isn't a liquid rental market.
I moved to China a few years ago. I am glad that I was able to let my flat (to responsible tenants who have paid the rent on time for >3 years) and that I was able to rent an apartment in Beijing. Selling my flat in London and buying one on Beijing would have been impossible and, even if it had been possible, why should I invest in a property in Beijing just because I want to live here for a few years? And why should I sell my flat in London?
The economic middle road is to penalize the externality. If a community is concerned about non-resident property owners, they might consider taxing them at a higher rate and longer-term full-time residents at a lower rate. I don't know if there's anywhere that actually does this, however.
Buy-to-let is penalized because rental income is taxable. (As a thought experiment just consider the extra income tax liability if two owner-occupiers with identical houses started renting from each other).
This is on top of the fact that CGT applies to non primary residences in the UK and other countries (as rahimnathwani mentioned).
In the US, the government already heavily subsidizes home ownership via the mortgage-interest tax deduction[0]. From Wikipedia, it seems that similar programs exist worldwide as well[1]
In the UK, there is no capital gains tax (CGT) on the sale of your 'principal private residence', i.e. the place where you live. So, yes, non-resident property owners are already taxed differently.
CGT only applies on the sale of the property. As the property value rises, buy-to-let landlords will often use the equity generated to leverage another loan on another buy-to-let property, rather than sell the first property. So as they keep on collecting properties, they're not paying CGT because they aren't selling.
Especially as CGT is typically lower than income tax, so investors would prefer capital gains over rental profit. (And if their rentals are generating profit, might be tempted to buy more rentals that are not profitable but rising in capital value, so that their rental profit is lower but capital gains are higher).
You hear stories of investors who keep on acquiring and end up with dozens of buy-to-let properties and are leveraged up to the hilt.
Bradford & Bingley, which was the UK's buy-to-let mortgage specialist, was particularly hard hit by the GFC.
If UK taxes work like US taxes, then the community in question doesn't capture this externality (it goes to the state/Feds), so that's small comfort to them.
"The City of Philadelphia is offering a new tax relief program for homeowners called the Homestead Exemption, which will reduce the taxable assessed value used for calculation of homeowners’ Real Estate Tax bills by $30,000 (exemption amount may be subject to change) starting in Tax Year 2014. A person must simply own their home and live in it as their primary residence."
I don't think he is suggesting that. The fact is that many people under 40 are priced out of the market. 20 years ago, a graduate could easily buy a flat or house, rates of owner occupation were higher, and we still had the option to rent. This tended to suit people at the start of their careers, when they were more likely to move for work. After a certain age, you start wanting to settle somewhere.
Your parent post is not talking about some schmuck moving abroad for a few years. He is talking about the type of person who buys up property with the sole intention of making money by renting it off to others.
Oh, I can't prove anything, but to explain what I mean a little better, renting the first is a much more natural progression. Like a hermit crab moving up in shell sizes. You rent the first property as a consequence of buying a new house, rather than as the entire purpose of the second purchase.
I think we would be better off with more businesses and less private landlords in the UK. The current situation doesn't work very well for many tenants.
How do you define "business"? BtL landlords with a property portfolio are businesses.
Excluding those there are very few businesses that rent homes. The few that exist work at the lower end renting social housing.
There have been severe criticisms of business-landlords. I'm trying to find some cites but business landlords have been implicated in poor maintainence, leading to deaths from carbon monoxide.
Letting agents don't own the properties, they just handle the details for the landlords.
Not all but many private landlords can be fickle, turfing you out on a whim, getting into the business without realising the costs, basically having an amateur attitude to the endeavour.
In suburbs of Boston this is a very common thing. They are "all cash buyers" and often beat out regular folk who want to buy a home via a mortgage.
Boston's extensive housing development limits enable this behavior; in a functioning market we'd see supply rise to meet demand. See Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO) for more.
> in a functioning market we'd see supply rise to meet demand
So, tear down existing buildings to build higher, dig more basements, or subdivide existing properties? Because you can't assume there's always free land to build new buildings on.
Even if you assume the city is in the middle of a desert and there's essentially infinite room to grow horizontally, eventually you lose the reason people came to the city in the first place: The city itself, which you aren't really living in if you're commuting from a neighborhood more than an hour away from the city proper, or the city before it added on a dozen outlying regions.
In Australia, investment residential property is seen as almost an inalienable right and a cultural norm.
I've lived in the UK and opinions there vary a lot. In London, it doesn't really have a negative connotation that I can recall. In rural parts, it tends to be viewed very negatively. I seem to remember reading a story about anger against "Londoners" driving up local property prices (with weekend homes) resulting in someone burning one down.
Weekend homes are a different beast of course but the anger comes from basically the same place: the perception that "outsiders" are making housing unaffordable for "locals".
This seems to be a very Luddite view. If it weren't for people letting out property rental homes wouldn't exist outside of, say, council-run rental buildings. I don't see that as a good thing.
Some places have tackled this problem with regulation eg making it difficult for foreigners to buy real estate or punitive capital gains taxes on short-term property sales like in Switzerland.
