LawnStarter Survey: Nearly 4 in 10 Jacksonville Homeowners Say Neighbors Are Practically Strangers

John Egan

For many homeowners in the Jacksonville, FL, metro area, their neighbors are virtual strangers.

In an online survey conducted by LawnStarter on the SurveyMonkey Audience platform, nearly four in 10 (39 percent) of homeowners in the Jacksonville area said they don’t know their neighbors very well or at all. Meanwhile, 40 percent said they know their neighbors very well and 21 percent said they know them fairly well.

In the same vein, 26.6 percent of homeowners in the Jacksonville area said they know the names of only a few of their neighbors, with 2.9 percent saying they don’t know any of their neighbors’ names. Conversely, 47.6 percent said they know some of their neighbors’ names and 22.9 percent said they know all of their names.

Elsewhere in the survey:

84.8 percent of homeowners said a neighbor has been inside their home.

93.3 percent of homeowners like their neighborhood.

17.1 percent of homeowners have argued with a neighbor.

11.4 percent of homeowners have called the police about a neighbor.

Krista Paulsen, chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, says Jacksonville “seems fairly typical” in terms of people knowing their neighbors. Paulsen suggests the mobility of Jacksonville’s population is tied to the area’s degree of “neighborliness.”

“Jacksonville is slightly more mobile than the U.S. as a whole -- that is, people here are more likely to move,” she says. “Scholars have observed that length of residence has a positive association with neighborly interactions, so Jacksonville may be at a disadvantage in terms of fostering neighborliness.”

The LawnStarter survey was conducted online Feb. 4-18, 2016, among a regional sample of 702 adults over age 18 who own homes in the metro areas of Charlotte, NC; Raleigh, NC; Jacksonville, FL; Tampa-St. Petersburg FL; and San Antonio, TX. Respondents for this non-probability survey were selected using a SurveyMonkey Audience. As the sample for the survey self-selected for participation, sampling error cannot be calculated.