Should More of Us Be Moving to Live Near Friends?
Illustration: Lizzie Soufleris
25 years ago, Toby Rush and his friend group at Kansas State University received some valuable advice from elder mentors that would shape their entire adult lives. “They gave us this thought that resonated so profoundly: Go ask any 80-year-old who’s lived a good life to reflect on what really mattered, and almost every single one of them will say it’s not the car, it’s not the house, not where I live, the job title, or the amount of money I made,” he recalls. “It’s people, the relationships. Their challenge to us was to invest often and deeply over a long period of time in the treasure we’re going to care the most about, and we’d be the wealthiest people in the world.” Today, he and his friends are all neighbors. In their enclave of the Kansas City metro area, they share a lawnmower, a pool, casual babysitting duties, a text thread for grocery borrowing dubbed “Who’s Got an Egg?,” and effortless swaths of their lives together that would likely have been impossible if not for an intentional effort to keep in close contact by remaining close by.
The world has a way of pulling at friendships forged in youth. We form easy ties with kindergarten confidants, neighborhood playmates, and college pals, but relocating for jobs, love, whatever it may be (even when it’s just a short distance away) can sever the strongest of bonds, over years of increasingly dry text chains and overnight with cross-country moves that shake up the world you built together. It’s true that there’s a normalized-to-the-point-of-somewhat-inevitable distancing that happens in friendships with regular life changes, like in the case of the stereotypical buddy who drops out of their social circle the second they marry or have a kid. But studies suggest we’re in more perilous times than previous generations when it comes to sustaining friendships.
The loneliness epidemic
For the unfamiliar, the “loneliness epidemic” is not simply a term thrown around on blogs and internet forums but a broader societal issue on which even the US Surgeon General has sounded off. The phenomenon seems to have descended slowly like a fog throughout the late 2010s as our lives became increasingly digital and siloed. It’s also being called a friendship recession. As one might expect, the COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans reported having lost touch with most of their friends throughout COVID, per a 2021 study.
Rush and his friend group felt that routine deterioration at work in the time after college when everyone starts to scatter; he moved to Houston for a few years, one friend went to Wichita, and another decamped to DC. It was the late ’90s, long before Zooms and group chats, and the friends reconvened a few times a year before concluding it simply wasn’t enough. “We were having these conversations, like: ‘Guys, this is just not sustainable. We’ll always be friends, but if we really want to invest and know each other deeply, we got to be in the same city,’” he remembers. “So within probably a nine-month period, three or four of us moved back to Kansas City. And it was awesome.”
The tight proximity fortified their ties over a couple of years. And then came the children. When their individual lives were overtaken by little humans with big demands on their time, Rush and his friends sensed that familiar erosion on the horizon. “We could see the trajectory that not even in the too distant future, we were going to have to schedule our friendships, and that didn’t feel right,” he says. At first, the concept of stepping up their commitment by moving even closer—within walking distance of each other—sounded too dreamy to be a real possibility. But it would make theirs as uncomplicated as college campus friendships are, when you can bump into your besties as you leave the dorms and catch up on the way to class. So, 18 years ago, he and his buddy bought homes on either side of their other friend. “When you literally see each other as you’re pulling in your driveway, or mowing your lawn, or playing with your kids in the front yard, to walk across the street is a very achievable friction point,” Rush says of the arrangement.
In terms of the real estate, the acquisition of properties has been smooth. “It’s gotten to the point now where a neighbor will come and say, ‘Hey, we’re looking at moving and would rather not get a realtor. We know you like to buy the houses, would you guys want to buy our house?’ And we’re like, ‘Sure!’ We’ll do what a realtor would do and find a bunch of comps and settle on [a price], but no one pays realtor fees and it’s very amicable.” 14 houses are now in the fold, filled with friends, friends of friends, and their families. Rush’s children and their neighborhood peers have essentially been raised together—he estimates that number at 34 or 35 kids, many of whom are all grown up now. The deep investment in friendship modeled by their parents is a value that is not lost on the generations that have followed.
“All they’ve ever known is families that have open doors,” Rush explains. “My son was one of the oldest. There are three his age in the neighborhood and they’ve all come back and said, ‘This isn’t normal, is it?’ My son was recently hanging out with another one of my friends—one of the cool things is when you get to mentor your friends’ kids—and my friend Scott asked him about his fears at this point in his life. He responded really authentically, ‘I’m afraid I won’t have as good of friends as my dad, you, and the others.’ Your kids are going to value what you value, so it was very rewarding for me to hear my kid, unprompted, say, ‘I see that Dad and Mom value these relationships and these friends. And I want that.’”