In NYC we have a different problem: rich people parking money in real estate leading to what are known as "ghost buildings". This is mainly a Manhattan issue.
Historically NYC had rent control that ended in the early 70s (meaning no new rent control leases were issued, existing ones remained while the tenants remained). Reforms were enacted to allow tenants to buy their apartments leading to the "coop", which accounts for the vast majority of Manhattan apartments.
A coop is an interesting beast. Technically you own shares in the coop. The coop owns the building. Your shares entitle you to reside in a given apartment. You must comply with the coop's rules. Coops are typically for primary residences and, to a lesser extent, pied-a-terres.
You can sublet coops you own in some cases but it tends to be pretty restrictive (eg only for 2 years out of every 5 and you have to own it for at least 2 years).
The effect of this is that coops tend to have very high occupancy rates (in real terms) and relatively low turnover.
Most new builds are condos, where you own your property outright and are a member of an HOA (Home Owners Association). Buying a coop will involve getting approval by the board, which can place wildly varying limits on mortgage amounts, income to debt ratios, requiring personal and professional references and so on. Condos however require only finance approval (the building has a right of first refusal).
So a lot of condos are owned by wealthy people who might visit for a few days a year if at all. I don't think this ghost building phenomenon is healthy for a community and is certainly a problem if all construction falls into that category.
Buy-to-let isn't the problem here. Unchecked buy-to-let might well be. Banning it is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A more nuanced scheme might give tax abatements for owner-occupied properties in the coop model. Or put quotes on investment property in a given area. You can even create markets for such things eg NYC has a market for "air rights" above buildings to allow really tall buildings.
As far as "crappy" rental property goes, that's pretty much rental property all over.
>Weekend homes are a different beast of course but the anger comes from basically the same place: the perception that "outsiders" are making housing unaffordable for "locals".
So in parts of England, Cornwall for example, the house prices are over ten times the average local wage (due to Londoners buying them up as holiday homes). I don't see how that can be viewed as a positive thing.
Good to see they finally point the finger at what is fairly certainly the culprit: the automobile.
When i lived in NYC, i knew most of my neighbors. Why? because we literally bumped into each other coming in and out of the building. When you have a common destination (subway, bus, market, etc), it's nice to have someone to chat with, but when your commute is in an automobile, you never get a chance to ask. Living room, garage, automobile, parking lot, destination.
With automobiles, there is no opportunity to, say, bump into your neighbor and ask, and then follow up with quickly knocking on your neighbor's door to see if they are still interested in joining you. Without those quick opportunities, relationships cannot form. Without relationships forming, it's culturally awkward to ask directly.
The single occupancy automobile, and the decentralized suburbia that formed around it are very probably central to many of the ills detailed in the article.
My suburban neighborhood consists of single family homes on roughly quarter-acre lots. I "bump in" to my neighbors a lot when we're in our front yards. But I hate the "stop and chat", so when I see a neighbor outside I employ the following strategies to avoid neighbor contact:
- Driving into the garage and lowering the garage door even when I really wanted to park in the driveway
- Peeking through blinds to see when my neighbors go back inside
- Getting into my SUV from the passenger side so they can't see me through the smoked glass
That's kind of pathological. I also don't care for ad-hoc social interactions, but you can learn a few routines to manage them, like wave but don't engage, or greet but say you had a long day and you'd prefer to talk later. It's probably not worth seeing a therapist over, but a little work on dealing with the small talk is much less stressful than the anxiety of skulking around hiding from eye contact. If you can't get past this then you should see a therapist, letting it stress you that much is unhealthy.
Why do you hate chatting? I can understand if one of your neighbors is annoying, but my point is that if you weren't driving, you'd certainly know more than just the annoying one next door, and you almost certainly get a kick out of dogging him with the person on the other side of his house.
If not, hey, there's always one or two annoying neighbors, and if you can't find them, it's probably you.
you almost certainly get a kick out of dogging him with the person on the other side of his house
Well no, not everyone enjoys that kind of behavior. To me, it's one of the repellants in neighbor relations. I'm happy to help them out, but that kind of shit talk is poisonous.
I really don't know! I just get this deeply uncomfortable feeling when I see that I'm going to have to have some kind of unplanned interaction with them. I'm not a terribly shy person, there's just something about the neighbor encounter.
It's because you don't know them well enough. Or maybe because you haven't been "formally introduced". This makes you nervous of the impact that an accidental disclosure of information might have.
Invite them around for a BBQ (if you're American).
Even better, if you notice one of them having a minor problem, offer to help with it.
When I worked a few months in Silicon Valley, I noticed something similar there:
There's a McDonalds in an area dominated by software and engineering companies. At lunch, people would go through the drive-thru, park in the McDonalds' parking lot, and eat in their cars. The parking lot was full; the large dining area inside was usually empty.
The saddest part is that I myself started doing the same thing after a while. Although Silicon Valley is the center of the universe for my profession, I found that it is also a lonely experience compared to other cities/countries.
