Orthodox Jews have a solution. Since they go to synagogue on the Sabbath and cannot use any machine to get there, they cluster around synagogues. A side effect is the sort of get-togethers and mutual support that you wish for.
This is definitely something I'm thinking about as I move right next to my brother/sister-in-law but not right next to my friends. I wish we would all just live right next to each other! C'mon people! But the externality point makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's even like a common pool resource. My moving away takes away from your resources.
This is an interesting question to ponder. I moved last year to be closer to friends and my quality of life has definitely gone up-- the proximity was ultimately more valuable than the other amenities of the neighborhood I was in originally.
What nudged me towards the decision was taking a closer look at how I spent my time, and realizing some of my best days were when I was in the neighborhood where more of my friends are. Maybe if there was more focus culturally on spending time optimally rather than the consumption of other amenities, more clustering would happen?
What I see works in the real world is to create high-trust subcultures with high barriers to entry, and then to exist as a member of a subculture rather than as a member of a friendship group. For example, gay men in the 80s in NYC would probably not miss clustering with their hometown friends if they were part of the subculture. This has the added benefit of essentially being portable, as the traits that get you entry into subcultures work anywhere, and benefitting from scale as barriers can be higher in bigger populations.
So maybe the solution is to be an exceptional person in a subculture, and normal people lose.
Yes, why do people think so little about friends when they choose to move? Why do they presume that they can find them trivially but they won't be able to find other things and need to plan around them? Or why don't people make new friends near to them and choose to stay near them? Why is it so easy to move for work, school, but not friends? Or why don't people make friends with people near them in a stable way, and instead find 'loving their neighbor' rather near impossible?
When I lived in New York I lived in Downtown Brooklyn and so did many of my friends. So there are some exceptions! Of course, Downtown Brooklyn is a bit of an anomaly. A host of new buildings have sprung up in the last 10 years thanks to tax breaks/rezoning, making it a relative bargain to live there if you work in downtown Manhattan. And it helped that my friends were a relatively homogenous bunch -- we were all young professionals with no kids.
Then all the people that were open to living in the Bay anyway moved there, kicking off a little movement that caused 150ish people to move to 2022-2023 and incentivized community startups like the Commons (which I helped start), HF0, Solaris, and MadSci makerspace to locate there, which created a positive feedback loop.
Another way I’ve seen it solved is for a critical mass of core people in a group share a duplex or a triplex. Once you’ve got a nucleus of 2-4 key people together, then more peripheral people in a group can move closer too.
Successful cities pull friends apart. They match people with their perfect job. But each individual's perfect job will be distributed somewhat randomly around the city. If friends do co-locate for a while, job matching will pull them apart eventually. Only solution as you say is to make new friends wherever your job lands you.
In my experience the problem has been a combination of the quirks of when people move, the availability of apartments and especially willingness to pay (in the context on NYC) that has kept me and my friends from coordinating better.
The thing about the 'be in the middle' theory is it's flat out wrong, as you observe - the utility of proximity is roughly an inverse square, so if there's two useful things A and B, the midpoint is actually the worst possible place to be, you want to be at A or B instead. So it takes a weird config combination of A+B+C to make picking such a point wrong.
There's also the fact that your friends have other friends outside of your social group. Even if you could persuade your friends to consider moving closer to you, unless you're highly unusual or in a cult, they are going to have to consider proximity to many people you do not know or are only vaguely acquainted with.
I wonder if this is true more broadly. When I and partner lived in East London (contrarians, I guess?) most of the Aus ex-pats I knew lived in Hammersmith or Shepherd's Bush. Not identical to what yr discussing, but this being up to your elbows in countrymen halfway around the world is the opposite dilemma to the one you describe. Anyways, just a thought.
I think there are two insights that make this project possible:
1. If you choose a location where people already demonstrably want to live (the single best square mile in a tier 1 city), then recruiting becomes easier
2. If you expand your ambitions to 200+ people instead of just 10 best friends, it becomes paradoxically easier to coordinate. Friends of friends feel more welcomed, and when it's literally remarkable then people will talk about it.
I'm happy to walk you through how we've gotten here in the last 6 months, I'd love to see something similar happen in the rest of the world's great cities. jasoncbenn@gmail.com.
Any "when": Something perhaps more common a hundred years ago, for cultural icons, aristocratic or upper classes - more socializing may have been organized around country houses, or areas such as the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard, etc. These areas provide venues to solve the problem. There were more downscale places all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, as well, where families would see each other year after year. It's the workaholism required even of so many professionals and others trying to achieve or retain high status that makes workaday geography so problematic for a human life.
Non-native-language-speaking immigrant communities are a counterexample - many cities have a Chinatown. I suspect what is going on is that economic quantifiables (e.g. job prospects, good schools) are overweighted in location choices whereas intangible final consumption goods (e.g. proximity to friends, parks) are underweighted.
Orthodox Jews have a solution. Since they go to synagogue on the Sabbath and cannot use any machine to get there, they cluster around synagogues. A side effect is the sort of get-togethers and mutual support that you wish for.
This is definitely something I'm thinking about as I move right next to my brother/sister-in-law but not right next to my friends. I wish we would all just live right next to each other! C'mon people! But the externality point makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's even like a common pool resource. My moving away takes away from your resources.
