Richard Kyte, an ethics professor in La Crosse, Wisconsin, started meeting two increasingly isolated colleagues for Wednesday-morning breakfast at a local cafe in 2011. Fifteen years on, the meetup still runs — now at a tavern after the cafe closed — and some of the most reluctant participants are the most engaged. “When you’re talking about adding a close friend,” Kyte says, “that’s a huge change in the quality of your life.”
The Nation’s feature uses Kyte’s tavern — and the sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s term for such places — to survey what’s happening to “third places,” the informal gathering spaces outside home and work: cafes, barber shops, libraries, parks. The numbers are stark. Fifty-four percent of Americans regularly spend time in third places, down from 67 percent in 2019. Thirty percent socialized in person on an average day in 2025, down from 38 percent a decade earlier. Just 44 percent of Americans trust all or most of the people in their neighborhood.
What’s being lost, and who loses most
Rising costs, remote work, busy schedules, and e-commerce have made the places harder to sustain and harder to fit into daily life, while social media and group chats moved much of the socializing online. Jessica Finlay, a geography professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, notes the trade: online you can find people who share your passions, but you lose what happens “when we’re in third places in person” — sitting next to someone who doesn’t think like you. “We can lose a lot of that online.”
The loss is not felt equally. A 2025 study Finlay co-authored found the decline in third-place availability falls hardest on majority-Black, lower-educated, and rural communities — groups that already report higher loneliness and less social support. The Trust for Public Land finds neighborhoods where most residents are people of color have roughly 44 percent less park acreage than predominantly white ones. But the picture is complicated: majority-Black communities in the study had more civic organizations, barber and beauty shops, and restaurants, and some communities are simply more adept at finding places to gather.
Trust, polarization, and what to do about it
Kyte’s argument connects the decline to the country’s broader fraying: most trust is built through person-to-person contact, so less time getting to know neighbors means less trust, and less trust feeds polarization. CUNY anthropologist Setha Low cautions against the straight line — “Everybody’s looking for it to be one thing… It doesn’t have to be one thing” — but the experts converge on the remedy. The main fix, Kyte says, is zoning: revise codes to allow mixed-use development and small businesses in residential areas, a slow process La Crosse is mid-way through and Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Seattle have begun.
The piece is worth reading whole for the research roundup — and it maps neatly onto the everyday question of where a person is supposed to make low-stakes, repeatable contact with other humans in a city that has quietly zoned those places away.