Free Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

get his wallet back if he happened to drop it on his street?
    “I’d never see it again!” he said with a laugh. “Look, shortly after we moved in, we were burglarized. The police were the first to say we’d never see any of our stuff ever again. This happens constantly out here. Everybody turns their head away. Nobody looks out for each other.”

    We Can Trust Other People More Than We Think
    Survey respondents rate the likelihood of a stranger returning their lost wallet at only about 25 percent. But an experiment in Toronto found that among real strangers, the likelihood of return was better than 80 percent. (Scott Keck, with data from Helliwell, John, and Shun Wang, “Trust and Well-Being,” working paper, Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2010)
    Had Mountain House attracted a particularly untrustworthy demographic? Probably not. Randy’s mistrust actually points to the tricky twist in that lost-wallet question: your level of faith in getting your wallet back has almost nothing to do with the actual rate of wallet losses and returns in your community. The numbers are independent, just as most people’s perception of safety has more to do with the plentitude of graffiti than the density of purse snatchers. Most people’s response to the wallet question ends up having as much to do with the quality and frequency of their social interactions as it does with the actual trustworthiness of other people, Helliwell told me. * We may live among noble, honest, wallet-returning people, yet if we do not experience positive social interactions with them, we are unlikely to build those bonds of trust.
    Randy complained that his neighbors didn’t keep an eye on one another’s homes. They didn’t chat on the sidewalks. They didn’t get to know one another.
    But how would they? The urban system gave them few opportunities. There were some five thousand people living in partially finished Mountain House, but there were virtually no jobs and no services beyond a little library, a couple of schools, and a small convenience store. Most of the adults drove out of Mountain House before dawn and returned after dark, cruising, one by one, into their garages and closing the doors behind them. The only people left during the day were the kids. So Randy’s lack of trust in his neighbors was at least partly artificially induced. In stretching his daily routine, the city had sucked much of the spectrum of casual social contact right out of the neighborhood.
    This is not a local phenomenon, nor is it a trivial matter.
    The Social Deficit and the City
    Just before the crash of 2008 a team of Italian economists led by Stefano Bartolini tried to account for that seemingly inexplicable gap between rising income and flatlining happiness in the United States, using the statistical method known as regression analysis. * The Italians tried removing various components of economic and social data from their models, and they found that the only factor powerful enough to hold down people’s self-reported happiness in the face of all that wealth was the country’s declining social capital—the social networks and interactions that keep us connected with others. It was even more corrosive than the income gap between rich and poor.
    A healthy social network looks like the root mass of a tree. From the most important relationships at the heart of the network, thinner roots stretch out to contacts of different strength and intensity. Most people’s root networks are contracting, closing in on themselves, circling more and more tightly around spouses, partners, parents, and kids. These are our most important relationships, but every arborist knows that a tree with a small root-ball is more likely to fall over when the wind blows.
    The sociologist Robert Putnam warned back in 2000 that these networks of lighter relationships had been dwindling for decades. The trend has continued. People are increasingly solitary. In 1985 the typical