Mary Ghalustians, left, and Vinita Persaud are neighbours who became close during the pandemic and now go on daily dog walks together in Mississauga, Ont.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Every morning at 7:15, neighbours Vinita Persaud and Mary Ghalustians meet on their quiet cul-de-sac in Mississauga to walk their dogs, Freddy and Harvey. Their conversations meander: family dynamics and work politics, of course, but also critiques of TV shows, intel on local restaurants, recipe and butter tart exchanges. After 45 minutes, each woman retreats to her home office for the day, enlivened by this human time first thing in the morning.
“We’ve never run out of things to talk about,” said Ms. Persaud, 41. “It’s become a deep friendship.”
Both moved to the street during the pandemic. When Ms. Persaud arrived in October, 2020, another neighbour wasted no time inviting her and her husband for a wine tasting in his garage, the door open for air circulation. In May, 2021, Ms. Ghalustians and her husband were waiting for their moving truck when a throng of residents emerged to greet them outside.
It remains a friendly street. After work in the summers, with the sun beaming down on their front yards, people are drawn out from their fenced-in back yards. Kids play, adults sip wine – easy, spontaneous meetups different from the labyrinth of scheduling dinner with friends.
“I didn’t realize how unique it is to be so connected with everyone on your street,” said Ms. Ghalustians, 31. “I have friends who don’t know their neighbours’ names. They hide from them, try and avoid seeing them. I know the name of every single person who lives here. I could go up to any door if I needed help.”
Both Ms. Persaud and Ms. Ghalustians moved to their street during the pandemic, and quickly found a friendly, welcoming community of neighbours.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Their happy street is an anomaly. For decades, time with neighbours has been dropping in North America. Research finds people becoming more insular, investing more of their time within their four walls. Young people especially are forgoing visits with neighbours, choosing likeminded communities online over the one outside their front door.
More than a third of Canadians said they were interacting less with neighbours than they used to, according to 2021 polling from The Angus Reid Institute. Respondents complained about neighbours being closed off. And they worried about inadvertently offending the people next door in the course of a casual conversation.
Canadians met with just two neighbours over six months, according to a 2018 Ipsos poll that found respondents didn’t know many of their neighbours’ last names, favourite foods or who they voted for. Alberta, with its fast-growing population, and Quebec clocked in as the least neighbourly, Atlantic Canada the most.
An age gap persisted in these relationships. Seventy per cent of Canadians 75 years old and up said they trust most people in their neighbourhood. That dropped to 43 per cent of those under 34, according to 2022 figures from Statistics Canada.
There’s a sense that “being a good neighbour” is a relic from some bygone era, when homemakers welcomed new arrivals to the street with a casserole. Who has the time today?
A Calgary neighbourhood in June, 2013. Research finds people becoming more insular, with young people in particular choosing likeminded communities online, rather than the one outside their door.Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press
The retreat from community collides with research showing connection with neighbours is uniquely good for people. Performing one small act of kindness a week for neighbours helped ease loneliness, social anxiety and stress, according to a study involving 4,284 users of Nextdoor, an app for fostering local connections, in Britain, Australia and the U.S. People who trust most of their neighbours reported a stronger sense of meaning and purpose in their lives, according to the 2022 data from Statistics Canada.
Neighbours can be a comfort and a reliable contact close by, knowing our daily rhythms. It’s a kinship different from far-flung relatives, friends and colleagues.
Often, the people living on our streets and apartment blocks are different from us – in age, life experience, culture and politics – though they may share similar values for the neighbourhood. They’re contacts we might not otherwise meet or befriend. With division and mistrust running high, sociability scholars see these relationships as especially worth cultivating.
Few of us consciously pull back from our neighbours, argues Katherine Goldstein, an American journalist whose forthcoming book is How to Find Your People: A Guide to the Transformative Power of Community.
The flight has more to do with rising individualism: an ever narrower focus on career, finances, personal health, children and their many activities. In a gig economy, people’s workloads have grown heavier, their hours less predictable. With all this busyness, neighbours start to feel like an afterthought.
People spend lunch hour in Montreal's Little Burgundy neighbourhood in November, 2021. According to 2021 polling from Angus Reid, more than a third of Canadians said they were interacting less with neighbours than they used to.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
“The way we prioritize individual advancement – either work advancement or, directly or indirectly, trying to enrich our children to get ahead – this takes us out of the spontaneity in meeting our neighbours,” said Ms. Goldstein.
Pandemic lockdowns shuffled these dynamics. With nowhere to go and no one to see, many turned to their neighbours. “Nobody had anything going on so we just sat on our porches at night,” she said.
Ms. Goldstein was buoyed by the shift. But now, with regular life resumed, she sees a slow return to individualism – to those four walls.
For other neighbours, those first tentative steps grew into closer ties in the last four years.
Ted Nesbitt, 56, remembers the bond developing between four households on the street in Holland Landing, Ont., where he’s lived for 24 years with his wife Tracee. Once pandemic restrictions lifted, neighbours migrated from their firepits to informal pub nights hosted around the Nesbitts’s antique table, every Friday after work.
