It shouldn’t be so hard to live near your friends

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Logan Ury and her partner Scott received devastating news: Scott had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and his right foot needed to be amputated.

At the time, they were living in what Ury describes as a “kind of sad apartment” in San Francisco’s Mission district. It didn’t help that as Scott underwent chemotherapy in a nearby hospital during the early days of social distancing, Ury found herself increasingly isolated from friends and family.

When Ury’s friends, married couple Kristen Berman and Phil Levin, stopped by for a visit, they had a quick assessment of the situation: “They looked around ... and said, ‘This is really sad. You need to move to Radish,’” Ury said.

Radish is a co-living space in Oakland that Levin founded in 2019. Today, it’s made up of five houses, alongside a communal space that’s outfitted with a kitchen and a yard on one-third of an acre lot that’s shared by 19 adults and five babies. Unlike the communes of the past where participants share the same living space, most of Radish’s members have their own standalone homes — a way to live communally without sacrificing privacy or squabbling over housework.

Ury and Scott, who asked to be identified by his first name to maintain his privacy, took Berman and Levin up on the offer, moving into Radish in August 2020. It was a decision that turned out to be perfect. “It was such an amazing support during this hard time,” said Ury. “And it was a really fun way to ride out the pandemic.”

Later, Ury wrote about her experiences living at Radish for the New York Times’ Modern Love column in a piece that urged people to lean on “Other Significant Others”: friends who provide an integral role that romantic partners are unable to fill.

Nearly four years later, Radish is still at the center of Ury and Scott’s lives. In April 2023, they bought a house half a mile away, but they regularly stop by Radish for communal dinners and casual hangouts around the firepit. When Ury threw a party for her birthday, she invited a big group of friends, most of whom were people she knew from Radish.

But the benefits go beyond socializing: During a recent trip to the emergency room, she was struck by how many people she could ask to help out around the house. “Most people don’t have, like, 28 people they can call on in an emergency,” she said.

Like many millennials, Ury is experiencing what’s becoming an aspirational lifestyle: living within walking distance of close friends. As more people work remotely, friends, rather than offices, are becoming the central compass around which people are seeking to orient their lives. Online, friendship is having a big moment: Videos on social media about living near friends frequently go viral, a flurry of recent media stories and newsletters suggest that people should be moving closer to their friends, while an article in the Atlantic wondered whether friendship, rather than romantic partnership, ought to be at the center of life.

But this celebration of friendship contrasts starkly with the realities of hanging out: Simply put, we’re not. Today, Americans spend less time with friends and family than at nearly any other point in history. It’s a trend so disturbing that, in 2023, the US surgeon general issued a public advisory statement describing loneliness as an “epidemic” rivaling both tobacco smoking and obesity in terms of its impact on health.

People like Ury — 30-somethings who still spend a lot of time with a big group of friends — are increasingly becoming the exception. Not only do Americans spend less time with their friends, they also have fewer friends, a fact that’s particularly true for men. Despite having more technology than ever before centered on social connection, there are fewer social institutions that support spending time together in real life.

Americans are less oriented around common social pursuits, whether it be going to church, which, for the first time in history, less than half of the country attends, or playing youth sports, from which participation has declined since the early aughts. There’s also a steep dropoff in social clubs, a former staple of American life. Freemasons, for instance, have lost 3.8 million members since the 1950s, and the civic institution Rotary has only 330,000 members, 90 percent of whom are 40 or older.

Not only this, but Americans lack trust and commonality in the places they live: 57 percent of people know only some of their neighbors, while 23 percent of people under 30 say they know none of their neighbors at all.

How do we change this? There are two significant ways to invest in “community infrastructure,” said Dr. Jeremy Nobel, who teaches at the Harvard School of Medicine and wrote the book Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection. “[F]ind friends within half a mile of where you live by engaging in meaningful community activities like volunteering,” or, the other way: “Recruit a bunch of your friends to live near you.”

Living near friends does seem like an obvious way to offset much of the loneliness creeping into American life. For one, it’s a solution that cuts out a lot of the reasons that prevent people from spending time with close friends in the first place, like meticulous scheduling or long commutes across town. “If a gym is closer, you go to the gym more,” said Berman, who lives at Radish and is the co-founder of Irrational Labs, a consulting firm that advises companies on behavioral economics. “If friends are closer, you see them more.” Upon joining Radish, new members are given a pair of Crocs: the only transport vehicle required to travel the distance between their friends’ homes.

In many ways, living near friends replicates life on a college campus where socializing is centered around shared pursuits and people can walk between their friends’ dorms. Research shows that social bonds peak at about age 25, the same age at which many people are leaving the campus behind.

There are steep barriers, though, to building functioning communities. For one, most people lack a big group of friends who can agree on the same city to live in, much less the same neighborhood. There are serious logistical complexities as well. Finding available real estate within close proximity isn’t always realistic, and even if it is, housing is often unaffordable. This is especially true for popular cities, like those in the Bay Area, where the average price of a home is $1.25 million as of February.