Where in NYC? I find it really varies. At present in Bushwick, none of my neighbors talk or even make eye contact in the hallways, it is a pretty strange social situation. It is in pretty stark contrast to when I lived in Park Slope, where I would run into people in local bars, etc.
Yes, I live next to Prospect Park and I know faces of most of my neighbors (at least in the same 4-story building), and regularly 'socially interact' with some of them.
High density is one of the principal things I like about proper cities (like NYC or London or Moscow).
During my 7-year stay in Singapore (a city with very low car ownership and where almost everybody commutes with the public transport) - neighbours don't typically chat either. People commutes at different time, and people who wait in bus stops or train stations usually prefer their gadgets/phones/iPads to talking to strangers
Unfortunately, you cannot now fix it by removing the automobile. Now, even when you bump into people, you don't have a conversation, because they're on their headphones or texting on their phone or whatever. Nobody's available to talk to, even if you would be willing to do so.
When I see people standing with their head down, cradling their device in their hand, I imagine Cthulu's tentacles reaching up from the device, sucking their souls out.
Yes, you can. If everyone is walking to a centralized transit location, then those that would like to know each other will easily identify themselves. Catch the bus at 8AM? You'll soon learn who else is walking that route. Headphones or not, human interaction isn't that awkward. Even if you never talk in that context, it only takes one out-of-context interaction to end that. At a coffee shop: "hey, don't we walk the same route from the metro every day?" or "Didn't i see you at the farmers market on Thursday?"
To know people locally, you need to live locally. If getting dinner involves a commute, then you're never going to meet people. It takes more than one or two instances to get past the earbuds. Remove the automobile and immediately you're seeing the same people dozens of times a week.
When I used to take public transport to work, I'd see lots of the same people every day but never spoke to any of them. They didn't speak to each other either.
It's quite the paradox that humans are incredibly dependent on social interaction, but we would rather avoid contact because we are afraid of the what consequences it might have on our life.
My entire adult life, I haven't known any of my neighbors, until recently.
One day about 8 months ago, we got a note on the door from new neighbors. They were having a "floor party" and invited everyone on the floor to their place.
Almost everyone on the floor, reluctantly went to the party expecting it to be awkward. We all ended up drunk and hanging out until 2 am. Turns out, pretty much everyone on the floor was a 20-30 something couple.
Flash forward to last night, we all had dinner together on the roof, and celebrated someones birthday. I'm close friends with a few of them.
Point is, someone just has to take the initiative. I'm now embarrassed I didn't do it sooner, as I'd live here for 3 years.
To me, this is the key - someone has to take the initiative. Once you realize that everyone is in the same boat; being that person can be uncomfortable but incredibly rewarding. Invite everyone over. Someone has to do it, and everyone else will be grateful.
I live in a newish neighbourhood. There were about 8 households that moved in within the same 2 months. One couple decided to have a get-together and put flyers in mailboxes (in January in Canada). 10 years later, some of the people I met that night have become my best friends. The folks that took the initiative are long gone, but what they did for the neighbourhood with that one leaflet has had a real impact.
Communities, rife as they were with gossip, ostracism and superstitious cruelty, were always based on mutual need, not on acting out some supposedly gene-based pantomime. I daresay when the next drought or plague comes along I will get to know my neighbours and we'll pull together for mutual support.
>Communities, rife as they were with gossip, ostracism and superstitious cruelty, were always based on mutual need
To counter your easy dismissal I'd say modern individuals, rife as they are with selfiness, consumerism, lack of empathy and of time to connect to their neighborhood, are mostly basing their circles on career paths and personal interests, and other people being their cultural split image.
How is my dismissal 'easy'? I haven't heard it from anyone else and it acknowledges an unpleasant truth. What I dismiss are sentimental media ideas about 'community' which are all too common.
What both arbitrary socialising and consumerism have in common is that they are focused on selves whereas truly important activity primarily relates to abstract ideas. It is ideas that create the solutions to local problems.
Btw, none of this is inconsistent with a smile and a nod to people you see about you in daily life! And mingling with new people if one feels lonely.
Those ideas about community aren't just sentimental, they're reflections of real human needs. Humans value community to a tremendous degree, shaped by evolutionary pressures evolving from our tribal roots. We want to feel part of a larger group, whether it is our family, neighborhood, city, company or country. This isn't a relationship born out of "creating solutions," it independently nourishes an innate emotional need.
Oh, c'mon, the word "community" is thrown around willy nilly nowadays. Every day I read something about the "tadpole-owning community" or whatnot.
It could be the other way around: we are born into families and nations and therefore we post-hoc accept and value them.
We can't wait to leave and get away to the big city and then, eventually, from time to time, we yearn to return home. Not due to some innate preference or unexplained genetic mechanism but simply because that's how we grew up.
However, few are willing to give up their new-found freedoms for a circumscribed tribal existence. Which doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't honour our pasts.
Honest question - why would you wait until the next draught or plague to get to know your neighbors well? Why not start getting to know them today, before you "need" them?
