For years, the internet sold us the idea that connection doesn’t have to be local to be meaningful. Your people could live anywhere: in a Discord server, a group chat of far-flung friends, or a TikTok comment section. Geography was optional.

Now, more people are turning toward the ones physically closest to them: the neighbor down the block, the parent from the playground, the person whose wifi shows up in your network list. It’s not just about wanting connection; folks are looking for support. Childcare is expensive. Rent and groceries are high. Climate emergencies are more frequent. For many Americans, the difference between stability and crisis comes down to whether someone nearby can help.

Call it neighborism: the growing practice of treating proximity as a resource. Increasingly, digital tools aren’t replacing local relationships — they’re helping activate them.

Sometimes it looks small: introducing yourself to the people on your floor, starting a group chat for your building or block, sharing babysitters, watering a neighbor’s plants. But it can also look overtly political.

In Minneapolis, community responses to ICE activity blurred the line between everyday care and organized resistance. As federal immigration enforcement ramped up this winter, residents organized patrols, filmed arrests, shared alerts, and trained one another to document potential abuses. What emerged was something bigger than “borrow a cup of sugar” friendliness. It was infrastructure: informal, fast-moving, and built on trust. And what happened there isn’t an outlier; it’s a large-scale example of a broader shift already underway. 

Getting to know your neighbors isn’t new, but its visibility is. After decades of isolation and a slow drift toward digital, long-distance connection, people are embracing an old-fashioned idea: Communities function best when people feel responsible for one another.

From digital connection to local reconnection

According to Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University and author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, Americans were more likely to socialize with neighbors 60 years ago than they are today. Some of this was due to the fact that it was far more difficult to keep in touch with people who lived in other areas. “Long distance phone calls were expensive! Email did not exist,” Klinenberg tells Vox by email. Most people’s lives revolved around their home base. And at the time, “women were less likely to be in the paid labor force, which meant they spent more time in and around the neighborhood, where they anchored the family’s social life,” he added. 

“Today, Americans work longer hours than they did sixty years ago, and often in more than one job. Temp work, gig work, and full time jobs all demand a lot,” Klinenberg writes — as do the familial demands facing the “sandwich generation.” “One consequence is that Americans socialize at work more than they used to; another is that they have less energy to socialize when they get back home,” he continues. “Finally, of course, there is the extraordinary rise of the internet, social media, dating apps, and the like, all of which make it far easier to socialize online, or to stay close to people who live far away, or to be anti-social, but deeply entertained, while the algorithms do their work.” Platforms made it possible to find your people anywhere, leading many of us to build relationships around shared interests and history rather than shared space. As more of our social lives moved online, the everyday, in-person interactions that once structured daily life began to fall away.

“So many technological promises that were supposed to…make our lives better, make us feel more connected to each other,” says Garrett Bucks, founder of the Barnraisers Project, which has trained nearly 1,000 participants to organize majority-white communities for racial and social justice. “But the problem with that model is that most of us live where we are and we miss out on interpersonal human companionship face to face.”

Increasingly, that version of connection is starting to feel thin — wide-reaching, but not particularly reliable when you actually need help. As neighborism grows, social media isn’t disappearing, but its role is changing. Instead of replacing local relationships, apps are becoming a tool to facilitate them: a way to stay in touch with parents at the playground or pool, organize a bulk grocery run, or find out who lives down the block.

In that sense, this generation has something earlier ones didn’t: connective infrastructure at their fingertips. The same platforms that once promised limitless, frictionless, global belonging can now be repurposed for something smaller, slower, and more grounded, helping translate online awareness into offline care. As Bucks puts it, “We’ve tried everything else. Maybe we should try each other.”

What neighborism looks like in practice

For many people, not knowing your neighbors doesn’t seem unusual — it just feels like how life works now. You occasionally pass each other, maybe exchange a quick hello, and keep moving. The distance becomes routine. Until, eventually, it doesn’t.

“There was a certain point where I just realized how few of my neighbors I actually knew,” says Alec Patton, 45, who started a WhatsApp group in December 2024 for his neighborhood in South Park in San Diego. “It was kind of horrifying. I think I imagined that other people knew their neighbors better than I did, or maybe all my neighbors knew each other and…they just weren’t hanging out with me. But I just think the extent to which neighbors don’t know each other is pretty staggering. And so I was really feeling like I knew I wanted to do something to change that.” Patton says he read a Substack post about how to start a neighborhood group chat and thought, That seems worth trying.  

Patton built his neighborhood group chat the old-fashioned way: He printed 50 fliers and dropped them in mailboxes on streets radiating out from his home. The effort paid off — today, the group has about 50 members and continues to grow organically. “I often drink coffee and read a book on the stoop in front of my house and sometimes, when I’m feeling unusually bold, I ask passersby if they’re on the chat,” Patton says. “I’ve got a QR code for the group set on a lock screen on my phone so people can scan it easily.” He also puts up a sign with the QR code at neighborhood gatherings. Others have started spreading the word too, turning it into a shared community effort.

