If you build it, they will socialize?
Public spaces and loneliness
By D. Dowd Muska | October 17, 2025
Urbanists have a new item for cities’ to-do lists: Fix America’s loneliness crisis. And their preferred tool? Public spaces.
The William Penn Foundation’s Shawn McCaney is typical. He believes the nation’s “lack of social connection” is partly due to “not enough high-quality public places.” After all, “we’ve deprioritized investment in our shared civic spaces for at least a generation, leaving us with inadequate parks, trails, libraries and community centers, along with a backlog of maintenance issues for the spaces that do exist.”
Planner Susan Henderson wants to “rethink what it means to create shared spaces,” and “design environments that heal, connect and inspire.” The University of Michigan School of Public Health’s Lindsay Kobayashi concurs. She advocates for public spaces “that encourage interaction” and urban planning “that prioritizes human connection.”
Make no mistake—the social-capital collapse is real. The data are sobering, if not depressing. Writer Derek Thompson documentedthat every demographic cohort “now spends significantly less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the 21st century, when some people already thought we were in a socializing crisis.” The overall drop is “about 20%,” but for “teenagers and for young [b]lack men, it’s closer to 40%.”
Last year, Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey published an analysis of “a dramatic shift,” with “[a]most every part of our lives … more likely to take place at home.” (According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 1920 and 2020, the average number of residents in American households fell by 41%, and a hefty 27.6% “of all U.S. occupied households were one-person households in 2020.”)
Friendship is in decline, and a survey by Bank of America found that half of adults between the ages of 18 and 28 spend zero dollars on dating per month. Little wonder, then, that a poll by the American Psychiatric Association revealed that 33% “experienced feelings of loneliness at least once a week” during the past year, with 18-to 34-year-olds “more likely than older people to report loneliness.”
Even for introverts, excessive “me” time is salubrious to neither the mind nor the body. In 2024, the Biden administration’s surgeon general warned:
The effects of social connection, isolation and loneliness on mortality are comparable, and in some cases greater, than those of many other risk factors … including lifestyle factors (e.g., smoking, alcohol consumption, physical inactivity), traditional clinical risks factors (e.g., high blood pressure, body mass index, cholesterol levels), environmental factors (e.g., air pollution), and clinical interventions (e.g., flu vaccine, high blood pressure medication, rehabilitation).
The crisis isn’t doing any favors for the entitlement expenditures driving the federal government’s nightmarish red ink, either. In the words of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Tyler J. VanderWeele, for older Americans, “both loneliness and social isolation” have “effects … on physical function limitations, on happiness, on one’s sense of optimism, on one’s sense of purpose in life, as well as various other mental health outcomes, like depression, or having a sense of hope.”
So everyone agrees. The phenomenon is real, it significantly detracts from Americans’ wellbeing, and it’s costly. But are cities competent—or even equipped—to come to the rescue?
Before any dividends from more “investment” in parks, libraries, plazas, playgrounds, riverfronts and the like can be realized, an undeniable challenge must be overcome: crime. Most urban Americans don’t feel safe. The left insists that the data are improving, and the right holds that the statistics are flawed. But few city-dwellers pore over the numbers and trend lines. Gut-instinct perceptions of personal safety shape their willingness to leave the house. And polling clearly indicates a high degree of unease. An August survey by YouGovAmerica found that 53% of adults agreed that “since 2020, crime rates in U.S. cities have increased.” Interestingly, the results were higher for Hispanics (73%), blacks (71%) and women (71%).
Closely related to crime is the fear of encounters with the homeless. Half of respondents to a recent poll believe that encampments are increasing in their area. Aggressive panhandling, needles scattered about, and public urination/defecation are significant deterrents to “going out.” As the Cicero Institute puts it, the “dramatic increase in homeless encampments over the last decade has deteriorated shared public spaces such as parks and downtown shopping districts,” with the “crime and safety issues that accompany encampments mak[ing] them susceptible to violence, exploitation, and drug trafficking,” putting “both the housed and unhoused in danger.”
In April, Politico reported that “California voters have grown so frustrated with the blue state’s failure to reduce homelessness that well over a third of the electorate now supports local laws that allow police to arrest people camping outside if they refuse shelter.”
Finally, there’s a strong argument that getting out of the way—i.e., deregulation—is cities’ best tactic for fighting loneliness. Yuck it up as “Kumbaya” naiveté, but cohousing appears to be catching on. What AARP calls “intentional” communities, “with physical design elements that facilitate spontaneous interaction and programmatic elements such as regularly shared dinners,” are winning converts.
Profiling a cohousing development in Portland, National Public Radio learned that residents “admit there are many tradeoffs to living in such close proximity to their neighbors including navigating a shared chore list and mutual financial arrangement.” But “many also say that they’ve found a way to conquer the loneliness and isolation that plagues so many Americans—especially today’s parents.” Cohousing California’s directory of communities “is growing,” with developments in Oakland, Berkeley, Sacramento, Fresno, Los Angeles, San Diego and several smaller cities.
Transit’s dire fiscal condition offers convincing evidence that lifestyle modification, at the hands of government, can be an expensive flop. If cities can’t get residents out of their automobiles, how likely is it that residents can be coaxed out of their homes? Perhaps addressing today’s safety-concern disincentives, and stepping aside so individuals, nonprofits and even profit-seeking entrepreneurs can build “environments that heal, connect, and inspire,” is a wiser approach.
