Kiara Aponte and Samir Husain loved everything about the Tudor-style house they bought in a leafy Houston suburb. It had a brick fireplace in the sunny living room and a yard with climbing roses. Upstairs sat a pair of Jack and Jill bedrooms where Ms. Aponte imagined future children quarreling over the connecting bathroom.
But beyond their property line, something was missing. There were sidewalks, but nobody walked on them. They identified their neighbors not by name but by the car in the driveway. No one ever popped over to borrow eggs.
“There weren’t a whole lot of interactions, period,” Ms. Aponte said.
“Just like a smile, wave and move on type of type of situation,” Mr. Husain added.
In 2024, two years after paying $280,000 and moving in, they left in search of better neighbors.
The couple told the story of how they fell out of love with their house during a lunch at Della Coffee & Wine, the social hub of a new master-planned development called Indigo. Indigo sits about 30 miles from downtown Houston and about a 15-minute drive from their old house, next to a cow pasture and a prison. Despite being in the suburbs, the development has a village feel. Ms. Aponte and Mr. Husain live along a car-free parkway with a view of sidewalk plantings and strolling neighbors instead of a wall of cars.
Housing developments reflect the times in which they are built. Developers erect gates when people are worried about crime, market big kitchens when land is cheap and turn dining rooms into offices when the world is mired in a pandemic. Today, with social isolation a major preoccupation, consultants are using phrases like “emotional reliability” and “community as an amenity” to describe buyers’ desires for places that foster connection and neighbors who like hanging out.
In California, the community of Silverwood asks its residents to sign a kindness pledge. A development in Utah called Firefly markets its slow streets and bountiful parks as an alternative to screen time. Developers are trading empty clubhouses for working farms and marketing halls designed around neighborly collisions.
As you pull up to Indigo from the highway, signs that advertise homes selling in the low $300,000s are broken up by messages like “Know Your Neighbors.” About 275 homes of a planned 692 have been built along streets with names like Kindred Way.
Ms. Aponte and Mr. Husain moved to Amity Lane and now live in a freshly completed duplex with a strip of grass for a backyard. A sapling sprouts from a circle of dirt. By the numbers, it is a step down from the Tudor. The space is smaller, and they share a wall. They also lost money on the old house, while forfeiting an ultralow interest rate for a high one. Mr. Husain said it was worth it.
“I don’t even ever think about the fact that I’m paying way more in mortgage,” he said. “Because everything has been pleasant and happy.”
Community as an Amenity
Selling the American dream increasingly means selling less. As home prices and borrowing costs have exploded, developers are squeezing more buildings onto the same acreage while downgrading the traditional starter home — a smallish, detached house — to 1,000-square-foot cottages and attached duplexes or triplexes.
It is one thing to drive to the fringes of a city to get a house with a yard, another to have to commute an hour to downtown and have to share a wall. To counter the diminished expectations, exurban communities are playing up urban features like walkability and adding amenities like brew pubs with adjoined parks so parents can gather without arranging for a sitter.
The underlying message is that while you might not get a lot of house, you’ll get a suburban approximation of the no-longer-affordable hipster urban neighborhood. In doing so, developers are inverting the ideas of privacy and abundant space that had once been the suburban ideals and repackaging them as antidotes to suburban ills like loneliness and isolation.
“You spend most of your time in the car, your kids don’t see other kids because it’s unsafe to walk — it’s brutal,” said Teri Slavik-Tsuyuki, a consultant who helps developers design new communities, describing her view of traditional suburban living. “That is what we’ve created, and developers have started to realize that it’s their problem to solve.”
The instruments of this transition are master-planned communities, roughly defined as town- or neighborhood-size projects in which a single entity controls the infrastructure and community vision. The homeowners’ associations that run these projects have long operated as mini-governments that handle services like landscaping and trash collection. Increasingly, they also emphasize “lifestyle” programming run by full-time coordinators who plan events and help neighbors make friends.
