Cramped Condos and the Rise of Unfriendly Neighbours

In 2012, a survey from the nonprofit Vancouver Foundation identified a perplexing trend: as the city was densifying in response to its housing crisis, people—especially those who lived in high-density housing—reported feeling less connected to their neighbours. A growing body of research since then has found a correlation between living in high-density urban environments and increased rates of social isolation, due to factors including a lack of secure tenure in rental buildings, poor architectural design, a dearth of green space and limited access to nature, and stigma related to cultural values that equate high-density housing with lower social status.

All this is leading to what researchers have termed the “emerging asocial society”—that is, a society in which people aren’t just lonely but have actually lost the motivation or skill necessary to engage in healthy social connections. This has profound implications for individual health and well-being and for the health and well-being of our cities.

“As things stand, this will bring increased trends of urban alienation, asocial and antisocial behaviours, loneliness and social isolation, marginalization, nuisance and exacerbated vulnerabilities,” warns one 2022 knowledge synthesis on the topic.

For most of human history, maintaining relationships with the people around us—our neighbours—was not exactly optional. We depended on our neighbours for survival in times of war, famine, drought, or other periods of strife and scarcity. We relied on a community effort to keep roofs over our heads, to build houses and raise barns, to raise children, and develop the infrastructure needed to support our livelihoods.

Most cities began not by virtue of some grand centrally planned strategy but by neighbours organically riffing on what the person next door did. Not everyone got along all of the time, but this interdependency forced people to work through conflict in a way that isn’t required of us today. And we are poorer for it despite being richer than we’ve ever been.

The introduction of modern creature comforts and an exponential increase in personal and collective wealth in the latter half of the twentieth century saw our homes—as in our houses, our neighbourhoods, and our cities—redesigned in a way that encouraged self-sufficiency and individualism rather than community.

Close quarters in tenement buildings or boarding houses with shared kitchens and bathrooms gave way to single-family houses set far back from the street behind expansive private lawns. Private automobiles replaced public transit or even walking as a primary mode of transportation. Streetcar tracks got ripped out in favour of smoothly paved roads engineered for cars. Sidewalks got much narrower or disappeared entirely. Eventually, front-drive garages replaced front porches as the most prominent design detail of the new houses in ever-expanding subdivisions. We could now come and go from our dwellings without ever encountering our neighbours, save, perhaps, for a cursory wave from behind a shield of glass and steel.

Along the way, we began to place immense cultural value on the qualities enabled by this shift in built form. Privacy, seclusion, and separation from those around us became defining characteristics of a “good” home, thus recasting the role of the neighbour in our culture. We became less likely to see them as critical resources essential for survival and more as curious strangers, if not outright impediments to our peace, quiet, and privacy.

As the sociologist Robert D. Putnam wrote in his famous book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, the decline in church attendance, dwindling involvement in labour unions, and even the phasing out of neighbourhood bowling leagues and community dances throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s further eroded opportunities to get to know those around us. In this century, megaplex movie theatres and shopping malls have been stripped of their status as both commercial and community hubs as more of us opt to stream and chill at home while compulsively scrolling through things we can buy online. Even the reliable din of the dinner rush at many local restaurants has been muted as tables intended for people to gather around become platforms for takeout containers awaiting a silent parade of app-enabled couriers.

Inside our private abodes, space to accommodate our vast selection of screens now takes precedence over in-person human connection as a chief design consideration. The rise of the internet and mobile devices has changed our daily habits and how we move through our neighbourhoods as well. Many of us, myself included, purposefully plug into a podcast or browse social media in order to avoid having to make small talk with the strangers in our midst. Then came the pandemic, accelerating our growing social anxiety and justifying our latent sense of stranger danger with an actual physical threat.

As we reconfigure our cities and towns to allow more housing to be built closer together, much of the resistance we bump up against is due to the fact that the skills we need to be good neighbours and live happily in closer proximity have essentially atrophied. Adding to the problem, no doubt, is the fact that we are just so damn busy trying to meet the demands of living in a 24/7 attention economy that we haven’t much energy or capacity to rebuild them.

Between answering after-hours Slack messages from our bosses, getting our kids to soccer practice, and rushing home to catch up on the side hustles many of us need to make extra money, there’s little time to chit-chat with that new person who moved in across the street. Forget forging a relationship that would make us feel comfortable enough to knock on their door and ask for a proverbial cup of sugar.

In the era of Amazon and Instacart, running out of baking supplies is hardly the emergency it might have been half a century ago. Our lack of neighbourly connections might seem a little sad but largely inconsequential to our lives. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Multitudes of studies show that good connections with our neighbours have an outsized impact on our health, safety, and happiness. People who spend more time socializing with their neighbours live longer, have higher life satisfaction, and are more optimistic than those who spend less time with neighbours or none at all. More than that, neighbourliness has proven to be the glue that holds our society together.