Honest question - why is it considered so inherently important to spend time with your neighbors? I don't understand why I'm supposed to have a natural connection to certain individuals just because we chose to live in the same area. If my social circle consists of people who don't happen to live on my street, is that so bad? We don't really need to worry about having someone to come check up on us from next door because modern communication has extended our reach far beyond our own street.
I've never really been comfortable getting to know my neighbors. I feel like they see and hear too much about my private life as it is, it's actually awkward for me to see my neighbors.
You have time and have nothing better to do with it than to kill it? My condolences. Try having kids; it rids you of free time quite well! :)
Really, with current online life, people have contact less with random strangers and more with like-minded or otherwise interesting individuals. If in an [abstract] countryside you have to talk to you neighbors because there's no one else around, on the Internet the choice is wider.
OTOH your neighbors may be nice and interesting people; some of my neighbors are. Also you might have some local common interest, or could e.g. lend power tools or kitchen utensils to each other sometimes.
It's not about staring at the screen. It's about using that screen to contact your friends who live beyond your street to come over and sit around your fire.
People forget that 100 years ago that wasn't really an option.
You really don't see the benefit in being social be to the people around you? It doesn't have to have an intimate relationship.
Do you just ignore the people you work with as well for similar reasons?
OK, one reason off the top of my head. Say something suspicions is going on outside your flat. Someone that could be checking out your house wanting to break in. A friendly neighbor may go up and ask in a non threatening way if you were expecting to see John in just now, and could he take a message for you. Ignore your neighbor to the point he doesn't even know your name, and guess what. He won't give a shit. Which scenario is more likely to get your place broken into?
> why is it considered so inherently important to spend time with your neighbors?
It's propaganda disseminated by unhappy single women. :) I said it that way because not all single women are unhappy -- some prefer being alone, just as some men do. Recent statistics tell us that almost 1/2 of Americans are single, and they're about to become an absolute majority.
> Why not start getting to know them today, before you "need" them?
Maybe they're completely boring. Maybe the person under discussion prefers being alone unless and until the entire neighborhood is going up in smoke. It's not as though large groups of people are what nature has in mind, regardless of environmental and biological changes -- evolution doesn't work that way.
About 1/2 of Americans are now single. Is this a disease, or a result of personal preferences, by people who tried the alternatives and then made the least objectionable choice?
I wish my neighbours well, but for me socialising is a distraction from work and family. Those are my contribution to the (wider) community. Besides, I have trouble enough keeping up with relatives and schoolmates without introducing new, geographically-oriented relationships.
I agree with coldtea. Our consumerison is why it we get isolated. What is intresting, tendencys in DE show that people go back in the cities for shopping (it's more socializing).
http://www.presseportal.de/pm/8664/2804458/innenstadt-bleibt...
Maybe when our kids getting in adolescence find that this is the way to be diffrent than us.
Good Practise:
Start greeting people when you are in your neighbourhood. That's what I did. I got very fast in contact with above-, below my floor and people around in that block. We had big times (even with the very old folks!). Friendliness and courage (to do so) is the key to start a relationship. The cause of the problem is our missing culture (even neighbourhood parties) to get connectd.
g start flash-mobs!
I'm not a consumerist. Nor do I suffer from social anxiety. Who are you talking to, and giving advice to? Nothing in your comment addresses any of my points. Why not engage -- otherwise you remain 'isolated', surely?
The sociologist describes the community response to the floods as
"the overwhelming message that flowed from events like the
floods in Queensland and Victoria last year was one of neighbours,
friends and even strangers rallying to assist flooded residents in
their hour of need
As the waters rose, neighbours banded together to sandbag each others’
homes and move possessions to higher ground. Once they receded,
information, food, homes and equipment were freely shared. Observers
lauded the spirit of community that prevailed.
So, why are neighbours still there when needed even if their noise,
smells and habits are cause for complaint the rest of the time?"
But what does Brian Bethune summarise the article as?
"An Australian sociologist investigating community responses in the
wake of the 2011 floods in Queensland found relations in “a precarious
balance”; neighbours were hesitant to intrude even in emergencies—leading
the scholar to conclude that “we are less likely than ever to know” our
neighbours."
Which is quite the opposite. The sociologist was investigating the contrast -- a tremendous community response in an emergency, when we're more private than ever the rest of the time. But Brian Bethune make it sound like she was bemoaning a poor community response to an emergency.
I don't think the point of the article is to go and become "pinky swear" friends of your neighbors (which seems to me that most comments here are alluding to). I just don't get the aversion of neighbors in the Western world. Sure there are annoying neighbors, but if everyone claims that their neighbor is annoying (with whatever criteria that may be) isn't there something wrong with you?
Having an active social life is not the same as having meaningful relationships with people (NOT activity partners: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7632094).
This happens in condominiums. Condominiums were originally intended to be owner-occupied dwellings. Once the owner moves out without selling and rents the unit, things go awry. That's why, as written, most condo agreements are very burdensome upon owners who try to rent (high deposits for rental, long leases required, background checks to condo owners' association, etc).
