We found that 23 percent of Americans live in high-amenity communities, close to half (44 percent) live in moderate-amenity communities, and one-third (33 percent) live in low-amenity communities. But more notable is the effect that living near these amenities has on how we relate to our communities and to one another.

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While high-amenity residents exhibit a range of more positive social behaviors and attitudes, it’s also true that these communities are geographically and demographically distinct from moderate- and low-amenity communities. High-amenity neighborhoods tend to be more urban and include a greater proportion of white non-Hispanic residents and residents with more formal years of schooling. To fully capture the independent influence of neighborhood amenities, we constructed three statistical models that controlled for these important geographic and demographic differences. The results show that even after taking account of educational background, race and ethnicity, ideology, income, age, and urbanity, people who live closer to neighborhood amenities are more trusting, are less socially isolated, and express greater satisfaction with their community.

For instance, residents in high-amenity urban neighborhoods are twice as likely to say people in their community are “very willing” to help their neighbors compared with urban dwellers in low-amenity areas. High-amenity suburban residents are three times as likely to say the same compared with those in low-amenity suburban areas. High-amenity urbanites and suburbanites are roughly twice as likely as their low-amenity counterparts to say they trust their neighbors a great deal. A similar pattern is evident when it comes to trusting co-workers.

Access to more community-oriented spaces is also associated with increased confidence in local government. Even though we are bitterly divided by politics, and confidence in federal and state governments is in decline, people in vibrant neighborhoods have a greater level of confidence in their local government than those living in amenity-poor places. Americans living closer to neighborhood restaurants, bars, parks, and libraries are nearly twice as likely as those living in places where these things are largely absent to say they trust local government (39 percent versus 22 percent). Having access to neighborhood amenities also correlates with how we think about our capacity to make a difference in politics.

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Many of the things that we lament are missing from our political and social life, such as mutual concern, a sense of belonging, and helpfulness, are found in greater degrees in communities that have a sense of place, or at least enough ingredients to make a well-rounded community. Urbanists have consistently found that proximity to core community assets such as grocery stores raise property values. These new data show that proximity has an even wider range of benefits, such that it should increasingly play a role in policy deliberations.