Is it normal to only know 5 people on your street?

Originally published in March 2018.

After learning of a neighbourhood New Year's Eve Party to which I've never been invited, I became more curious about my neighbours. 

I moved into my house 15 years ago. Last week, I could only name five other people on the street, which had never seemed an abnormally bad score — until now.

The discovery of this New Year's Eve Party raised some troubling questions about the standards of friendliness where I live, and the scale on which I failed to meet them.

So I made a game sheet, and started knocking on doors, asking each neighbour to name their neighbours. This quickly converted me into the only person on the street who knows literally everyone's name. And I now have a handy cheat-sheet for the next time I've forgotten someone.

My game also taught me that the normal number of neighbours to be able to greet by name is between 10 and 25. (This is for the suburb of East York, Ont.) This struck me as a huge number.

In a book called The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community, a sociologist named Marc Dunkelman claims that — among all the other reasons why the world is going to pot — the world is also going to pot because we are failing to cultivate our "middle ring" of social relationships, meaning people with whom we must be familiar, but whose company we do not particularly like.

We are better able nowadays to push these people to an outer ring or beyond, where they only need bother us online, or even better, they get blocked. (I may be slightly misreading this book. I didn't have time to read it slowly.)

Meanwhile, we — whoever "we"includes (I feel it applies to me) — draw only the like-minded or easily compatible people closer.

This trend has caused a weakened ability to get along with fellow citizens simply because we have no choice. And this neglected "middle ring" holds obvious promise as an ingredient of a functional democracy.

I always like to simplify ideas and put numbers on them. I defined my "middle ring" as people whose names I know without looking them up, whom I can say hello to, by name, without it being weird, and to make it harder, I must have some understanding of the person's aesthetics.

The "How Many Neighbours Can You Name?" game helped me expand my middle ring, especially when I used it to begin a conversation with neighbours about whether they would like a fountain on our street, and generally make the place look like a less ugly city, such as Montreal or Rome. 

I report more results from my nosy-neighbour routine in my radio essay called "All the People On My Street."

Perhaps it only tells us about East York, Ont., or perhaps the results would also apply where you live. I think that when or if I move to a new area, I will aim to learn the names of 10 neighbours, the number I apparently should have known while living here for 15 years, in order to fit in with the local customs.

Listen to Tom's documentary by clicking the Listen link at the top of the page, or download and subscribe to our podcast.

About the Producer

Tom Howell is a panellist on Because News, CBC Radio's comedy news quiz. He also jointly presents an ongoing series of documentaries about Canadian PhD students, called Ideas from the Trenches. His semi-fictional book about the English language is The Rude Story of English.

This documentary was edited by Acey Rowe.