Where Did Everybody Go?

The Empty Stool

There used to be a diner near my old apartment. Nothing special. Formica counters, bad coffee, a cook who called everyone "hon." I went there most mornings. So did a retired postal worker, a woman who wrote romance novels, two nurses coming off the night shift, and a guy who fixed motorcycles. We weren't friends exactly. But we knew each other. We talked. If one of us didn't show up for a week, someone would ask about it.

The diner closed in 2022. Rent tripled. A smoothie franchise moved in. Acai bowls for fourteen dollars. Nobody sits at the counter anymore because there isn't one.

This is a small story. It's also the whole story.

The Third Place

Ray Oldenburg named the concept in 1989. Your first place is home. Your second place is work. Your third place is everywhere else you go regularly: the bar, the barbershop, the park bench, the library, the coffee shop, the diner counter. These are the places where community happens without anyone planning it. You show up. Other people show up. Over time, you become regulars. Over more time, you become something like a community.

Third places have specific characteristics that make this work. They're free or cheap to access. They're located where people can reach them easily. They don't require reservations or memberships. They welcome lingering. They mix ages, classes, occupations. They operate on a first-come, first-served basis. Nobody checks your credentials at the door.

The sociological function of these places is enormous. They're where you encounter people outside your immediate circle. Where you hear opinions different from your own. Where loneliness gets interrupted by the simple fact of being around other humans. Where newcomers get absorbed into a community through repeated low-stakes interactions rather than formal introductions.

They're disappearing.

The Economics of Hanging Out

The math is brutal. A third place needs to be cheap. Cheap means low margin. Low margin means vulnerable to rent increases. And rent has been increasing, in some urban markets doubling or tripling over the past fifteen years.

Independent restaurants closed at a staggering rate during 2020 and 2021. The National Restaurant Association estimated that roughly 90,000 restaurants closed permanently in the first year of the pandemic alone. Many were exactly the kind of place Oldenburg described, neighborhood joints where the overhead was low enough to let people nurse a cup of coffee for two hours.

What replaced them? Chains. Franchises. Concepts optimized for throughput rather than lingering. The business model of a Starbucks or a Chipotle is explicitly designed to move people through as fast as possible. The chairs are uncomfortable on purpose. The music is loud on purpose. The WiFi cuts out after an hour on purpose. You're not a regular. You're a transaction.

Even the coffee shops that market themselves as "community spaces" are operating under economic pressures that work against actual community. When your rent is $15,000 a month, you can't afford to let someone sit for three hours nursing a $4 latte. The owner either raises prices, pushing out the people who made it a community in the first place, or goes under.

Parks Without People

Public third places, the ones that don't depend on commercial viability, should be the backstop. Parks, libraries, community centers, public pools. These are places where you can exist without buying anything. Where the only price of admission is showing up.

But the funding picture is grim. The National Recreation and Park Association has documented decades of underinvestment in park infrastructure. Adjusted for inflation, per capita spending on parks and recreation has declined in most American municipalities. Deferred maintenance backlogs run into the billions nationally. Parks get built when new developments need them for marketing purposes, then starved of the ongoing funding needed to keep them usable.

Libraries tell the same story. Hours cut. Branches consolidated. Programming reduced. The American Library Association has tracked steady declines in operating budgets relative to the populations they serve.

And then there's the hostility. Anti-loitering ordinances. Hostile architecture: benches with armrests designed to prevent sleeping, but that also prevent comfortable sitting. Skateboard-deterrent studs. Rules closing parks at sunset. The physical infrastructure of public space increasingly communicates one message: keep moving.

Who is this for? Not the teenager who needs somewhere to be that isn't home or school. Not the retiree whose social world has contracted. Not the unemployed person who can't afford to buy their way into a private space. These are the people who need third places most, and they're the ones being designed out.

The Subscription Model of Socializing

Here's what's replaced the third place: paid access.

Gym memberships. Coworking spaces. Boutique fitness classes. Membership-based social clubs. Paid events through Eventbrite. Even dating, which used to happen incidentally in third places, now requires paid apps.

Each of these works fine individually. A climbing gym is a decent place to make friends. A coworking space can develop regulars and community. But they all have a cover charge. They all sort by income. And they all frame social connection as a product you purchase rather than a condition you inhabit.

The shift from free to paid social infrastructure has distributional consequences that should be obvious but rarely get discussed. Wealthy people can buy their way into community. They can afford the gym, the coworking space, the social club. Their social lives are subsidized by disposable income.

Everyone else gets the couch and the phone screen. The places where they used to gather for free (the diner, the park, the library that was open until 9 PM) are gone or degraded or hostile. Their options for unstructured social time have been narrowed to the point where isolation isn't a choice. It's the default.

The Algorithm Filled the Vacuum

Social media didn't kill third places. But it colonized the void they left behind.

When there's nowhere to go and nothing to do that doesn't cost money, the phone becomes the default third place. You scroll instead of sitting at a counter. You comment instead of chatting. You follow instead of knowing. The platform provides a simulation of the third-place experience (regulars, community, belonging) without the embodied reality that makes those things meaningful.

And the platforms are designed to keep you there. Every minute you spend scrolling is a minute you're not at a park or a library or a diner. The business model depends on your isolation. Connected people with active social lives don't generate the engagement metrics that drive ad revenue.

So the cycle reinforces itself. Third places close. People go online. Online platforms profit from their loneliness. The profits don't get reinvested into public space. More third places close.

What Gets Built Instead

Drive through any American suburb built in the last twenty years. Count the gathering places.

You'll find a Starbucks in a strip mall. A gym in a commercial park. Maybe a chain restaurant with a 45-minute wait. A "town center" that's actually an outdoor shopping mall, privately owned, security-patrolled, and designed to facilitate purchasing rather than gathering.

What you won't find is a public square. A community center with open hours. A park with chess tables and no time limit. A bar cheap enough that a retired plumber and a college student can sit next to each other for an evening.

We don't build those anymore. We build amenities for residential developments, a pool and a clubhouse restricted to residents of that specific complex. Privatized third places for privatized communities. The exact opposite of what Oldenburg described.

The Fix Is the Space

We didn't lose community because people got worse at socializing. We lost it because we dismantled the physical conditions that made community happen without effort.

Rebuilding it means rebuilding the spaces. Fund parks and keep them open. Fund libraries and extend their hours. Reform zoning so that neighborhoods have commercial spaces woven into them: the corner bar, the neighborhood cafe, the barbershop that's been there forty years. Abolish anti-loitering laws that criminalize existing in public. Design benches for sitting, not for deterrence.

None of this is complicated. All of it costs money. The money exists; it's just being spent on highway expansion and stadium subsidies and tax breaks for developments that will never generate enough revenue to maintain their own infrastructure.

We didn't lose community. We priced it out, paved it over, and put up a sign that says Customers Only.