This is an interesting question to ponder. I moved last year to be closer to friends and my quality of life has definitely gone up-- the proximity was ultimately more valuable than the other amenities of the neighborhood I was in originally.
What nudged me towards the decision was taking a closer look at how I spent my time, and realizing some of my best days were when I was in the neighborhood where more of my friends are. Maybe if there was more focus culturally on spending time optimally rather than the consumption of other amenities, more clustering would happen?
What I see works in the real world is to create high-trust subcultures with high barriers to entry, and then to exist as a member of a subculture rather than as a member of a friendship group. For example, gay men in the 80s in NYC would probably not miss clustering with their hometown friends if they were part of the subculture. This has the added benefit of essentially being portable, as the traits that get you entry into subcultures work anywhere, and benefitting from scale as barriers can be higher in bigger populations.
So maybe the solution is to be an exceptional person in a subculture, and normal people lose.
Yes, why do people think so little about friends when they choose to move? Why do they presume that they can find them trivially but they won't be able to find other things and need to plan around them? Or why don't people make new friends near to them and choose to stay near them? Why is it so easy to move for work, school, but not friends? Or why don't people make friends with people near them in a stable way, and instead find 'loving their neighbor' rather near impossible?
When I lived in New York I lived in Downtown Brooklyn and so did many of my friends. So there are some exceptions! Of course, Downtown Brooklyn is a bit of an anomaly. A host of new buildings have sprung up in the last 10 years thanks to tax breaks/rezoning, making it a relative bargain to live there if you work in downtown Manhattan. And it helped that my friends were a relatively homogenous bunch -- we were all young professionals with no kids.
I agree wholeheartedly with your essay and think about this problem a lot!
Perhaps you've read this but Eliezer Yudkowsky covers similar territory here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cmiRk9XtT9Psnd3Yr/movable-housing-for-scalable-cities
particularly benefit #3
The way I solved this in San Francisco was to advocate for one area as the best square mile: https://bit.ly/neighborhood-location, https://goo.gl/maps/2Mpaw2213uwkrx3q7
Then all the people that were open to living in the Bay anyway moved there, kicking off a little movement that caused 150ish people to move to 2022-2023 and incentivized community startups like the Commons (which I helped start), HF0, Solaris, and MadSci makerspace to locate there, which created a positive feedback loop.
Another way I’ve seen it solved is for a critical mass of core people in a group share a duplex or a triplex. Once you’ve got a nucleus of 2-4 key people together, then more peripheral people in a group can move closer too.
Successful cities pull friends apart. They match people with their perfect job. But each individual's perfect job will be distributed somewhat randomly around the city. If friends do co-locate for a while, job matching will pull them apart eventually. Only solution as you say is to make new friends wherever your job lands you.
In my experience the problem has been a combination of the quirks of when people move, the availability of apartments and especially willingness to pay (in the context on NYC) that has kept me and my friends from coordinating better.
The thing about the 'be in the middle' theory is it's flat out wrong, as you observe - the utility of proximity is roughly an inverse square, so if there's two useful things A and B, the midpoint is actually the worst possible place to be, you want to be at A or B instead. So it takes a weird config combination of A+B+C to make picking such a point wrong.
There's also the fact that your friends have other friends outside of your social group. Even if you could persuade your friends to consider moving closer to you, unless you're highly unusual or in a cult, they are going to have to consider proximity to many people you do not know or are only vaguely acquainted with.
I wonder if this is true more broadly. When I and partner lived in East London (contrarians, I guess?) most of the Aus ex-pats I knew lived in Hammersmith or Shepherd's Bush. Not identical to what yr discussing, but this being up to your elbows in countrymen halfway around the world is the opposite dilemma to the one you describe. Anyways, just a thought.
I completely agree, which is why a group of friends in San Francisco have been clustering into a single square mile, along with 200+ other people: https://jasonbenn.notion.site/6-Becoming-Hyper-Local-Real-Estate-Guy-0e011a05e02a4df79e2355ed0789123b
I think there are two insights that make this project possible:
1. If you choose a location where people already demonstrably want to live (the single best square mile in a tier 1 city), then recruiting becomes easier
2. If you expand your ambitions to 200+ people instead of just 10 best friends, it becomes paradoxically easier to coordinate. Friends of friends feel more welcomed, and when it's literally remarkable then people will talk about it.
I'm happy to walk you through how we've gotten here in the last 6 months, I'd love to see something similar happen in the rest of the world's great cities. jasoncbenn@gmail.com.
And shoutout to Andy Jones for pointing me here in his newsletter! https://andyljones.substack.com/
Any "when": Something perhaps more common a hundred years ago, for cultural icons, aristocratic or upper classes - more socializing may have been organized around country houses, or areas such as the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard, etc. These areas provide venues to solve the problem. There were more downscale places all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, as well, where families would see each other year after year. It's the workaholism required even of so many professionals and others trying to achieve or retain high status that makes workaday geography so problematic for a human life.
Non-native-language-speaking immigrant communities are a counterexample - many cities have a Chinatown. I suspect what is going on is that economic quantifiables (e.g. job prospects, good schools) are overweighted in location choices whereas intangible final consumption goods (e.g. proximity to friends, parks) are underweighted.