This can be corrected in the case of condominiums by adding a clause to the condominium agreement mandating that owners occupy the unit and disallowing rentals. Perhaps, in the case of a neighborhood association, the same restriction could be applied (but not likely at any time other than the creation of the neighborhood).
To me, this seems to ring true - growing up I knew our neighbours (and so did my parents), but now I can't name any of my neighbours. The problem seems to me to be one of a disconnect, or different priorities: I have hobbies, things I love to do, and as far as I know (because I don't know my neighbours), my neighbours don't share in those interests. Given a choice between spending time with people I have nothing in common with (besides geographical location) and pursuing my preferred activities, I choose the latter. This is also why I don't know many of my co-workers very well.
A quote from the article: "We have evolved for it, to the extent that those surrounded by a tight-knit group of friends who regularly gather to eat—and, crucially, gossip—live an average of 15 years longer than loners."
A = alive 15 years longer than the average.
B = meets friends and gossips.
The claim, made by a psychologist (of course), fails to take into account the fact that correlation doesn't equal causation. It may be that some unexamined factor C causes people to (B) meet and gossip, and (A) live longer as well. Meaning before we change our lifestyle with the expectation of a longer life, we should first do some actual science.
> I'm far from an expert on the topic, but from what I read, a causal relationship is at the least very strongly implied.
Scientists don't imply cause-effect relationships, they demonstrate them, using evidence, to the exclusion of alternatives. Then they offer an explanation -- a theory about the evidence. These properties are rarely present in psychological studies, especially the explanation requirement.
Here's an example. Let's say I'm a doctor who believes he has cured the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the patient until he's all better. My cure always works -- it's perfectly reliable, even though it sometimes takes a week. So, where's my Nobel Prize? I've met the same evidence requirement the linked article does, and the latter is being described as science.
> ... the guy who did the initial investigations into the phenomenon ...
It's not a phenomenon, it's an observation, one without any effort to explain it or demonstrate a cause-effect relationship.
> And before we roll out Internet tropes about correlation and causation, maybe we should first read the underlying studies.
After reading the original work, one is left with the same impression the linked article provides -- a description without an explanation, and no effort to meet the evidence required to move from a correlation to a cause-effect relationship.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard P. Feynman
> Scientists don't imply cause-effect relationships, they demonstrate them, using evidence, to the exclusion of alternatives.
You mean like Einstein did with the theory of relativity? Oh. Wait. That was only proven 30+ years later by Ives–Stilwell.
You mean like String Theory is completely proven to the exclusion of alternatives? Oh. Wait. It isn't.
Science observes, formulates hypotheses, and then falsifies or shows them to be true. It is never "to the exclusion of alternatives", or we'd be done with science by now. It is about forming the model that best fits the world, given our current knowledge.
> I've met the same evidence requirement the linked article does, and the latter is being described as science.
The "linked artice" is journalism, not science. Try following up on the links in there, to the actual science.
> one without any effort to explain it or demonstrate a cause-effect relationship.
You didn't read any of the papers, did you?
> After reading the original work, one is left with the same impression the linked article provides
Ah. You digested 35 years of research, and found no evidence? Or you skimmed the overview I provided, and chose to not further investigate?
Yes, there is no clear mechanism, yet. That's because we don't understand psychology well enough to always define clear mechanisms. That's what science is about - furthering our understanding.
The work on establishing actual causal pathways is still going on, and probably will for quite a while. The metastudies indicate that research is doing a decent job to control for other factors, and still reproduces nicely.
> You mean like Einstein did with the theory of relativity? Oh. Wait. That was only proven 30+ years later by Ives–Stilwell.
You're registering agreement with my point. Or didn't you notice? No one accepted relativity until it was confirmed by experiment.
> You mean like String Theory is completely proven to the exclusion of alternatives? Oh. Wait. It isn't.
Notwithstanding its popular name, string theory is not a scientific theory, it's a conjecture without an empirical basis.
> Science observes, formulates hypotheses, and then falsifies or shows them to be true.
Yes to the first, no to the second. Science never proves anything true, only false. This idea was perhaps best expressed by philosopher David Hume, who said, "No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."
> The "linked artice" is journalism, not science.
So science journalism is free from the responsibilities of science itself? If that were true, it wouldn't be either possible or responsible to call it science journalism.
> Ah. You digested 35 years of research, and found no evidence? Or you skimmed the overview I provided, and chose to not further investigate?
There is no demonstrated cause-effect relationship, it's a correlation. If there were evidence for a cause-effect relaitonship, it would have been included even in the popular accounts.
> You didn't read any of the papers, did you?
This is what you think constitutes scientific debate? If the evidence existed, you would be linking to it rather than arguing in bad faith.
> Yes, there is no clear mechanism, yet. That's because we don't understand psychology well enough to always define clear mechanisms. That's what science is about - furthering our understanding.
Psychology isn't science, and until it tries to explain what it has until now merely described, that status won't change.
