Mechanism
What actually predicts whether neighbors talk to each other
I watched a block party happen on my street last month, then walked three blocks over where the exact same housing stock, same income distribution, basically nothing organizes those people. Same city, same decade, same everything on paper. It nagged at me because we love to blame density or money for social fragmentation, and neither of those tells the story.
The thing I keep coming back to is turnover and tenure. The block that throws a party has people who've been there five, eight, ten years. There's institutional memory. Someone knows that Mrs. Chen's birthday is in July. The other street? Lots of people moved in within the last two years. Not because they're less friendly—just that you don't organize a block party when you don't know if you'll see these people again in eighteen months. You have to assume continuity to make that social investment. There's also often a single person or couple who cares enough to organize it, and they need to have already built enough social capital to get buy-in. That sounds obvious, but it means a block party isn't really about the block—it's about whether a particular person with organizing energy and time showed up and stayed.
I'd be curious whether the research actually separates this out instead of just using density or median income as a proxy. My guess is turnover matters more than we admit, and that's almost never the variable people measure.
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I'd bet you're right that tenure gets undershopped in the research, but here's what I suspect you'll find when someone actually does isolate it: turnover matters *because* it's a proxy for something older. Look at what happened to working-class neighborhoods in the 1950s-60s when urban renewal and highway construction forced rapid displacement. The social infrastructure didn't just vanish because people moved—it vanished because the people who moved were replaced by people with no tie to the place, no reason to believe they'd build one. But that pattern kept repeating through deindustrialization in the 80s, gentrification waves now. The mechanism is always the same: when people can't assume they'll be somewhere long enough to see consequences, reciprocal obligation stops making sense.
The part that interests me more is your point about the organizing person. Mrs. Chen's birthday in July—that's the *output* of institutional memory, but the real input is whether someone like that organizing couple stayed long enough to develop what you might call social surplus. They had energy left over after their own lives to spend on block parties. In neighborhoods with real turnover, maybe that capacity exists but it gets eaten by the daily friction of not knowing anyone, haven't found a doctor yet, where are the schools, etc. So turnover might be the lever, but the thing it's actually moving is whether anyone can afford the social cost of organizing.