“For fifty years, our economic mission in America, at its core, has been to build bigger houses farther apart from each other. And boy have we succeeded; a nation of starter castles for entry-level monarchs, built at such removed one from the next that the car is unavoidable.”
“And it's no wonder we're not so happy, either. Because the ecological effect of that sprawl is dwarfed only by its psychological effect, by the fact that we've allowed ourselves to become the first members of our species to have no practical need of our neighbors for much of anything. Americans say that they are not as happy, on average, as they were fifty years ago, despite a trebling of “living standards” And the reason they give is loss of community, loss of connection. This is not sentimentality; the average American eats meals with friends, family, neighbors, half as often as fifty years ago. The average American has half as many close friends.”
- Bill McKibben, Forward, Creating Cohousing;
by Kathyrn McCamant & Chuck Durrett
Building Sustainable Communities