> The metastudies indicate that research is doing a decent job to control for other factors, and still reproduces nicely.
If reproducing unexplained results constituted science, astrology would be a science.
Ugh, seems like another article that derives causation from correlation.
Specifically:
"We have evolved for it, to the extent that those surrounded by a tight-knit group of friends who regularly gather to eat—and, crucially, gossip—live an average of 15 years longer than loners."
Perhaps the reason that people with a large group of friends live much longer is that people who are in better health tend to have more active social lives. If you have some sort of disorder or are extremely obese could it be that you're less likely to be able to spend time with lots of other people?
Yep. Give me five minutes, a pen, and some paper, and I can jot down a list of at least fifty potential confounding variables. I trust that someone, somewhere has strong and well-structured data, hinting at a causal relationship and a direction of causality. If so, I'd like to read that source.
Now, I'm not naive. I know that it would be damned near impossible to structure a longitudinal test that a) identifies all the significant variables, b) isolates the most appropriate ones, and c) controls for the least appropriate ones. But absent that sort of test, I'd like to read the tests that we have.
There may indeed be a connection between socialization and multi-factor health outcomes. Maybe even a causal link. I'm certainly willing to consider that. But let's avoid blanket arguments such as 'We've evolved to be social creatures, therefore, we need friends as much as food and water.' There are a lot of interesting ideas in this article, and the article weakens those ideas when it relies on folksy generalizations.
I was commenting more on the way that the journalist portrayed the research than the research itself.
Another example:
"But, however powerful the economic and social forces behind the disappearing neighbour—and however positive many of its results—according to reams of new research, the transformation is also poisoning our politics and, quite literally, killing us."
These are the kinds of articles that cause people to have an anti-science attitude. "One week coffee is good for me and the next week it causes cancer". It also makes it very difficult to address these kinds of problems because you have one side where people are running around like chicken little and another side that may actually agree that the issues is a problem but they have much more moderate solutions than the majority.
Even simpler than that. Healthy people are more attractive and more attractive people are more successful[1], which in turn makes them more successful socially because people like to associate with people who are more successful than themselves for various reasons[2].
As many people have already said, the article seems to jump to a conclusion rather quickly.
What the author might not have taken into account is cultural changes in living habits. With that I mean how we are increasingly moving away from our parents home, and into our own little cell/room/apartment, instead of living with the parents in the house or in an attached building.
And when people did move out, it would more than often be either because you moved into a dormitory (which previously were more communal) or together with a SO. That means more time spent in the neighbourhood, and more time with the middle ring as it's called in the article.
It could be interesting to compare the situation in america with for example the situation in Italy, where it's more common to stay at the parents for longer.
Since we're living around like-minded individuals but subjected to top-down centralized lawmaking, there is a large disconnect between what's happening in our backyard, in the state capital, and in Washington. Often the City Council office is out of touch with one part of the city or another, imposing rules on all that about half disagree with.
The federal system in America is supposed to emphasize differences in the states, and to some extent it still does. But Washington has been taking more power away from the states for the last ~100 years or so. This leads to large Washington-imposed mandates forced upon the states and upon the people, which leads to hostility.
Perhaps it's time to embrace the burbclave model from Snow Crash?
I still think one of the causes of the federal over-expansion was to make Senators popularly elected rather than appointed by state legislatures.
The point of the Senate was to create a check by the states on federal power. Now it's just an incentive for lower population states to expand the federal government since they have disproportionate representation in directing who the expansion benefits.
1. National businesses in many cases (though not all) want uniform regulations to ease doing business. So they lobby for federal preemption of state regulations. For example, car manufacturers don't want to have to meet 50 separate safety codes in order to sell cars nationwide, so they successfully lobbied for a federal code with express state preemption. Advocates of tort reform often have similar motivations: a key proposal of tort reform is to federalize product liability, because manufacturers dislike the current system where litigation will always end up being initiated in the most plaintiff-friendly county of the most plaintiff-friendly state.
2. The last time state vs. federal power came to the point of an outright test of strength, the federal government won. And what's worse for the states, its victory has in retrospect been very popular, which has done quite a bit to boost the popularity of federalization and stigmatize the slogan "states' rights". JFK sent troops to Alabama in 1963, removed the governor's control over the state national guard, and imposed federal law by force; and nowadays most people think he did the right thing.
3. People move around a lot, which makes it increasingly impractical to deal with things like social security or Medicare at the state level, when you might be born in one state, work in three others, and retire in a fifth. (This one is becoming a problem in Europe, too, and will probably lead to some kind of EU-standardized "portable pension" scheme in the medium-term future. An EU-wide health card has already been created, though its terms are not yet standardized.)
> National businesses in many cases (though not all) want uniform regulations to ease doing business. So they lobby for federal preemption of state regulations.
Very few of the regulations in that nature are the ones people are complaining about. The objectionable things largely fall into the categories of things that cost a lot in blood and treasure, put poor and middle class people in prison or erect regulatory barriers to competition and entrepreneurship.
