Building Community and Making Friends
How to be less lonely and more connected
Recently, I organized a social gathering for my neighbourhood in a local pub and people loved it. It was my first time doing this and I wasn’t sure how many people would come out or what to expect. As a board member of our local residents’ association, I suggested it at a board meeting and everyone agreed it was worth a try. We have an email list of about 800 local residents, so I sent out the invitation a month in advance, then sent weekly reminders, and started receiving a handful of RSVPs. On the Sunday afternoon of the social we had more than 20 people attend, and it was a lively, talkative, energized room. Neighbours who had been living in this community for decades were delighted to meet each other for the first time. To get to know each other, share their favourite things about the area, and commiserate about common frustrations. It was a great example of “building community”, a phrase commonly used in a vague way that makes it hard to know how to actually do it.
37% of Torontonians report feeling lonely at least 3-4 days per week, according to a study from Toronto Foundation’s Vital Signs in 2023. 60% of Canadians feels disconnected from their community, according to a 2024 Angus Reid survey, with that percentage up at 68% for 18-34-year-olds. Implied in these survey results is that the 925,000 lonely people in Toronto would rather not feel that way. They want more friends, acquaintances, to know their neighbours, to feel they belong to a community. And yet, given these numbers have not been improving, they are struggling to make any of those things happen.
Making new friends as an adult is not easy. According to Rebecca Adams, three conditions are required to form a new close friendship: proximity, repeated unplanned interactions, and a setting that encourages vulnerability. To put it another way, we need to be within conversation distance of someone regularly enough to interact with them on a regular basis, and we need to feel we can share something beyond a comment about the weather, something personal. When we are children in school, we often experience these conditions. We’re around other kids our age in classrooms and schoolyard for many hours every day, we have lots of unplanned interactions with peers, and we’re more vulnerable and unfiltered by default given our age. But as adults, we are rarely in circumstances that meet all three requirements.
Jeffrey Hall’s research concludes it takes about 50 hours to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to form a real friendship, and more than 200 hours to upgrade it to a close friendship. Those are some serious hours. The three conditions above are required to light the spark of a potential new friendship, then the two people need to want to spend lots of time together to make it stick. Our city is not designed to make this kind of connecting happen. Our buildings, city blocks, and especially single-family home neighbourhoods are designed for efficiency, privacy, and cars rather than unplanned interactions and expressing vulnerability.
So what does it actually mean to “build community”? We can look at community in two ways: affinity-based and proximity-based. An affinity community is one that forms because of shared interests, identity, or values. Running clubs, religious institutions, university friends, sports teams, and Meetup.com groups are good examples. Proximal communities are people you encounter because of shared physical space. These are your neighbours, coffee shop regulars, parents at the playground, dog owners at a park, the people you keep running into at the grocery store. By definition, you don’t choose these people, and they tend to have much more diverse economic, social, and political backgrounds than in affinity communities. The people in your proximal community are your source of weak ties: acquaintance-level connections that generate a sense of well-being and belonging. Proximal communities force a mixing that flattens status hierarchies and creates a healthy, vital mixing of a diverse set of people.
The “third place”, a concept introduced by Ray Oldenburg in 1989, is somewhere that’s neither home (first place) nor work (second place). It could be a pub, coffee shop, library, park, or community centre. Third places allow anyone to show up, and encourage regular, low-stakes socializing. Over the past decade, third spaces have been disappearing due to zoning changes, higher land costs, more remote work, and increased social media use. A 2024 YMCA study showed that 36% of Canadians have no third place at all, while 65% wished there were more such places. Putting aside the health risks, previous traditions of going to the pub after work had huge benefits for creating a sense of belonging and generating lots of loose ties, some of which developed into friendships. Religious spaces such as churches also served this purpose, but attendance has been steadily decreasing for some time. Even Starbucks has played a role in the decline of third places as they remove seating and reduce the size of many stores, encouraging customers to pick up a coffee and leave rather than hang around for a few hours.
Given all of this, what can we do to build community, increase the number of loose ties people have, and generate more real friendships? “Hey Neighbor”, created by Graham McBain, has a 10-step community building playbook that is rapidly gaining traction and showing great results in many communities. The playbook provides a very practical, step-by-step approach to meeting your neighbours and creating recurring events to bring them together. Steps include defining a boundary of roughly 200 homes, being conspicuously friendly with more small talk, starting with a low-stakes event like coffee on a driveway, and making an effort to get to know the people who turn up. After that, setting up a simple virtual hub such as a Whatsapp group and keeping a steady rhythm of events is important. Over time, expanding the diversity of events and having more organizers will take things to the next level. McBain offers free weekly virtual classes to help you get started.
Because we’ve optimized our city for efficiency, convenience, and privacy, that’s what we got. Third places used to provide a convenient outlet for proximal communities to form, but those have been disappearing. To combat the loneliness and disconnection many Torontonians feel, it will take conscious and deliberate effort. The “Hey Neighbor” approach has proven to be effective and will work in Toronto communities. Whether you follow their template or not, becoming aware of this type of approach can help you increase your number of loose ties, perhaps lead to new friendships, and turn the concept of building community into a real thing.