“It used to be that local institutions were largely responsible for the creation of community, and then for a variety of reasons — suburbanization, technology — we broke apart all those connections,” said Todd Hornback, chief executive of Cohere, a Phoenix company that manages homeowners’ associations, including the one at Indigo. “Community is no longer created organically in new places. It has to be designed and practiced.”
Cohere organizes Fourth of July parades and buys snacks for its residents’ game nights. One of its properties has a nearby neighbor deliver a freshly baked pie to new occupants. Instead of career property managers, Mr. Hornback said, the company tried to recruit HOA managers from nonprofits like the Boys & Girls Club and had recently started hiring pastors.
Mr. Hornback pitches this as good business: Word of mouth from early residents builds demand that allows developers to raise prices as they build homes for later phases. When Cohere asks residents what they like about a particular community, Mr. Hornback said, they rarely speak about their home and instead list things like “a small-town feel.” In business terms, he calls this “R.O.I.” — return on investment — “of belonging.”
An hour away from Indigo, a developer named Tom Woliver is building a community called Two Step Farm. It feels a bit like a theme park of small-town Texas, with a herd of goats and a dance hall built from reclaimed wood. When I visited the project, Mr. Woliver and his wife, Christina Acuña, regaled me with facts about dance-hall history and their trips to antique fairs to find décor. To drive the point home, Ms. Acuña showed me a video in which she fired a gun at an aluminum road sign for a town named Shiner (population: 2,069) so that it looked properly worn. It now hangs in the dance hall, next to a Lone Star beer sign that’s also riddled with holes.
“You have to go all-in on story,” Mr. Woliver said.
Accidental Developers
Indigo’s developers, Scott Snodgrass and Clayton Garrett, are first-time builders who came to real estate through agriculture. Mr. Snodgrass ran a coffee bean wholesaler while Mr. Garrett was a lawyer who quit full-time practice to be the general manager of a commercial bakery.
Before Indigo, they teamed up to start a company called Agmenity, which builds working farms into new developments, part of a growing “agrihood” craze that appeals to people who want to pick their own tomatoes and radishes. After six years of working inside new communities, they decided to try building one themselves.
Indigo’s layout borrows from the new urbanist movement that preaches walkable neighborhoods with a variety of housing types clustered together. When fully built out, the project will have everything from a 66-unit apartment complex with 500-square-foot rentals to 6,000-square-foot houses with price tags above $2 million. Building types aren’t grouped together — the plans call for 1,000-square-foot cottages to sit across the street from the biggest homes — and the whole thing is oriented around a Main-Street-style commercial center lined with brick buildings that will have ground-floor storefronts and apartments on top.
Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Garrett said they had also tried to strip their homeowners’ association of many of the rules that made suburbia feel so bland. While many developments prohibit people from having businesses in their homes, for instance, Indigo encourages them.
In comparison with nearby developments and their large lots and cul-de-sacs, Indigo seems teleported from a random downtown. That discordance appeals to buyers like Helen Clancy, who moved to Indigo last November. Ms. Clancy, 49, was living in a rental apartment in Montrose, a rapidly gentrifying Houston neighborhood where she had been priced out from buying. Indigo felt like a good approximation of that same urban feel, so she bought a 1,600-square-foot home for $360,000.
Ms. Clancy is a former journalist with a Ph.D. in social work who now does communications for a charitable foundation. She wrote her Ph.D. thesis about community bonding after extreme weather events, and the shelves in her living room are topped with candles and lined with books about social isolation, like Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone.” She is a member of Indigo’s foodie club, book club and cleanup club. She also goes to lavender circle L.G.B.T.Q. club, even though she is not gay, just because she wants to hang out.
During our interview, Ms. Clancy excitedly recounted, with jazz hands, that she had recently told a neighbor that if she ever wanted to come over to hang out she should just pop over — and the neighbor actually did!
“Somebody rang my doorbell for an unexpected visit,” she said, “and we talked about books.”
Indigo, while walkable, has none of the history or tradition of most neighborhoods developed before cars. And so Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Garrett hired a consultant to create a “belonging framework” (town meetings have to include child care, resident clubs cannot limit membership). An outdoor games company designed an activity called “IndiGolf,” which encourages residents to pair up and walk around solving a series of puzzles and challenges. (Example: Use nonverbal communication to find a marked rock in the Zen garden.)