In addition to being happier and healthier, people who spend time with their neighbours are more trusting of people overall, a vitally important tidbit in an era where we are more skeptical and fearful of each other than ever. One study I looked at, from the United States–based Institute for Family Studies, directly compared the number of Americans who spent social evenings with their neighbours over the past fifty years to the number of Americans who believe others can be trusted during the same time period. The trajectories of the two graph lines are essentially identical: a steady, precipitous decline.

Insights like this have led a growing number of experts to argue that reclaiming neighbourliness is essential if we are to overcome the radical polarization that has come to characterize modern politics and patch together our tattered social fabric. As Atlantic writer Derek Thompson points out, another way to think of our neighbours is as the village so many of us lament has gone missing from our lives in the past decades. Its disappearance hasn’t just made us feel more isolated and alone; it’s eroded our ability to form a functioning society.

“The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise—in other words, democracy,” he writes. The power of neighbourliness can be boiled down to the simple fact that we generally don’t get to choose our neighbours, so getting to know them gives us a rare opportunity to practise building relationships with people we might not encounter in any other way.

In fact, sociologists classify neighbourly relationships as “bridging” relationships—as in, they bridge the divides between different groups in society. In a world where our social lives are increasingly bifurcated between the known quantities of our immediate households and the special-interest echo chambers of the internet, talking to our neighbours is one of the only ways to develop tolerance, understanding, even appreciation for people whose politics, religion, or world views may, at first, seem utterly incompatible with our own.

“That is something that we need a lot more of in this world, to find those kind[s] of slow, safe, low-stakes ways to get to know people who are fundamentally different than us,” Michelle Hoar, project director with the Vancouver-based Hey Neighbour! Collective, told me. “It’s kind of an important muscle.”

It’s also a muscle we’ll need to intentionally strengthen if we are going to successfully shift toward more compact forms of housing without negatively impacting our quality of life and our experience of home. Given the economic, ecological, and social need to move away from single-family homes as the dominant form of housing in North America, urban planners and developers have attempted to coax us into closer proximity by pitching a vision of community. Knowing the change will naturally be met with resistance, they try to sell it with renderings for new, high-density housing developments that tend to feature healthy, happy people in a pristine and bustling public realm.

Condo buildings advertise party rooms and gyms and rooftop gardens as collection points where we can gather and get to know our neighbours. These buildings often have names that include “Village” or “Commons,” chosen specifically to conjure fantasies of reclaiming a yesteryear when we naturally offered each other friendship and support. The inference is that if you give up an element of home our culture has come to prioritize above almost all others—space—you get belonging in exchange.

Reality doesn’t always live up to the hype.

Shoving people into smaller spaces and closer proximity doesn’t necessarily lead to strong neighbourly bonds. As I saw in a number of cities worldwide, such as Vienna, Berlin, and Harare, creating tight-knit communities in this day and age often takes a fair amount of intention and effort. Without that, attempts to close the physical gap between neighbours can actually lead to people feeling more isolated and estranged.

The Hey Neighbour! Collective, an interdisciplinary group based out of Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, was formed specifically to investigate what can be done to encourage better social connections as cities become denser. Step one is helping people understand why they need to know their neighbours and what neighbourliness even is. While it’s wonderful to form close friendships with the people around us, to the point where we feel confident asking them to watch our kids in a pinch or think to drop off some soup when we know they’re sick, it’s not actually necessary to get to that level of intimacy to see benefits, Hoar said.

Just becoming familiar with our neighbours is often enough. As more of us live alone or in smaller households away from extended family and friends, our neighbours can fill the gaps in our support systems, just by virtue of their proximity. For instance, if you regularly see that senior down the hall, you might think to check on them in a heat wave; or someone else might pop by to see if you’re okay when the power is out after a storm—both scenarios that are getting much more common due to the wild weather effects of climate change.

Knowing the people around us are looking out for our well-being, and vice versa, helps communities become much more resilient in the face of challenges posed by everything from economic uncertainty to an unstable climate, Hoar said. It also makes living in apartment and condo buildings a much more pleasant experience. Becoming familiar with our neighbours can lead to what Hoar calls a system of “mutual support,” which can increase our sense of purpose and belonging where we live.

That can’t happen if we aren’t afforded the opportunity to get to know our neighbours in a positive context, and our housing often works against this goal. Despite the promises of many multi-family buildings, a majority are not designed in a way that intentionally encourage good interactions between neighbours.

“What we see in a lot of buildings that have poor acoustics, few social spaces, and no kind of social programming is that people’s only experience of their neighbours is like ‘This person parks too close to my car, or this person makes a lot of noise on Sunday morning,’” explained Madeleine Hebert, senior housing specialist with Happy Cities, an urban planning, research, and engagement firm that works closely with Hey Neighbour! From there, it’s easy to default to disliking all the unknown people we almost never see but who nonetheless still manage to infringe upon our private space.

However, these impediments can be overcome with a bit of strategy. Our outward ambivalence toward the strangers who live among us often masks a deep longing for human connection, Hoar and Hebert’s research has found. Most people actually yearn for closer connections with their neighbours. They’re just not sure how to make it happen.