Mr. Nesbitt grew particularly close to one neighbour. Through months of lockdowns, the man couldn’t see his teenage grandchildren. Mr. Nesbitt’s mother was isolated in a care home, and he rarely saw his sister and brother, who live more than an hour away.
“When I wasn’t able to see my siblings, I was able to see this guy’s face,” Mr. Nesbitt said. “I almost consider him like a brother now.”
Bargain hunters shop at the Great Glebe Garage Sale in the Glebe neighbourhood of Ottawa, in May, 2022. Research shows connection with neighbours is uniquely good for us, and performing just one small act of kindness a week for neighbours helped ease loneliness, social anxiety and stress.Spencer Colby/The Globe and Mail
It was the first pandemic Christmas when Greg Emerson, 52, knocked on neighbours’ doors in Ottawa, caroling with his wife Kim Newman.
After lockdowns loosened, Mr. Emerson and his wife resumed the annual holiday party they host for their neighbours. There are smoked devilled eggs, “atomic buffalo turds” (smoked, bacon-wrapped jalapenos), and dark ‘n’ stormy cocktails. Ms. Newman plays piano and everybody sings.
“It really only takes one or two people to get things going, to light the fire, and then all of a sudden the doors crack open,” Mr. Emerson said.
More than a decade ago, they greeted Jennifer Ong Tone and her husband when they pulled up on the street in their U-Haul truck on their move-in date.
Like other close-knit streets, there is mutual help here. People shovel each other’s driveways in winter, share garden bounty in summer and help the sick. “Everyone seems to have an eye out for one another,” said Ms. Ong Tone, 38.
On the Nextdoor Canada app, a “Thank a Neighbour” feature lets people extol the good deeds of others: a drive for errands, an invite to a Diwali celebration, help pruning a tree or finding a missing pet bird.
“These small acts go a long way – waving to a neighbour, listening to them, checking in on them,” said Nextdoor Canada managing director Christopher Doyle, who wants to challenge the notion that only extroverts and community go-getters are good at this.
People’s inability to connect with neighbours is often more simple. There can be a fear of asking for help or of putting yourself out there, said Ms. Goldstein, who recently launched a “community-finding” project related to her book.
“Getting to know people is a skill. The less we do it, the harder it can be to restart that,” she said. “Imagine you have someone move in on your street. You see the moving van and think, ‘I should go over and say hi.’ But you feel a little nervous about it, or you think, ‘I’m too busy.’ You don’t do it. Weeks go by, then months, and then they’ve lived there an entire year. Now it feels really hard to go over and introduce yourself.”
She pointed out that technology – neighbours walking their dogs with heads down, ear buds in – and remote workers holed up in their homes haven’t helped either.
Studies and community initiatives are also probing how urban design plays into these isolation loops. Tall fences; the disuse of front porches on hot summer evenings in favour of air conditioning; the advent of garage door openers that allow neighbours to drive straight in without stepping outside – all lost opportunities to interact. Sidewalks and the walkability of neighbourhoods factor in, as do commute times: The longer people sit in their cars to and from work, the less time they have left in their communities.
Befriending neighbours can be even harder in condos, where shared space is finite, contact is often limited to a cramped elevator ride and residents disappear down corridors of identical doors.
Little Mountain Cohousing is an intentional community in Vancouver. Three times a week, the residents have the option to attend a shared meal.Jackie Dives/The Globe and Mail
In Port Moody, B.C., a movement is underway for more neighbourly low-, mid- and high-rise buildings. Working with Happy Cities, a group that focuses on planning public spaces, streets and housing that nurture health, Port Moody recently published social well-being design guidelines that push for more “social circulation” in these buildings: courtyards and lobbies where neighbours can linger; nooks near elevators and stairwells where residents can talk or exchange books; shared amenity rooms situated in high traffic areas. Happy Cities co-founder Charles Montgomery said the idea is to get neighbours to interact and eventually come to rely on one another.
Mr. Montgomery describes his own home in Vancouver as “a machine for social relationships.” He lives at Little Mountain Cohousing, an alternative housing model where people have individual apartments but the rest of the building design draws them together. There’s a common kitchen, where residents can cook and eat together, a shared rooftop garden, workshop and music room. Exterior hallways overlook a communal courtyard, encouraging contact.
Mr. Montgomery recalled one week earlier this winter: he joined a common meal and cleaned up on the dish crew; shared lunch with his neighbour across the hall and rehearsed “Stand By Me” for Little Mountain’s variety show.
“I know not everybody wants this level of engagement with their neighbours – and it may be even more than I want,” he joked, while acknowledging he’s not lonely anymore.
“I find that being challenged with the differences of my neighbours, working through those differences, it’s giving me a higher degree of trust in everyone else in society,” he said. “It’s boosting our capacity to imagine the complexity of other people.”