Plastic flamingos can cure loneliness epidemic in US
A salve for America’s loneliness epidemic could exist right in front of its homes.
Front yards are a staple of many American neighborhoods. Lush plantings, porches or trinkets can capture the attention of passersby and spark conversation. Other lawns say “stay away,” whether it’s through imposing fences or foreboding signs.
But to what extent do yards serve as a window into the people who tend them – and how they feel about their home, neighborhood and city?
In our study of nearly 1,000 front yards in Buffalo’s Elmwood Village neighborhood, we found that the livelier and more open the front yard, the more content and connected the resident.
Cultivating a sense of place
Our study of front yards is part of a larger investigation into the ways in which American neighborhoods can cultivate a stronger “sense of place,” which refers to the feeling of attachment and belonging one feels to their home, neighborhood and city.
For decades, psychological, geographical and design research has linked sense of place to happier neighborhood residents and stronger ties among neighbors.
We decided to focus on Buffalo’s Elmwood Village for this particular study. In 2007, Elmwood Village had been honored by the American Planning Association as one of “10 Great Neighborhoods in America.”
We wanted to know what set Elmwood Village apart.
Located north of downtown Buffalo, this leafy neighborhood is famed for its parkways designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who also helped plan New York’s Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace.
We wanted to know whether residents could reinforce their own sense of place from their homes, particularly the parts that are visible to passersby.
In the precious few feet in front of the home, residents can put their values and interests on display, whether it’s garden gnomes, Little Free Libraries, elaborate gardens, sports allegiances and political loyalties.
While in their yards, residents can chat with neighbors; one study found more than 3 out of 4 new neighborhood contacts are made in the front yard.
They’re like bridges to the rest of the neighborhood, where each resident can decide how much they want to express themselves to their neighbors and passersby.
Life in Elmwood Village’s front yards
A pilot study our students demonstrated the elements we could reliably measure: flags, expressive signs, flower pots, landscaping, toys and games, seats, porches, fences and hedges, and welcoming or unwelcoming signs.
We then compared the data from the students’ fieldwork to responses from surveys we had administered asking residents about their attachment to their homes, neighbors and neighborhood; whether they felt their neighborhood had a strong identity; and if they felt they could connect to nature.
The results proved remarkably consistent. Whether they proudly displayed Buffalo Bills flags or simply had a couple of flower pots on their front porch, residents who expressed themselves with items in front of their house reported feeling a greater sense of place. Those with obstructions in place, such as fences and hedges, correlated to a lower sense of place.
Even objects as simple as toys or plastic playground gear left out on the front yard seemed to foster a sense of place. To us, this says a couple of things: Homeowners trust that their property won’t get stolen, and parents don’t seem all too concerned about letting their kids play outside.
This connects to our strongest result: Elements that facilitate socializing – a garden chair, a porch, a bench – strongly boosted residents’ sense of place in every dimension and scale.
Building better neighborhoods
Our study finally validates urbanists’ decades-old contention that lively front yards make better neighborhoods.
And it turns out that places with tiny front yards, or even none at all, can also play along.
One study of Rotterdam, Netherlands, found that the city’s residents, even with little-to-no space in front of their densely built, urban homes, nonetheless embellished their sidewalks with seats, planters and knickknacks to express themselves. These small gestures strengthened community ties and made residents happier.
The results of our study should serve as a reminder to architects, planners and developers that they ought to create spaces for sharing values and conversations in front of homes – to prioritize porches over parking, and canvases for self-expression over saving space or money. While American designers and builders are under enormous pressure to produce more housing, they shouldn’t forget that only residents can turn them into homes.
Conrad Kickert is associate professor of architecture, University at Buffalo. Kelly Gregg is assistant professor of urban planning, University at Buffalo
For all the ways that our political coalitions have changed over the last few generations — Southern Democrats joining the GOP, Northeastern Republicans turning Democrat, “Reagan Democrats” moving right, suburban Republicans voting for Joe Biden — there are patterns that persist across the generations.
That’s what we’re seeing in foreign policy right now, as Democrats and Republicans are dividing over Israel-Palestine and Ukraine-Russia, respectively, in ways that would have been familiar to the version of each party that existed 50 or even 75 years ago.
The Democrats, first, are replaying their Vietnam-era divisions in the split between the Biden administration and the pro-Palestine left. Again you have an aging Democratic president struggling to modulate a conflict with no certain endgame. Again his left-wing critics represent his party’s younger generation, their influence concentrated on college campuses, their power expressed primarily through disruptive protest tactics.
The language of the protesters is similar across the two eras, albeit with “settler colonialism” replacing “imperialism” as the favored epithet.
So is the internal dilemma of the left — namely, to what extent is it possible to oppose a military campaign against an insurgent force embedded in a civilian population without becoming dupes for the insurgency’s authoritarian (in Vietnam) or theocratic (in the Gaza Strip) politics?
So is the depth of the divide between progressives and the Democratic older guard — Cold War liberals then, liberal Zionists today — and the possibility that the debate will push some of the latter group toward a form of neoconservatism.
While the Democrats replay the 1960s, the Republican split over Ukraine funding has revived debates that were familiar to anyone watching the GOP from the 1930s through the early 1950s. Now as then, we have noninterventionists pitted against hawks, Jacksonian populists against internationalists, an updated version of the party’s old Robert Taft wing against the contemporary equivalents of Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey.
The fact that Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the most prominent spokesperson for the populist side, represents the same state as Taft is a nice little historical brushstroke. If you wanted to push the analogy further, you could even say that the recent shift by the embattled speaker of the House, Mike Johnson,