Build your own “MiniHood”
Oakland-based founder Phil Levin placed the value of friendship pretty high on his own list. About four years into intentionally residing in community with his friends on a compound they named Radish, he launched Live Near Friends in 2023 to spread the gospel. The online platform is geared toward helping interested parties arrange to live within a five or 10 minute walk of each other, which Levin notes is “a very common fantasy” nowadays. He hopes to be the catalyst that coaxes those fantasies out of the group chat into the real world of real estate.
The first offering of Live Near Friends is called MiniHood, which Levin likens to a multiplayer version of Zillow. “You set a radius inside of which you’re trying to get everyone to move, so you’re able to coordinate with them, view homes—some people want to rent, some people want to buy, it allows you to [factor in] both,” he says. The other option is Hot Friend Compounds, which helps friends seeking real estate set up for multiple occupants on a single plot. “This is targeted to people that actually want to co-buy and own a property together,” Levin explains. “This might look like duplexes, triplexes, homes with granny flats, ADUs. There’s real estate out there in the wild for multiple occupants. You have your apartment, I have my apartment, but they’re right next to each other and maybe we share a yard.”
Levin’s 20 closest friends are, because of Radish, his closest friends by physical proximity. Most of them have dinner together six days a week. They put in a big Instacart order every few days and split the cost of food. Levin basically doesn’t cook anymore, finding that his talents are better suited to the cleanup aspect of things. It’s not been hard for others to see the appeal of such a setup. “I think why we’re seeing a lot of interest in [Live Near Friends], partly, is the loneliness epidemic,” Levin explains. “I’ve heard it called the National Deficit of Hanging Out—people just not spending time together. The amount of coordination and logistics to actually spend time with people these days is a lot. But I think, on the other side of it, people are looking for better ways to start families and raise kids. Traditionally, this has been done with the support of a community. I think it’s a really hard thing to do alone.”
Kids (or no kids) in community
One of the initial motivators that pushed Levin to convince his friends to live nearby has been the abundant access to childcare. “My wife and I were trying to create the best home for ourselves, the home that we want to have kids [in], and we were thinking, ‘What’s the most important thing? That we’re around people that will support us,’” he insists. “We can—without planning—hand someone a baby monitor and go out every single night without a babysitter, which is a radically different lifestyle than that of most new parents. It’s not something that cost us a lot of money, just coordination.”
Relying only on our standard social unit, the nuclear family, can feel isolating for many people. Levin co-writes a blog with Gillian Morris called Supernuclear, which explores an expansion of that classic lens on domestic life via profiles on co-living houses and communities. Morris, who has resided in a number of co-living arrangements in the Bay Area and NYC, and currently runs a co-living space in Puerto Rico, is no stranger to discussions about the loneliness epidemic. She worries that an emphasis on an individualistic, independent ideal is pulling snags in a social fabric that benefits all parties mutually. In fact, she’s seen this resistance firsthand when folks in her co-living spaces express hesitance about accepting babysitting help pro-bono. “There’s this sense that we must do everything ourselves, and I actually think it’s a beautiful thing to open yourself up to help and to not turn it down when it’s offered,” Morris says. “But people just need to get over that hump.”
For UK-based journalist Rose Stokes, doing motherhood alongside her longtime best friend Maddie was a huge influence on the decision to trade in the hustle and bustle of London for slower-paced Bath, England. “Your friendships are just as important, if not more so, than your romantic relationships. So why wouldn’t I invest in a relationship that’s sustained me my entire life?” she says. “Why wouldn’t I want to move to support that relationship?”
Even a three hours’ drive or so away, Stokes and her best friend never grew apart. They stayed in touch via check-ins and goodnight texts, cheering each other from the sidelines as they celebrated major events and life updates. But now, as they each raise two children in the countryside, she echoes Rush’s point about the total lack of friction in coming together. “It’s just so effortless,” she says of the Bath era of her friendship with Maddie. “When you are texting someone who’s not [living] in your orbit, you have to explain loads of context. Now, I hear much more about the kind of banal details and the day-to-day. It creates a stronger sense of intimacy because it enables me to see the fullness of her life rather than just the things that she felt made the headlines.”