Speaking with residents in living rooms and the coffee shop, I noticed that several of them wore a bulky bracelet with a translucent box containing a small circuit board. The doohickey was not a hot new piece of jewelry, but rather a device collecting biometric data like daily step and sleep data. It is part of a Texas A&M study, funded by the federal government, of the impact of social belonging on physical health. Every few weeks a research team comes out to collect data, including a blood sample, and compares residents in Indigo with those from a less walkable development nearby.
When I asked Ms. Clancy if this gave her any pause — I mean, giving blood and all — she said that, in fact, the experiment comforted her. “If they were doing this as a gimmick, they wouldn’t go through all this trouble to work with researchers,” she said.
The initial marketing for master-planned communities can be self-fulfilling. “By advertising that they’re into sociability and having some cues, the social crowd will move there,” said Ann Forsyth, a professor of urban planning at Harvard and co-director of the school’s New Towns Initiative.
Indigo, because it leans so heavily into the friendliness vibe, seems to have attracted people like Ms. Clancy. Many are in life transitions — divorced, widowed, just starting families — where making friends can be hard.
The social activity has helped create good will that has eased some of the development’s practical problems, of which there are many. Ms. Clancy moved in several months late because the developers could not secure power, a delay that caused a handful of buyers to back out.
Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Garrett were surprisingly unguarded about Indigo’s many setbacks. Sitting at Della Coffee & Wine one afternoon, Mr. Snodgrass cataloged a list of sidewalks that had to be torn out and redone. Cost overruns have forced them to take on more debt and caused some of their contractors to quit.
Living near people is hard, in Indigo and everywhere else. Indeed, one of the biggest problems with suburban life, Mr. Snodgrass said, is that people have forgotten how to resolve their problems on their own and instead outsource their issues to a homeowners’ association.
Recently, for instance, one of Indigo’s blocks was roiled by a series of intertwined complaints: A dog was pooping on a neighbor’s lawn, a resident was leaving trash cans in the driveway on non-collection days and a sonic fence was installed in someone’s front yard to ward off coyotes. Each of these arrived as an atomized complaint to the HOA.
Instead of issuing violations, Mr. Snodgrass said, the HOA responded by asking the neighbors if they had talked to each other. The answer, as usual, was no. So they are setting up a neighbor-to-neighbor meeting. Mr. Snodgrass expects the meeting to be every bit as awkward as it sounds. But so what: Isn’t arguing a vital part of a real neighborhood?
“We can have all these fun events and clubs, and that’s great,” Mr. Snodgrass said, “but we will know things are working when people can resolve these problems without support from an HOA. It’s messy, but we’re here for it.”
Pull Up a Chair
In April, Ms. Aponte and Mr. Husain had their first child, a boy named Amar, the first new baby at Indigo. Ms. Aponte said that when they came home from the hospital with their son, neighbors across Indigo offered to start a meal train. It was the sort of gesture that they craved in their old neighborhood but never had.
Still, they politely declined the meals. Mr. Husain had persuaded his parents to sell their home and buy the unit next door to them at Indigo. Then his sister bought one next to that. So they have all the help they need.
On a rainy afternoon in July, Ms. Clancy, having just agreed to water another neighbor’s plants, left her house and strolled down one of the walking paths to Della Coffee. She was there to have a glass of wine with Nancy Wenzel, 72, a retired teacher who had moved in after her husband died. Soon they were joined by a couple, Casey and Will, who arrived with their two young daughters.
For the next hour the group talked about their book club and how everyone was watching the new “Little House on the Prairie.” Amazon drones have started delivering to the area — can you believe that? One of Casey and Will’s daughters noted that she had a cat named Weasley and two bug bites that were red. Then she got embarrassed and buried her head into one of her fathers’ chests.
They pulled a couple of bistro tables together, and then a third when another couple arrived. By the time they left half the cafe was consumed by a loose rectangle of conjoined tables.
The post Here’s Your New House. It Comes With Friends. appeared first on New York Times.
