After a recent summer storm here in Baltimore, I took a walk along the trail near our house. I found a group of people sheltering beneath an overpass with instruments to play: fiddle and banjo, a couple of guitars. A young woman handed me a zither and invited me to join along.
I’d never seen a zither, let alone played one, but I did what I could for a little while as droplets pattered from above. I didn’t know any of them, apart from a young man who worked at our local hardware store. Still, they welcomed me into their circle. Their community was open to strangers like me.
The musicians demonstrated a quality fading from our lives in the United States: neighborliness. Neighbors take an interest in those they live beside, even those they don’t know that well. Neighborliness depends upon a more expansive sense of kinship and belonging. On a planet of deep relationships between far-flung people and places, it’s a crucial sentiment to nurture.
Many of our leaders don’t acknowledge this value. At an election rally in Vandalia, Ohio, last year, President Donald Trump mocked the idea of welcoming undocumented migrants into the country as possible neighbors. “How are you doing neighbor?” you might say, but then “they punch you in the face and whack you,” he added.
In my new book, “Something Between Us,” I explain why such suspicions land with so many Americans. I show how everyday infrastructures of defense and retreat in the United States make it difficult to meet others with the concern they deserve. The deepening divides of our daily lives lead us to think of wellbeing in individual and antagonistic terms.
Commonplace forms of isolation in the United States hamper relationships beyond one’s own family and friends. Front porch sessions with neighbors and passersby have given way to private gatherings on the backyard deck and time with screens indoors. Such changes lessen happenstance conversation and the trust in community such interactions can build.
I’ve seen this first-hand in many places around the country. In Fargo, North Dakota, I met a real estate developer who set suburban homes at a distance from each other. “People here don’t want to be congested,” he explained. “I don’t want to open my window and pass over some sugar by hand to the neighbor next door.”
Such circumstances can make contact threatening, as I learned from Hukun Dabar, a community organizer working with the many Somali-Americans who have settled in the area. In Somalia, he recalled, neighbors would reach out to each other for charcoal or cooking oil, even an impromptu meal. But here, Dabar explained, such things could provoke fear. “You go to your neighbor’s door, it’s like you’re disturbing them. They look at you from a small window; they don’t know who you are.”
Many American homes look and feel increasingly like fortresses; the same is true for our ever-larger vehicles. The walls of these structures promise safety and security, but they often leave people with a greater sense of exposure and unease. The truth is that we share our lives and places with others we don’t know that well. And neighborliness is one way to seek well-being in their company.
I’ve experienced this myself in Baltimore. We live on a walkable street with a civic sensibility and a thriving porch culture, where people are likely to encounter strangers on a daily basis and acknowledge them with a nod. For many of us here, the years of the pandemic turned our lives further outward, toward the shared outdoor spaces of the neighborhood and the needs of others around us.
Such attention matters. Two mornings after the 2024 election, I came outside to find that our car battery was dead. Our kids needed to get to school, and my wife and I wondered what to do. Then a neighbor walked by. “Do you need a jump?” he asked, and we gratefully accepted his offer.
We recognized each other vaguely, though we’d never met. Still, he overheard us as he walked by and offered to help. He could have been wearing headphones, or driving up the road instead, or simply passing by without stopping. But there was a space to share, the chance to pay attention, and an inclination to do so.
We need to ensure that such gestures have a place in the rhythm of our daily lives. Whether it’s everyday challenges like dead batteries or lost keys, or situations of far more encompassing need like hurricanes, floods and wildfires, meeting the travails of others in a spirit of mutual aid and solidarity can transform the quality of our lives.
“Sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow,” Jane Jacobs observed. Societies built around hardened boundaries tend to produce exclusionary viewpoints. But the spaces of our homes and roadways, the places we occupy in body and mind, can be remade to support our capacity to look out for each other.
The challenge may seem insurmountable. Neighborliness can itself be hostile and exclusionary, as we know in Baltimore, the city that pioneered residential segregation in the United States. Still, we have occasions to nurture other forms of social possibility. Take that woodland trail close to our Wyman Park rowhouse: once a railway line, now a key resource for walkers, dog owners and amateur naturalists, a space for diverse encounters.
Soon after I met those musicians along that trail, I ran into a birder. He excitedly described the yellow-crowned night heron that had just swept by along the stream. Facing habitat loss in many states, some of these birds nest along our urban waterways for a few months each year, laying eggs and raising chicks before heading south each fall.
These migrants are also neighbors of ours. And it matters that they have a place to return here each year: that they find welcome and care as they pass through, that we hold a space for them beside us.
Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of “Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down.” He will be at the Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore on Aug. 21 for a live discussion of the book.