We Paved Over Community

Ray Oldenburg was a sociologist who spent his career studying the places where community actually forms.

Not homes.
Not workplaces.

Third places.

The bar.
The barbershop.
The diner.
The park.
The library.
The corner store where the owner knows your name.

He wrote about them in 1989.

He was concerned even then.

Thirty-five years later, the third place is:

And we are surprised that nobody knows their neighbors.

Perhaps we accept it because each individual loss seems small.

And economically justified.

The diner wasn’t profitable enough.
The barbershop got priced out.
The community center’s budget was cut.
The park got “developed.”

Each one made sense in isolation.

The aggregate is a social catastrophe.

One that happened so gradually…

nobody called it what it was.

We didn’t decide to eliminate third places.

We just made thousands of small decisions that prioritized:

economic efficiency over social infrastructure.

And third places were the thing that fell through the cracks.

The United States has lost roughly 25% of its local business establishments over the past thirty years.

The kinds of places that double as community anchors.

We replaced them with chains that:

A McDonald’s is not a third place.

It is architecturally designed not to be.

Throughput is the metric.
Lingering is the enemy.

We built a country optimized for consumption…

…and expected it to produce community.

The consequences aren’t just social.

They’re physical.

Research consistently shows:

Neighborhoods with walkable amenities — the kind that create accidental human interaction — have lower rates of depression and anxiety than car-dependent, chain-dominated ones.

We designed cities for cars.
We designed commercial strips for national brands.

And then…

we prescribed antidepressants for the outcome.

I’m not saying the antidepressants are wrong.

I’m saying:

we should also talk about the parking lot.

You’d need to make third places economically viable again.

You’d need to make showing up worth something.

You’d need to give people a reason to be somewhere in person…

Not through nostalgia.
Not through guilt.

Through genuine incentive.

The local business that becomes a real community anchor —

Where regulars know each other
Where being there becomes part of your identity

— has something Amazon can never replicate.

The questions I’m asking are:

How do we help more businesses get there?

How do we give people a reason to show up?

How do we make it economically viable?

How do we collectively know where to find our people now that we have all become so fragmented and isolated?

What do we do with all this empty real estate in downtown city centers with the explosion in remote work?

I see a pattern. Do you?

Name a third place that has mattered in your life.

Is it still there?

If it isn’t…

do you remember what replaced it?

Turn Around. Look Up.

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