Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

long commutes created a dispersive effect on people’s social network: the longer the commute, the farther apart one’s friends tended to live from one another, like a web being stretched in all directions. (To be precise, every extra six miles of commute meant that one’s friends lived an extra 1.39 miles away from her, and an extra 1.46 miles apart from each other .) The upshot of this stretching: long-distance commuters’ friends were less likely to be friends with one another, making it logistically more challenging to get face time with each of them. So while the long-distance commuters may have had lots of friends, they just weren’t able to get as much support from them.
    How much does social time matter? One more survey: a 2008 study by the Gallup Organization and Healthways found a direct relationship between well-being and leisure time. The more people hung out with family and friends in any particular day, the more happiness and enjoyment they reported, and the less stress and worry. It’s no surprise that it’s good to hang out with people we like. What is remarkable is just how much socializing we can handle. The happiness curve doesn’t level off until it hits six or seven hours of social time a day. And yet, like Randy Strausser, more than three-quarters of American commuters now drive to work alone. By the mid-2000s, after a half century of massive investment in highways and urban road expansion, Americans were actually spending more hours commuting than they got in vacation time.
    When Kids Pay for Distance
    In 2010, I returned to San Joaquin County to see how the exurbs were recovering. I took a cruise through Stockton’s Weston Ranch, which had noticeably changed. Lawns and shrubs were shaggy and under-watered. Fences were faded and broken. I stopped to chat with a group of teenagers in the middle of a sidewalk drinking party. They were sons and daughters of parents who had moved to the exurb from Oakland a decade before, hoping to escape the urban gang culture. After proudly showing me their own gang colors— Norteño bloodred, on belts and scarves and hoodies—they did what suburban kids have done for generations: they whined about where they lived. They said they were stuck, trapped, miles from anywhere. It was not a new complaint, but it was especially true in this city without a city. Here they were, on the cusp of adulthood, virtually helpless to access jobs or education or stores, never mind parties or movie theaters or restaurants, for that matter. I told them I was researching cities and happiness. One girl pulled her hoodie back over her dreadlocks and said, “You know what would make me happy? A store—something, anything, right here on the corner.”
    “Quit dreaming,” her friend shouted over her. “What we need is a car and a tank of gas .”
    These kids had bigger worries than picking up more beer. Before I left them, they warned me to get out of Weston Ranch before dark, when the guns would come out. The warning struck me as pure bravado, but my scans of headlines in The Record , Stockton’s local newspaper, have since revealed a parade of shootings and assaults in Weston Ranch—from the kid who took a stray bullet in his head when he peered out his window in 2009, to the rapper who was executed on a bench in nearby Henry Long Park in 2012.
    Stockton has developed the worst youth gang problem in California. The city faces issues of poverty and immigration, but poor parent-child bonds and weak social ties were key contributors to gang membership. “If we have parents who take care of their kids, provide love and affection, how much of this gang activity would we be curtailing?” asked Stockton mayor Ed Chavez in frustration back when the county was still pitching itself as a rosy alternative to the inner city.
    Geography was not helping. One survey found that, with a quarter of all workers commuting to other counties, others driving between San Joaquin’s various hamlets,