Neighbors, eye to eye? Where a politics writer found America’s new comfort zone.

Episode transcript

Clayton Collins: Americans’ loss of social connection has been an issue for long enough to have inspired the Robert Putnam book “Bowling Alone” way back in 2000. The pandemic increased isolation for a few years. Loneliness is still being called an epidemic. And technology has in some ways accelerated the retreat from real life community. AI companionship is now regularly discussed.

In early 2023, The Monitor’s Sophie Hills wrote a kind of antidote story about front porch culture and the power of people to collectively make life richer.

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Collins: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. This episode is an encore of one that we produced in May of last year. What makes it as timely today – now 24 years after that Putnam book, and 17 months after Sophie appeared on this podcast to talk about her story? Connections remain frayed. Neighborliness and civility – especially toward those with different views – are traits now even more in demand as a US presidential election nears. According to a Pew Research poll, 60 percent of U.S. adults find it stressful to talk politics with those who hold different views – a 10 point hike from 2019. Maybe we all need some front-porch time. Here’s our encore.

Welcome, Sophie!

Sophie Hills: Hi, Clay.

Collins: A lot of front porches in the news stories that get attention lately have been places of suspicion, not hospitality. You write about that in your piece. And Patrik Jonsson, a colleague of ours, also looked at the defensiveness that has even led to people being shot for quite innocently entering someone else’s space. But you led off with a D.C. neighborhood, Petworth, where the pandemic period had the opposite effect. People mingling – on porches. How did you find it and decide to set the story there?

Hills: Well, this story started out as a companion to Patrik’s story, looking at these recent instances in the news. We were sort of wondering: how do people feel now when a stranger knocks on their door? Or how do people feel when kids are playing in their yard and it’s not their kids? So that’s how this story started out. And then it broadened into a look at neighborhood culture more generally, including things like porch fests, which happen around the country. They’re really just neighborhoods that organize musical events. And people offer up their porches or their yards for musicians to play concerts from. It’s just a big, more organized block party.

I ended up going to a porch fest in Petworth, and speaking to some people there about it, I spoke to someone in another neighborhood of D.C., I spoke to someone in Key West, and asking all these people what they value about neighborly interaction, and how they feel when strangers knock on their door.

Collins: Hmm.

Hills: And this all led back to porches. One person in this story, Michael Dolan, he spoke about porches as a liminal space. “They’re the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside.” Those are his words. And so people feel safe because they’re in their own space. But they’re still in the world. You’re still interacting with people walking by, and you can’t necessarily control that part. And so porches open us up to the people around us.

Collins: Your piece also goes into some of the history and sociology about how front porches came to be so important to people. There are also some surprises in some of the statistics you cite. For one, that rural people interact with neighbors less, for example, even though they’re more likely to know their neighbors. I’m just wondering what surprised you most in the reporting.

Hills: That was surprising to me too, Clay. And another point that polls reflected that I didn’t expect was that almost all Americans over 65 know their neighbors in some way. Only 4% of Americans over 65 say they don’t know any neighbors. But 23% of Americans under 30 say they don’t know any neighbors. And I experienced that a little bit in my door to door interviewing of people, or attempting to do so, in suburban Maryland, just outside D.C. If we’re looking at the polls, that would indicate that people are less likely there to know their neighbors, yet they’re more likely to interact with the neighbors they do know. That may have been true, but people certainly didn’t want to talk to me about it. So they still didn’t want to talk to a stranger.

Collins: There is a generational dimension to this story. Sophie, you probably came of age with technology, maybe with texting as a primary means of having exchanges at least some of the time. How much of the front porch lifestyle do you think depends on having sort of a longing for a different era, and how much of it can be genuinely generated in the world as it is today, when all of our heads are often down looking at screens?

Hills: In every interview, everyone seemed to be in agreement that this is something you have to create intentionally. And several people mentioned that barrier you bring up, of technology. Karen Goddard, who calls herself a “professional porch sitter,” somewhat ironically – she just likes sitting on her porch and getting to know people – she feels that front porch culture is waning and social media culture is gaining steam in a way that adds to divisiveness. Part of the reason that she values spending time on her own front porch, as she does every evening, and walking through her neighborhood and waving to people on their front porches, is that it builds this trust and rapport with other people that enables dialogue about things people disagree on. And she feels that social media gets in the way of that and people are much less likely to commit to a thoughtful conversation with someone online. They’re much more likely to just block that person or discount that information and gravitate towards people with whom they agree.