It was only possible for Levin to start Radish due to a few advantageous circumstances: He had a group of friends that pitched in with him on the property, and a new California state law made it possible to build more housing, called Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs, on Radish’s land. Part of it, too, was luck. When a home adjacent to Radish’s property went on the market, Levin convinced his close friends, now members of Radish, to buy it.

Radish is what Levin calls a “very difficult, pretty maximalist version” of living near one’s friends. Gathering 19 friends on the same plot of land in a city where housing is in high demand is no easy feat. But Levin believes that more people can have a smaller-scale rendition of what Radish offers: neighborhood communities, or “mini hoods,” founded on the guiding belief that people are happiest and healthiest when they are surrounded by those they love and admire.

To help them, Levin has built a website geared at making it possible for people to find housing within walking distance of the people they love. Called “Live Near Friends,” the site surfaces available real estate (both to rent and buy) located within a five-minute walk of a given zip code. For now, the website is a pared-down concept, a digital nudge in a conversation among friends that begins with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we lived near each other?” But Levin believes that Live Near Friends could surface an untapped market for communal living in the same way that Airbnb created phenomenal demand for short-term rentals.

Levin has experience building out large-scale real estate projects that, at first glance, may seem like absurdist utopias. He was a part of the founding team at Culdesac, a real estate developer that builds car-free neighborhoods in some of the most car-reliant cities in America. Its first project, a housing community in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, banned cars to free up parking spaces and enhance walkability in a place where summer temperatures regularly climb to 100℉. The project was deemed impossible by naysayers when it broke ground in 2019, said Levin. But today, the $140 million housing development is home to nearly 200 people — with plans to house 800 more.

Levin, a self-described “tech optimist,” has raised a small amount of venture funding for Live Near Friends, a company that he envisions could change not only the type of real estate that’s being built but also the way people think about buying real estate. By aggregating demand for community-based neighborhoods, Live Near Friends could “influence the rest of the [housing] ecosystem,” said Turner Novak, the founder of the early-stage venture fund Banana Capital, which invested in Live Near Friends. “They are sitting at the top of this discovery stack of helping people live next to or close to the people they care about.”

What if, instead of thinking about buying or renting real estate from what Levin calls the perspective of a “single-player application,” we thought about it from a “multiplayer frame”? “We want people ... to think about a home not [just] as four walls, but the people and the stuff around you,” he said.

This would diverge dramatically from how people have thought about choosing housing in the past: a decision in which countertops and light fixtures typically carry more weight than the amount of time it takes to walk to a friend’s house. But it’s a shift in values that many millennials — the older of whom are entering their 40s and settling into more permanent living situations — are endeavoring toward.

“I feel like a lot of people I know are unhappy,” said Ury. “[They’ve] strived for a career, and that’s felt good, but then it doesn’t feel good for that long. There’s just a lot of emptiness around other things.”

The embrace of living near friends isn’t just about real estate. It represents a reframing of what success looks like in America, where upward mobility has always flowed toward more privacy. The more money you have, the more you can afford to shield yourself from the messiness that arises from sharing space with other people — whether through living alone or hiring support like housekeepers or nannies. But as Berman put it, people may have begun to understand that they are often using their money to “buy more loneliness.”

“I think rich people are worse at community because you get used to getting everything your own way,” said Joe Green, a friend of Levin’s who co-founded a mixed-income community in downtown Los Angeles called Treehouse. “In community living, you have to give up your preferences.”

Most of the people who live at Radish work in tech and have good jobs and decent salaries. Even in the expensive Bay Area, if they wanted they could live in their own homes with their own private slice of astroturf. These aren’t people who are seeking out co-living simply for financial perks like sharing rent, mortgages, or property taxes. Yet many of them are willing to put up with slight inconveniences for the deeper benefits of co-living.

When I visited Radish for a communal dinner around the backyard firepit in March, many residents told me that what they most liked about living there was the knowledge that they could leave their house and bump into a friend at any moment. It was a low-stakes way of hanging out from which they could just as easily withdraw, unlike the increasingly typical scheduled friend date, which turns a hangout into one more to-do item.

In the kitchen, two couples were discussing a car swap for the weekend — one of them was going out of town and they were letting the other couple use their roomier vehicle to run errands. There were a lot of subgroups at Radish, people who did laundry together or worked out together. A few people who reluctantly turned down dessert told me they were in a no-sugar group. For parents, co-living opened up a new range of social possibilities once they put the kids to bed: Just about every parent at Radish had a baby monitor propped up beside them as they ate and chatted with friends.

There are a lot of intangible benefits to living among friends that are profound but difficult to qualify, Gina Gutierrez, an entrepreneur who lives at Radish with her husband, told me. “You shift your mood when you’re having a bad [day]. You get to take some of the pressure off when you’re having a tiff with your partner, and then you come back and you’re in a better mood.”