> The last time state vs. federal power came to the point of an outright test of strength, the federal government won.
The federal government always wins. They have more soldiers than anyone else. Winning and being right are not the same thing and being right sometimes is not an excuse to claim unchecked power.
> People move around a lot, which makes it increasingly impractical to deal with things like social security or Medicare at the state level, when you might be born in one state, work in three others, and retire in a fifth.
Problem solved by internet. There is no reason that four states can't deposit the retirement income you're due into your bank account in a fifth. And people retiring in a place far from where than they've lived is something to be discouraged from a social welfare standpoint in any event.
> erect regulatory barriers to competition and entrepreneurship
Ah, so federal preemption is okay when it's good for businesses' profits (e.g. overriding state environmental and product-safety laws), but bad when it's bad or businesses' profits (e.g. imposing environmental or product-safety laws)? Sounds like policy-biased "federalism", not principled federalism.
You're just talking about two different things. The purpose of the commerce clause is to allow the federal government to preempt protectionist state laws, but that doesn't exempt the federal regulations from having to be reasonable and not impede competition or entrepreneurship.
Allow me to make an important distinction. Environmental regulations can be expensive, because you might have to pay more for energy if you can't burn dirty fuels. Environmental regulations can be expensive, because a small business may need to hire a team of lawyers they can't afford, or fulfill bureaucratic requirements that make no logical sense. The first cost may be inevitable if we want to be able to breathe clean air. The second cost is totally inexcusable and is to be exterminated whenever discovered.
> Now it's just an incentive for lower population states to expand the federal government since they have disproportionate representation in directing who the expansion benefits.
The incentive was tempered by the fact that state legislators don't like expanding federal power since it interferes with the exercise of their own power.
> But Washington has been taking more power away from the states for the last ~100 years or so.
Yes, and there are very good reasons for that, beginning with us having to fight a Civil War because the South felt the need to keep slavery and continuing on to us having to fight the South to get it to enforce the laws preserving Civil Rights for black people and other minority groups.
Shifting power back to local governments doesn't mean the locals in general get more say. Historically, it's meant that the most violent and richest of the locals got to lord it over everyone else in the region until the Feds stepped in to clean things up.
> This leads to large Washington-imposed mandates forced upon the states and upon the people, which leads to hostility.
And, just to make it clear to everyone else, slavery isn't the only problem the Feds had to step in to solve. The KKK, Jim Crow, company stores, and pretty much every other type of institutionalized bigotry had to be handled at the Federal level because the local governments weren't even trying.
I wonder how many of the people commenting on this thread have families. I grew up on a cul-de-sac where we knew everyone. Then I lived in a series of apartments through my 20s and had no neighborly contact. But we bought a house in a family friendly neighborhood to start our family, and we have fantastic neighbors. Block parties, babysitting exchanges, toddler brunches, active mailing list, etc.
Perhaps people just seek out the community when they need it.
This article contains lots of definitive-sounding statements that not only lack the ring of objective truth that they're presented with, but would be considered offensive in other contexts. People are different, and those differences should, when possible, be respected. Some people are homosexual, some are members of racial minorities, some are members of unpopular cultures and religions... and some are natural hermits.
I was moving furniture last night. In the rain. Pissing down. Had one friend with me hauling stuff from van to doorstep. My 'neighbour', who I've never met, simply stood on his doorstep (our houses touch one another) and didn't even say 'hi', let alone ask if we needed a hand.
Was I pissed at this? I thought it was a little rude. But on reflection, I don't really care too much. In fact, I prefer it this way. I like choosing my friends and have a diverse cast of hand-picked co-conspirators in my life. So I enjoy that, today, I am no longer geographically obligated to make chit-chat to this uncouth guy next door.
This is what this article misses. It directly correlates the old archetype of a buzzing neighbourhood with the issue of loneliness and it's health impacts. It's a false pretense that the article was written on, and it conforms to the Luddite pandering to 'the good old days before computer' that at one point it actually mocks.
I'm sure if the guy next doors house was on fire, I'd help him out. But I can live with the idea of him not coming around to borrow a cup of flour.
I have seen people in my neighbourhood (Bermondsey in London, UK) struggling with luggage twice, luggage that was clearly far too much for them to carry on their own. Both times I offered to help them take it from the train station to wherever they were going. The first time the man accepted my help, the second time the woman politely declined.
Even the first time I detected an uneasiness, partly because we were strangers of course, but also I got the sense that the man was very wary of putting on me at all. Perhaps because people like not having obligations towards their neighbours it feels wrong to accept help and thus set up an expectation of reciprocisity. Maybe this then leads to not offering help because it is assumed it will be refused?
London is a particularly atomised place of course, back home I think I would have got a very different response.
I believe that if we start helping each other in close proximity, we increase our self-confidence and neighborhood security all while building social capital.
I am working on an open-source hyperlocal Craigslist-style solution to the neighborhood dilemma with JoatU : http://github.com/joatuapp
It's definitely a step in the right direction and fulfills the neighborhood aspect. I have a different idea in mind for what I'm building; I want to see a participative economy built from the ground up.