Collins: You had a very nice quote from Karen Goddard, she says: “I like to smile and make eye contact and say hello if possible, because I just think that’s important for human connection and for neighbors.” Just a process question. How did you find a “professional porch sitter”?

Hills: As I was researching for this story, I came across an article that was published, I think, around 1999, and it was someone who had created what they called a professional porch sitters union. It isn’t really a formal thing, it’s really just sitting with neighbors or friends on a porch and talking. And it turns out the concept caught on, and there were a couple other people around the country that started their own “porch sitting unions.” And so I started searching on that term, and I ended up finding Karen.

Collins: You mentioned your reporting took you to another location, a neighborhood that was actually adjacent to the one where you grew up in Maryland. So what went into choosing that place, and what did you find there?

Hills: Well, to go back to what you mentioned earlier, I count myself lucky because while I did grow up, with social media and technology as a pretty constant presence, I made it through middle school without an iPhone. And I spent so much time outside with friends, with my brothers. Our neighborhood culture, where I grew up in Silver Spring, was very community-oriented. You know, things like 15 kids playing a game of hide and go seek across two blocks. So I chose the neighborhood where I ended up going, one of the neighborhoods adjacent to the neighborhood I grew up in Silver Spring. I didn’t wanna go somewhere where I was gonna know a lot of people, but I did wanna go somewhere that I knew, at least 15 years ago, had something of a porch culture.

Collins: One of the things you mentioned when we were preparing for this interview was the presence of ring cameras, and the effect that that had on you when you went back.

Hills: Yeah, I would say about 75% of the doors that I knocked on when I was door knocking in Silver Spring had ring cameras. And it was about three o’clock on a Friday afternoon. It was a beautiful day. And I was picking houses that really looked like people were home. And most people didn’t answer. And it was a really odd feeling to knock on the door and know that someone was looking at the ring camera. That said, I understand the practical reasons for having ring cameras in a lot of neighborhoods where there’s porch piracy. Sometimes it is a helpful safety measure. But ring cameras were also something that several people I interviewed brought up as another barrier. Michael Dolan talked about how he doesn’t want a ring camera, because he likes opening the door and just talking to whoever is there. Even if it’s someone selling something. It’s at least a person-to-person interaction, and he values that.

Collins: Hmm. In a companion column that you wrote for the Monitor Daily, and we’ll link to that in our show notes, you wrote: “My grandfather had a wide open heart for the humanity in everyone.” And you called that a key to neighborliness. What did your reporting tell you about how that attitude that your grandfather had could spread?

Hills: I think I saw it in a lot of different ways, whether it was this porch fest in Petworth that attracted a lot of people from other neighborhoods in DC. So there’s that open-heartedness. And then Campbell McCool, who is the developer of this community in Mississippi, where the only architectural requirement is that every house have a front porch, he spoke about the type of person who was attracted to live in his community, being an open-hearted, curious person. And so that’s where it’s present there, for the type of person who can afford to move into that kind of planned community. Or Michael Dolan, who wrote this book on the American porch. He has lived in another neighborhood in DC for decades, and he spoke about how there’s this really easy neighborly culture of texting each other and saying, “Hey, do you have an extra roll of duct tape?” And he did acknowledge that that’s an anomaly in his neighborhood. But in talking to these people, I realized this idea of building community through being open-hearted and curious about other people represents itself in different ways depending on people’s circumstances.

Collins: When you went to get a copy of Mr. Dolan’s book, you found out that he was closer to you than you thought, and you actually went to get it in person. Can you recount that experience?

Hills: The night I had finished the story, I had just one last question for him, and he offered at the end of the call to send me a copy of his book. And so I decided to just go pick it up because we live in neighborhoods close to one another. And it was really lovely because first of all, I got to see his porch, and he explained how intentional he was about the dimensions of everything. You could stand on his porch and turn left and right, and see the porches on the houses on either side and how they all lined up. So when everyone is out on their porch, they can all see each other. And then he invited me in, and I met his wife. And we found all these connections that we had from having lived in the same area. And I got to actually experience some of that neighborliness with someone who wasn’t even a direct neighbor of mine.

Collins: Thanks so much for coming on to talk about your story, Sophie, about the intentionality of community and about the hope that brings.

Hills: Thanks for having me!

Collins: Thanks for listening to this encore presentation. You can find our show notes with a link to the story that we discussed and to more of Sophie’s work at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. The 2023 episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Alyssa Britton was then, and is again, our studio engineer, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.