If making friends in Richmond Hill feels harder than it should, it’s not just you. It’s the way the city is designed.
By Editorial Board
If you spend any time on the Richmond Hill subreddit, a pattern jumps out. Every few days, a teenager or young adult asks the same question: where do people actually hang out here? How do you meet others?
The answers are usually well-meaning but thin: try a gym, walk around Hillcrest Mall, maybe join a class. None of them really solve the underlying problem—and that’s what makes these posts so revealing. They’re not just about boredom. They point to something structural: the postwar suburban model doesn’t just shape how we move—it systematically reduces opportunities for social connection across all stages of life.
After World War II, cities across the U.S. and Canada rapidly expanded outward. What emerged was a development pattern dominated by single-family homes, separated land uses, and an assumption that nearly every trip would happen by car.
Organizations like Strong Towns have argued that this pattern isn’t just financially fragile—it also reshapes everyday social life in ways that are easy to miss but hard to reverse.
At a basic level, the design removes what urbanists call “third places”—the informal, everyday spaces where people naturally gather outside of home and work. When destinations are far apart and connected primarily by arterial roads, accessing them requires planning and driving. As a result, people make fewer spontaneous visits. With fewer spontaneous visits come fewer repeated encounters, and over time those missing encounters lead to weaker social ties.
The impact starts earlier than we often acknowledge—with children.
In a car-dependent environment, distance and traffic conditions make independent movement difficult, if not unsafe. As a result, parents restrict mobility, relying on scheduled, supervised trips instead. That shift matters. Without the ability to move freely through their neighborhood, children have fewer chances for unstructured play with peers. When those unstructured interactions are limited, children have fewer opportunities to practice negotiation, resolve conflicts, and read social cues. Over time, independence is not built gradually; it is deferred.
A Love Letter to the Suburbs by Alex Bozikovic frames this as a missing layer in suburban life. These environments provide safety and privacy, but often at the cost of everyday interaction. The result is a more controlled childhood, where growth happens in bursts—organized activities and planned playdates—rather than through continuous, low-stakes exposure to others.
By the time these kids become teenagers, the constraints tighten. Because destinations remain far apart and transit options limited, social life depends on access to a car. Until they can drive, teenagers rely on parents; after they can drive, independence is still mediated by access to a vehicle, time, and money. When distances remain long and most trips require driving, casual interaction becomes less frequent. As those interactions decline, opportunities to form and sustain friendships also become more limited.
Strong Towns often describes this as the loss of incremental independence. Instead of expanding their world step by step, young people move abruptly from dependence to full responsibility. That discontinuity affects more than mobility—it shapes confidence and social development. Increasingly, it also appears alongside a broader pattern: young adults describing persistent isolation or low mood in environments where connection requires effort rather than emerging naturally.
Adults experience a parallel dynamic.
In a car-oriented suburb, most interactions are scheduled and destination-based. Because daily movement happens inside vehicles, the number of incidental encounters drops sharply. When driving replaces walking, people lose one of the main settings where casual encounters typically occur. As those encounters become less common, relationships are less likely to be maintained over time.
In more walkable environments, repeated, low-intensity contact—seeing the same neighbor, recognizing familiar faces—helps sustain what sociologists call “weak ties.” These ties are not close friendships, but they are essential for a sense of belonging. When those everyday points of contact are missing, social life becomes narrower and more fragile.
As Charles Marohn has argued, when your primary interface with your community is a windshield, the city becomes a collection of destinations rather than a shared space. That shift helps explain a broader trend often described as a “loneliness epidemic.” When interaction requires planning every time, it happens less often. And as informal social support weakens, more people turn to formal systems—therapists and structured programs—for needs that were once met through everyday conversation and proximity to others.
None of this means suburbs offer no advantages. Privacy, quiet, and space are real benefits, and for many households they remain deeply valued. But those benefits come with trade-offs that are less visible. Environments optimized for separation and efficiency tend to reduce the frequency of unplanned interaction. Over time, that reduction accumulates into thinner social networks.
Places like malls or big-box plazas—often suggested in those Reddit threads—try to compensate, but they are limited substitutes. They are privately controlled, consumption-oriented, and disconnected from the surrounding fabric. Because they are not embedded in walkable, mixed-use environments, they cannot generate the kind of repeated, low-effort encounters that sustain social life.
This is a central argument in A Love Letter to the Suburbs. Suburbs, as built, are “half-finished places.” They contain homes but not enough destinations, offer privacy but not enough shared space, and separate uses so effectively that they also separate people. The result is a landscape where the effort required for social interaction is unusually high.
In a walkable neighborhood, that effort is low because stepping outside naturally leads to opportunities for interaction. In a car-dependent one, socializing requires planning, driving, and intentional effort at each step. Each of those steps reduces the likelihood that interaction will happen at all.
That’s what those Reddit posts are really expressing. Not just “where do I go?” but “why is it so hard to belong without effort?”
The answer is not a better list of places. It is that the built environment itself shapes the frequency, ease, and likelihood of human connection. Until that underlying structure changes—by adding closer destinations, enabling walkability, and reintroducing the spaces where interaction can happen naturally—the pattern will persist.
And the signals will keep appearing: children with limited independence, teenagers searching for places to exist, adults maintaining thinner social networks than they expect. Not as isolated issues, but as predictable outcomes of a system designed for movement rather than interaction.