I've spent the past 5 years in the same apartment. I've had immediate neighbors on both sides switch at least 4 times. After getting to know the first two, we stopped bothering. And now it's our turn to move. It's very different from where I grew up, where somebody moving from the block was very big news, and only happened every few years.
The main difference is that this connection has moved on-line. My high school's reunions have gone downhill because everyone can communicate on Facebook. I have connections of classmates and shared hobbyists across the country facilitated by technology. Yes we are losing place-based connections in much of the country, but is that really such a bad thing if it's replaced elsewhere?
https://nextdoor.com/ is trying to help bring back that sense of community that this article talks about us losing. I think if something like this can help us get a cursory relationship with our neighbors, then that could potentially develop into something deeper and more meaningful and facilitate more offline interaction as well.
My neighborhood uses NextDoor.com and it does work. We share info on nearby construction, crime, and trade recommendations for local services, trade local gardening/landscaping tips, pest-management, etc.
Having civil exchanges over those "transactional" issues is the first step in knowing them, establishing trust, & then digging deeper when you cross paths.
+1 for Nextdoor. I've moved around the Bay Area several times in the last few years, and every new Nextdoor community I've joined has been very active and helpful.
looks like it could be beautiful, but I'd really prefer being able to at least browse some of what's being talked about in my neighborhood before signing up.
The premise is that each neighborhood and the conversation contained within it is completely private to the neighbors.
Since every neighbor is completely verified, you can be 100% sure the person you're talking to is who they say they are. That's why you need to sign up in order to use the service.
What people don't want is the inconvenience of dealing with people who don't operate exactly like they do. As far as I'm concerned, this is a feature of living in community, not a bug.
I realize there are differences between living next to a drug dealer and living next to a person who likes to put 50 plastic pink flamingos in their front yard, but I suspect most of the "HOA hell" stories involve the latter circumstance rather than the former.
they are different "things" but still related. HOAs tell you what you can and cannot do. who created those rules? the people of the neighborhood at some point in time.
I want to paint my house green -- NOPE, neighbors #3, 5, 16, and 20 think green is stupid, and since nobody else had anything to say about it at the rules meeting, I can't do it.
when I moved to into my house we were thrown right between two feuding houses. and as it turns out, the disagreement in place affected us as well (about children playing outside). we ended up leading the fight at the HOA meetings while others, who had voiced their support to us directly and said they would show up, didn't show up. long story short, old lady got sent to the hospital over the stress of the situation, and we won. but there's a happy ending -- we became good friends with old lady, she has married and moved on :)
The article seems to dog on the suburbs as a big part of the problem. Is there any breakdown of the polling that shows that people in denser areas know their neighbors any better? Controlling for occupation / income level would highlight differences in neighborliness against population density.
I would hazard a guess that its more common in apartments to be socially distant. Because you are far more likely to get annoyed by the neighbour being noisy, you don't have any windows to interact through with them (eg. waving) and most important (imo) of all: you can't just talk in the hallway/stairway the same way you do in a garden or across a fence. And actually entering someones quarters is probably a lot more socially taxing than just stading in their garden.
I don't really know what to expect, that's why I'd like to see details in the polling.
On the one hand, living in a denser part of the city, you might walk around more and see people on your way. But many people just plug in headphones and look at their phone while walking.
On the other hand, your points stand out as to why living in multi-family homes might be taxing on community-building.
After spending last week at my grandparents' North Carolina mountain house, I was encouraged to find they regularly have neighbors over for dinner. I must admit, I only know one of my neighbors' names at my apartment in LA.
When I lived in NC I never knew ANY of my neighbors. When I moved to Chicago I met all of my neighbors except for one. [That one lives above me and I'm pretty sure everyone in the building hates them.]
This comments page shows us the dark side of HN community.
There are comments here that completely depressed me and revealed not an introverted but an anti-social personality among some HN users. I am/was also anti-social but I make/made some effort to get out from there. I'm not judging anyone but this side of HN is not a bright one.
edit: I knew that I would be downvoted but I consider that I'm doing the right thing speaking about this.
The actual article describes some of the reasons why. The comments reflect that yes, the article does describe the actions. I suggest that it is not "a dark side" of the HN community - rather a frank discussion about life, the good and the bad.
And what is the solution? Everyone here has instant communication and if you have even a small social life, such as many who work hard all the time for their dreams, you can still see friends once a week and family once a month or every other month.
It's not a great idea to compare today to yesteryear because back then they didn't have facebook, twitter, iPhones, Skype, Google hangouts, the internet etc.
Buy-to-let is rampant in the UK. Other European countries sensibly restrict it's growth or they enact strict tenancy laws to deter the worst type of buy-to-let landord (UK laws are weighted in favour of landlords). In the UK, we've lost any sense that housing has a social component.
I write a blog about housing in the UK and wrote about this topic five years ago. Depressingly, the situation is even worse today.
http://designofhomes.co.uk/016-damaging-effects-of-buy-to-le...