The chat has already proven its value in both small and significant ways. In one instance, Patton realized he had lent the car seat he keeps in his car to a friend, and his wife had driven away with the other one. “I needed to take the kids to school in half an hour so I posted an urgent message on the chat — a neighbor responded in five minutes and saved the day!” he says. In a more serious moment, the group became a real-time information hub during an ICE raid at a nearby restaurant, helping neighbors understand what was happening and coordinate support. While Patton initially envisioned the chat as apolitical, he came to see moments like this not as politics, but as neighbors showing up for one another in times of need.

That kind of care, however, doesn’t emerge passively — it requires time, repetition, and a willingness to do the unglamorous work of showing up. There’s no app or shortcut that can replace the slow accumulation of trust. “Dude, I really do have to invite my neighbors over for a potluck — shoot,” Bucks, the community organizer, says. “I really do have to go to that annoying meeting that I don’t want to go to at 7 pm — shoot. I have to keep going back and forth with folks in the Signal group even if they’re getting on my nerves because it’s worth it.” 

When that effort is missing, the absence is palpable — shaping not just how neighbors support one another, but how they perceive even the smallest everyday annoyances. “If you don’t know your neighbors, then all they can do is annoy you,” Patton says. “It’s just a sort of a sad and unpleasant situation.” He says he’s had instances where a neighbor was being loud and getting on his nerves, and finally had a moment where he realized that if he knew someone and had a relationship outside of the thing they do that bothers him, he’d be less irritated. “First of all, I could actually talk to them and say, ‘Hey, could you not do that?’” Patton says. “But also, I’d be less annoyed because I know who they are. It’s one thing if your anonymous neighbor is just being really noisy, and it’s another thing if you know that Mike is having a barbecue.”

Robert J. Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard University known for his work on collective efficacy, which is the process of taking social ties among neighborhood residents and activating them to achieve collective goals, says that getting to know your neighbors isn’t necessarily about building super-tight friendships. In his research, he’s found that neighborhoods function best when residents are loosely connected but willing to step in for one another, whether that’s maintaining a sense of order or simply helping out in small ways.” Any mechanisms that can bring people together, particularly in public spaces, I think, can create a certain kind of public good,” Sampson tells Vox. That level of cohesion doesn’t require intense intimacy or even liking everyone you encounter; it requires regular interaction and a shared sense of responsibility to the people around you.

Neighborism isn’t just feel-good — it’s filling the gaps institutions can’t

Good Looking Out, a Facebook group started in 2014, connects West Philadelphia residents who use it to ask for help, share information, and flag urgent issues — everything from flooded basements to lost pets. At its core, it’s about neighbors taking care of each other.

For co-founder Gabriel Nyantakyi, 43, the group grew out of discussions about law enforcement and a desire to build something more community-led. “It emerged from conversations being had about police and policing and wanting to provide some support through community to fill some of those needs,” he tells Vox. “Just establishing some independence from the state.”

Since then, both the network and the broader culture around it have expanded. “Mutual aid culture has grown as a whole,” Nyantakyi says, pointing to the rise of community fridges and food giveaways across West Philly. The shift accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, when digital tools became essential and institutional gaps became harder to ignore. “It was all a clear case of the government being inadequate in addressing people’s needs,” Nyantakyi says. “People in the community stepped up.”

Aisha Nyandoro, the founding CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit organization that helps support residents of federally subsidized housing, tells Vox that in the communities she works with, neighborism is not new or optional. It’s how people survive. It’s “a practice of radical, everyday care rooted in proximity,” she says. “It’s the belief that the people who live closest to you are not just strangers who share a wall or a street, but co-creators in your safety, your joy, and your ability to thrive. It is about reciprocity — not in a transactional sense, but rather a mutually helpful way.”

Nyandoro says that, in practice, it looks like “a neighbor watching a child when a parent’s shift runs long” or “moms texting each other to see if someone needs a ride to the grocery store.” Sampson, the Harvard sociology professor, notes that these kinds of interactions — even small ones — build the trust that allows communities to function.

Klinenberg sees neighborism as part of a broader shift back toward what he calls social infrastructure: the physical places that make connection possible. “If you live in a neighborhood with a great playground…a great library…sports facilities, green space,” he says, you’re “much more likely to have strong local ties.” Without those spaces, connection becomes “a lot harder and less likely.”

The emotional pull of neighborism is real, too. Juli Fraga, a psychologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, says that proximity-based relationships are easier to maintain and access in real time. Low-stakes interactions do wonders for our well-being. “Just being around other people can help us feel less isolated,” she tells Vox.  Patton says that’s been the case for him —  knowing his neighbors has improved his quality of life. Meanwhile, doing small favors for others, even strangers, cultivates positive emotions. Plus, these situations give people a chance to connect and know that others are experiencing similar struggles, which helps them feel less alone.

Ultimately, though, neighborism may be less about sentiment and more about function. After years of too-online hyper-optimized isolation, people are rediscovering that life is better when somebody nearby knows your name and your general comings and goings. They might not be your closest friend, but they show up anyway — sometimes awkwardly, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes just to stand there and witness.

As Bucks sees it, none of this is entirely new. “We’re not learning to do something that human beings haven’t done previously,” he says. 

Source: Vox.