The Work of Community

Choosing Friction in an Age of Convenience

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Nature conspires to erode the walls we build: ice swells, the ground heaves, and the stones fall back to earth. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert Frost wrote in “Mending Wall.” His poem is often read as a critique of man-made barriers, but Frost’s narrator is more ambivalent. The wall persists, and each year, he and his neighbor meet to repair and talk over it. The boundary may divide their land, but it brings them together, giving rise to the poem’s most famous line: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost’s insight is that the things that seem like barriers to connection might actually be the things that bring us together. Indeed, without the annual work of tending to the wall, those neighbors would have one less reason to meet.

This points to something fundamental about community: it has to be built and maintained.

Today, it seems easier not to make the effort. Technology has made it possible to work, shop, and be entertained without leaving home. Streaming, ecommerce, and delivery services have turned outbound trips into optional ones. Home has become a walled garden, increasingly entered not by neighbors, but by delivery drivers and service workers. When everything can be brought to us, going out—to the grocery store, the pharmacy, a restaurant, a movie—starts to feel like unnecessary friction. Meanwhile, shared experiences in real life are getting more expensive while solitary ones are getting cheaper.

When interaction is optional, it becomes easier to skip. Not because people don’t want connection, but because it now requires intention, planning, coordination, effort—friction. Social encounters that were once commonplace now have to be arranged. And so we have fewer interactions with other people outside our front doors.

The built environment often reinforces this pattern. Homes turn away from the street: facades are dominated by garages, otherwise blank-faced, with social life pushed out of sight; setbacks, fences, and deep front yards add visual and physical distance. Streets optimized for speed discourage lingering or casual travel on foot, and the absence of nearby cafés, shops, or parks removes everyday reasons to step outside. Exclusionary zoning, minimum lot sizes, transportation priorities, and market preferences have compounded these patterns over decades. The built environment sets the conditions for interaction: if it is designed to thwart community, staying home is often the path of least resistance.

But even a neighborhood with good bones does not safeguard against retreat.

Here in Austin, I live in a historic neighborhood in the central city. Even though the neighborhood is still car-oriented by urbanist standards, homes are close enough to the street to see who’s passing by, low fences and open yards invite conversation, sidewalks and shared streets provide space to walk and chat, and there’s just enough neighborhood retail to create reasons to leave the house. As a result, I’ve met many of my neighbors, renters and homeowners alike. We help each other with missed packages, text when a dog gets loose, take in each other’s trash cans, and stop to talk on walks or at the local coffee shop. These aren’t deep relationships, but they create a sense of familiarity and neighborliness—and little more. We still mostly live behind closed doors, even when we’re just a few steps apart. You can live here comfortably, even pleasantly, without ever participating in anything that feels like a community.

I know this firsthand. Shortly after moving in, I joined the neighborhood association and later served as acting vice president, but we never even managed a voting quorum at meetings. People who came didn’t really have a sense of what we were there for. Meanwhile, I put more of my civic energy into housing advocacy, city commissions, and the broader urbanist work I was already doing—and became part of a community there. I stopped going to neighborhood association meetings. The neighborhood remains the backdrop to my life, but not quite the stage.

The physical conditions for neighborliness were there, but they weren’t enough to sustain an organized community. Indeed, good neighborhood bones make it possible for those who want to step outside to do so—but even then, we mostly only encounter neighbors walking their dogs and pushing strollers. If we didn’t have a dog, I wonder if we would get outside half as much.

The usual explanations don’t quite resolve it. Yes, going out has gotten more expensive. Yes, technology has made staying home easier. Yes, the built environment reinforces this behavior. But even where interaction is free, even where it is easy, we are still opting out.

The answer may not be better places alone, but people willing to create and sustain connection within them.

If stepping out matters, someone has to step up.

My friend Pari Schacht describes what that looks like in practice. She recounts the story of her neighborhood women’s club, which is defying the trend of increasing isolation with an active membership and social calendar decades after its founding. The women’s club has been around since 1958, but the only reason it has persisted for so long is because women from the neighborhood have made an effort to keep it going, and to keep it valuable. As Pari writes, “one of the biggest barriers to community in adult life is not desire. It’s friction.” Someone has to be the one who goes first:

Everyone is busy. Someone has to reach out. Someone has to pick a date. Someone has to host. Someone has to follow up. Even when we want more connection, the effort required to create it from scratch can be just enough to keep it from happening.

But in making the effort, the club’s leaders have created a structure that lowers the activation energy for everyone else. The club serves a vital role in the neighborhood, welcoming new neighbors, creating connections, and fostering lifelong family friendships. What its leaders have built is not a club sustained by obligation, but a standing invitation to participate in neighborhood life.

This is social infrastructure built on the recognition that place is not enough.

Compared to Pari’s neighborhood, my own has more of the conditions urbanists typically prize: mixed uses, sidewalks, neighborhood retail, walkability. But the comparison only underscores the point: even in a place with stronger physical conditions for interaction, organized community does not happen by default. It’s not at all effortless—and that’s the point.

A neighborhood doesn’t have to provide community. But if it doesn’t, it has to be found somewhere else. If you’re waiting for it to show up on your doorstep—even in a walkable neighborhood—you may be waiting a long time.

Somebody has to do the work.

What’s at stake here is not just convenience or preference, but the conditions that make social life possible. Loneliness and isolation are personal tragedies, but they are also civic ones. Without everyday encounters, the familiarity that makes public life feel welcoming begins to erode. When we don’t see our neighbors, everyone beyond our front doors becomes easier to ignore, easier to abstract away—not just in our neighborhoods, but in our politics, our institutions, and our common life. These fractures won’t be repaired from behind screens. They require us to show up in the same places, to see and be seen, to navigate the small frictions of living alongside one another. Frost understood this. The wall he describes may be an inconvenience, but it is also a reason to meet—a place where neighbors return, again and again, to tend and repair.

Human nature demands that we see each other: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” We don’t love walls like his—and yet we need the friction they create all the same. Instead, we’ve spent years optimizing for convenience, eliminating friction wherever we can. In succeeding, we’ve stripped away many of the small, incidental moments that gave daily life its texture. If we want community, we will have to build some friction back into our lives—good fences where we can meet and mend.

And some of us are going to have to choose to do it first.

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