Getting to know your neighbors is a bit of a cliché these days, it seems. Here’s a chart from a recent Citylab article about how many people actually know their neighbors:
Here’s what the article says about the trend:
“There used to be this necessity to reach out and build bonds with people who lived nearby,” says Marc Dunkelman, a public policy fellow at Brown University who studied the shift in American communities for his 2014 book The Vanishing Neighbor. That was particularly true in the 1920s through the 1960s, when social tension ran high due to issues like the Great Depression and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“There was this sort of cohort effect, in which people … were more inclined in many cases to find security that existed in neighborhoods,” he says. “They depended on one another much more.”
For the record, I know all of my neighbors that live in my building, but don’t know the people in the houses on either side of my Saint Paul apartment.