Having a network to lean on while raising children is an obvious selling point of living near friends. But the community that grows out of raising a kid—a circle of parents and guardians that you befriend by virtue of having a common daycare, school, and playdates or sports to coordinate—can also form through being neighbors with your best buddies. During the pandemic, Paris Smith and her partner left Brooklyn for Twin Cities, Minnesota, where a number of their pals had recently relocated, in large part “because of the fact that we are child-free adults,” she says. Her partner’s family lives about an hour away from the area, which was another incentive, but the friendship component was “critical.”
“My family is based in New Orleans. I don’t know anybody else in New Orleans, and so as much as I love my family and as much as my partner and I love his family, the family wasn’t enough for us,” Smith explains. “We’re very independent and social, and so I think we would be lonely in an environment where we didn’t have a lot of friends. It isn’t enough to sustain my personal social battery and fulfillment; I gain a lot of joy out of being with my friends and spending time with them and their families and being spontaneous about how we hang out. I don’t think there would’ve been a reason for us to leave New York without having all of those factors come together.”
Smith and her partner’s Brooklyn-based buddies flocked to Minneapolis and St. Paul over the course of about seven years, either for work, grad school, jobs, or simply to return to their Midwestern roots. “We suddenly had this group of six or seven people that we had known for many years that were all in this bubble,” she says. “Here was this little oasis where a lot of folks are within walking distance to each other and have yards and can all gather and hang out. We were able to find a house that is literally two blocks down the same street as one of our really good friends. We’re a five-minute walk to another couple that we’re friends with, and then a seven-minute walk to another couple we’re friends with. We all live along the same three streets. And in this time, we’ve recruited friends from Colorado to come join us.
Recruiting your besties
This type of residential recruitment is a full-time job for Priya Rose. “Fractal is my main hustle,” she says of her Brooklyn-based network, which she launched shortly after the pandemic. “It’s a social scene with many nodes. It started as a bunch of apartments, all in the same building, of friends who just hung out all the time, did projects all the time, worked out together, et cetera. Now, it’s a lot of things. We have something called Fractal University, which is basically us teaching each other classes from our living rooms. And then there’s all these different co-living houses that are all around New York now. Each of those is their own social center, in some ways.” Rose recently moved from her spot at the original Fractal building to Fractal 2, which has a slightly more family-friendly bent to it—an even more ideal setting for her after having a baby this year.
Similar to Morris, Rose previously lived in the Bay Area, where the co-living scene is abuzz. In 2021, after moving into a three-bedroom New York apartment with friends, a vacancy in the unit across the hall presented an opportunity. “We happened to have another friend who was trying to move from San Francisco to New York at the time, so we helped her sign that lease. It was a four-bedroom, so we helped her fill those rooms. At that point, it was like Friends. We would just leave our doors unlocked and go between them.” So, Rose dug deeper and deeper into organizing the community over the next few years. She’s gone semi-viral singing the praises of living near friends and has sold numerous pals on the lifestyle. Like Rush, Stokes, and Smith, she points out the natural ease of linking up to hang out when the need to “make plans” is replaced by casually bumping into each other.
“The sense of serendipity [is a major benefit],” Rose says. “Before I was in this situation, it was a lot of, ‘Let’s get coffee next Tuesday at 7:00.’ Now that’s just way less common. It feels a lot more like being in school. You just can spontaneously hang out with people… As an adult, there’s a lot of drudgery—you go to the grocery store, you do your laundry. But for the last multiple years, I always go to the grocery store with a friend.”
According to Rose, the Fractal organization has no religious or ideological binding agent beyond simply a desire to maximize time spent around pals. Levin, too, laughs off comparisons to a commune tinged with the darkness of every negative commune stereotype—though by definition, he admits that Radish kind of fits. “They are [communes], so part of that’s true,” he says of such co-living arrangements. “But it’s an urban commune. Most of us have great jobs and we all have private space. We have our own homes, which are just homes near each other rather than homes near strangers.”
Levin isn’t promising a perfect world through Live Near Friends. “No one’s trying to create utopia here,” he insists. “What this is going to achieve is just making your life feel 30% easier and 30% more supported. It doesn’t solve the world’s problems, that’s not the claim. It’s a better way to live, alongside a bunch of people that [you] think really matter, especially in busy, hard, or lonely periods.”
The good and bad times of life will happen anywhere, but the prospect of living in walking distance of your best friends certainly seems…well, maybe just a little bit utopian? “It’s like you have your own trusted network of folks that can assist and provide support to one another—whether that’s a folding table or our friends that live seven minutes away watching our dog this weekend,” Smith adds. “It is a real extended family in a way that is beautiful to see. I kind of wish it for everyone.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