From hippie communes to hacker houses, communal living has always figured at some level in American life. It reached its height in the ’60s and ’70s — a period of social upheaval mirroring our own tumultuous times — which led many people to reject traditional values and seek out alternative ways of living, from sharing farmland to sharing each other’s spouses.

Today, the emphasis in communal living has shifted from co-housing to co-living to living near friends. This is true for Fractal, a loosely defined co-living collective based in New York that is steadily taking over an apartment building in East Williamsburg.

Fractal has none of the top-down leadership, founding manifesto, or shared list of chores you might expect in a communal living environment. “It’s basically just a bunch of people coordinating to live in the same apartment building,” said Priya Rose, Fractal’s co-founder.

Since 2022, Rose and her friends have been moving into units in the same apartment building as soon as they become available. Currently, about 30 or so Fractal members live in 10 of the 72 units. Rose and her husband, who were expecting a soon-to-arrive baby when we last spoke, recently moved into another co-living house about five miles east in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where they are building out a secondary community called Fractal Two.

While Fractal has no formal agreement with the building in which its members reside, the building managers are aware of it, and for the most part are okay with the project, said Rose. The only commune-style aspect of Fractal is “Berlin’s Place,” a shared community space located within the apartment of one of the larger units that Fractal members can access at any time to co-work or hang out.

Recently, they’ve been offering classes, open to the public, called “Fractal University,” in which Fractal’s members teach everything from painting to poetry. Rose, an entrepreneur and software engineer, has also been teaching a class, one course that’s geared at helping other people live near friends and build their own Fractal-style communities.

It’s not surprising that projects like Fractal and Radish have sprung up first in densely populated cities like New York and Oakland, where it’s much easier to build communities made up of friends who live within walking distance. Less obviously walkable urban areas require foresight, planning, and, as with the Culdesac Tempe project, serious real estate investment.

One such project is West Village, a residential community in the northern Alabama town of Florence. Currently under construction, it will soon have 170 condos available to buy.

Joel Anderson, who founded West Village’s real estate development firm, Mainstreet Communities, designed the project with walkability and community as core components. Condos face open courtyards where he envisions residents will socialize (a common building design in Europe); local businesses and coffee shops will occupy the around two dozen available commercial units; two public plazas will feature live music and events; and, to ensure that people aren’t car-dependent, each resident will be given an e-bike upon moving in.

Anderson became interested in urban design and development after reading about how living environments have a profound effect on every aspect of people’s lives, from how healthy they are to how much money they make. “The urban fabric of our cities is what water is to fish,” said Anderson. “If the water is dirty, [the fish] probably won’t notice, though they may not live as long.”

One issue Anderson is attempting to solve in his own real estate projects is the lack of density even within most US cities, a design flaw that requires people to be both car-dependent and to “spend enormous energy and money to do something basic like seeing a friend or getting groceries,” he said.

Within Florence, which has a population of about 40,000, the project has been greeted with great enthusiasm. West Village has yet to put any units on the market (some residences will become available in May, starting at about $225,000), yet it already has a waitlist of several hundred people, both for residential units and for its commercial spots.

This reception has only further strengthened Joel’s conviction “that people today don’t want to spend hours commuting,” he said. “They don’t want to be isolated on an island.”

Despite the growing emphasis on living near friends and what seems to be an authentic and often unmet desire for social connection, the reality is that building community and keeping up with connections is hard work. It is seldom convenient, and it has a tendency to be crowded out by more seemingly urgent concerns. Case in point: I live a 10-minute walk from one of my oldest childhood friends, yet we’ve somehow been unable to find time for coffee in the past three months.

The truth is that if making friends is a priority in your life, it’s something you’ll cultivate wherever you live. “One of my friends was like, ‘Why do you always need to create a community? Can’t you just join one?’” Green, the Treehouse founder, told me. (At the time Green and I spoke, he was signing paperwork for a home in Sonoma that is located within a short distance of his rabbi and a group of Jewish friends, bringing him one step nearer to his goal of living within “a spiritual Jewish community.”)

There are many ways to cultivate a community where you live, something that Katherine Berry, a Seattle resident and community advocate, has learned firsthand. After reading numerous articles on the benefits of living closer to friends, Berry moved to a neighborhood in Seattle where many of her friends live within walking distance. But she also made gestures to foster community in her apartment building, throwing a party and inviting her new neighbors with handwritten notes she tacked to their doors.

Her friendly gesture was greeted with enthusiasm and, in the case of one longtime resident who had lived in the building since the 1980s, shock. “[He told me] that nobody in his history had ever invited people in the building to their apartment,” said Berry. “Like, damn. I didn’t [realize] I was a pioneer for putting notes on people’s doors.”