Hey Neighbour! and Happy Cities have found that creating an environment conducive to neighbourliness doesn’t actually take all that much, but it does take someone or something to get the ball rolling. A pilot project Hey Neighbour! ran with Concert Properties, a British Columbia–based property management firm and developer, put in place a social connectedness coordinator in five rental buildings. This person’s job was to support and empower resident-led activities that could encourage neighbourliness in high-density housing.

Ideas ranged from doggy dates for canine residents and their humans to online speed-friending during the pandemic. The most effective interventions, however, were exceedingly simple. Placing a puzzle out in the lobby that people could noodle with when they had time to kill; putting up a bulletin board in the laundry room where people could post recipes; and other “light-touch,” almost passive, interventions gently nudged neighbours toward each other by puncturing the veneer of anonymity that can shroud life in a big building. Those safe and somewhat distant entry points into considering the humanity of their neighbours opened the door for more in-depth and in-person interactions.

Surveys after the pilot program showed that most participants met three or more new neighbours in the process and that they’d be more likely to ask a neighbour for a small favour in the future, a small but significant step in the right direction. Residents also said they felt safer and more connected in their buildings after the project, while building managers reported less conflict between residents, lower turnover, and less property damage.

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Of course, another way to rebuild our capacity for neighbourliness is to design housing in a way that explicitly encourages it.

It makes sense that if decades of separating people into single-family homes has made a lasting imprint on how we relate to our neighbours, we might be able to undo that with housing designed to do the opposite. This is not a consideration that typically gets factored into most design and development processes, Hebert, a former architect, told me. Nor is it generally a factor included in our building codes or our housing policies.

I found this hard to believe in an era where it seems like so many new condo buildings, especially higher-end ones, feature trendy community amenities, like rooftop barbecue stations or game rooms, as a rule. But Hebert’s research into the link between design and social connectedness found those spaces are often underused and seldom configured in a way that invites residents to use them together. These spaces usually need to be pre-booked, sometimes for a fee, and for security reasons, they’re often tucked away in parts of the building that are hard to access and even harder to see. She found this keeps them out of sight and out of mind for many residents.

When these amenity spaces do get used, it’s often as an extension of people’s personal space—a place to host private events that don’t fit in more diminutive urban abodes—not to gather with neighbours in the building. But a lot of architects and developers with good enough intentions may not realize this, Hebert said, because it is not common practice for them to go back and assess their work once buildings are complete. “As architects and planners, we kind of walk away from our projects and we don’t really take the time to understand, okay, what’s actually happening in these buildings after we leave?”

In the course of her research, Hebert did actually go back to several completed multi-family buildings to observe how real people in the real world used the space in daily life. What she found was that “community” spaces like gardens or party rooms really need to be accessible and visible to a majority of people in order to build familiarity between residents. Common rooms located off the lobby with an open-door policy and, better yet, some programming had more potential to draw in people for a board games night or some other casual event. Community gardens were best placed on the ground level, like in a courtyard, and combined with other leisure spaces, like children’s play structures, that encouraged a multitude of uses by multitudes of people rather than just those with a green thumb.

But it doesn’t even take expensive purpose-built amenities to encourage social connection through design, Hebert found. Sometimes it just comes down to more thoughtful placement of standard fare. Laundry rooms, Hebert discovered, hold untapped potential to encourage socialization when they are placed on the main floor of a building rather than in a dank basement. Add some seating and a few kids’ toys outside the door, and laundry day suddenly turns into an opportunity for people to sit and chat with their neighbours while they wait for the spin cycle to finish.

Hebert’s research also found that parking garages, bike storage lockers, even the little nooks in front of elevators could all be configured in ways—think simple, cheap additions such as a few chairs, a bookshelf, or a bulletin board—that encourage people to form connections. Meanwhile, corridors with natural light led people to linger a little longer and carry on conversations with neighbours at the door when compared to hallways awash in fluorescent light.

Considering the amount of public money that goes into supporting the housing sector, the fact that architects, planners, and developers—people whose work has so much influence over the way we live our lives and our broader culture—don’t have to make sure their work lives up to expectations amounts to a glaring lack of accountability.

The neglect of social considerations in architecture and design has gotten even worse as we’ve attempted to build our way out of our housing crisis by emphasizing quantity over qualities that encourage positive interactions with our neighbours and thus nurture a more robust and holistic sense of home. This is especially true of projects meant to be “affordable” or aimed at lower-income households, Hoar and Hebert have found.

Booting social considerations to the bottom of the list or reserving them only for high-end housing isn’t just contributing to the sense of loss and resistance so many people feel as our cities densify, but it’s also a wasted chance to meaningfully address some of the biggest social and public health issues of our time.

Adapted and excerpted from No Place like Home: The Missing Key to Our Housing Crisis by Jessica Barrett. Copyright © 2026 Jessica Barrett. Published by Viking Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.