It starts at home

A while back I went to an Austin Salon evening featuring Sam Gosling, the UT Austin psychologist who wrote a book called Snoop. His point is simple: your space says a lot about you. The posters on your wall, the books on your shelf, the music you put on to unwind after work. It all tells a story about who you are and who you want to be.

Austin Salon is one of those groups that gets people out of the house to listen, argue and swap ideas over a drink. Talking with folks there afterward, we kept coming back to one thing. A nice apartment or home is great, but it’s only half of it. The other half is what’s outside your door. Do you know your neighbors? Do you run into people you know? Does the place make you feel like you belong?

What the numbers say

My site EventCarpooling scored 11 cities on six things: culture, talks and lectures, civic events, how much is going on, how easy it is to get to events without a car, and train service. San Francisco and Washington, DC came out on top with 29 out of 30. Tokyo and Boston were right behind at 27. Austin and Houston landed at 17, and St. Louis brought up the rear at 15.

Here’s what surprised me. Austin and Houston have plenty going on. Austin has gems like Austin Salon and Thinkers & Drinkers, and both cities scored a 4 on culture, same as Boston. Where they fell short was getting there. Too many events were out in Round Rock, Bee Cave, Pearland or The Woodlands. The New York Times recently highlighted the challenges of living in the suburbs of Houston and the arising loneliness epidemic there. As Sam Gosling postulated, the living space design has to extend to the neighborhood design where social connections are more frequent and natural. The old HOA-governed suburbia littered with sprawling McMansions is a fading model for the younger generations. I can attest to this while watching younger neighbors move away.

That means a car, a drive and a parking spot every single time going into an urban utopia. After a long day, most of us just stay home in suburban America with our families. In Boston or San Francisco, nearly everything is a short walk or a train ride away, so going out is the easy choice.

The 15-minute rule

Paris (France) has a name for what those top cities get right. Mayor Anne Hidalgo has championed the “15-minute city,” an idea from urban planner Carlos Moreno. The goal is that you can reach groceries, school, work, a park and the doctor within 15 minutes on foot or by bike.

That rule does more than save time. It gets people moving, and that may be its biggest payoff.

Here’s the math. Federal health guidelines call for about 150 minutes of moderate activity a week. Walk 15 minutes to the store or the train and 15 minutes back, five days a week, and you’ve hit it. No gym membership, no workout plan. You were just going about your day.

Compare that with a car-first town. There, you walk from the couch to the driveway and from the parking lot to the door. Exercise becomes one more thing to schedule, and after work and errands, most of us skip it.

Multiply that across a whole country and you get a big piece of America’s health problem. Most of our towns were built for cars, so for millions of people a car is the only way to get anywhere. Researchers have long tied that kind of sprawl to less walking, more obesity and higher blood pressure. Add in time stuck in traffic, car crashes and dirty air, and it’s fair to say a lot of what ails us starts with how we built our streets.

The benefits go well past the waistline. Regular walking is good for your heart and blood pressure, helps you sleep and lifts your mood. And a walk home after a talk gives you time to chew over what you just heard.

Transit counts too, because nearly every train ride starts and ends on foot. It’s no accident that the cities that scored a 5 on transit, like Boston, San Francisco, DC and Tokyo, are also places where people rack up steps without trying.

Walking also brings back the neighborliness we talked about at Gosling’s event. Nobody waves at you from the freeway. They do on the sidewalk. See the same faces enough times and strangers turn into neighbors.

You get what you pay for

Now, I’d be leaving something out if I didn’t talk about money. My scores don’t measure cost, and the cities near the bottom are a good deal cheaper. A paycheck goes a lot further in Houston or St. Louis than in San Francisco or Boston.

But in a lot of ways, you get what you pay for. Cheaper rent often comes with a car payment, insurance, gas and long drives. A pricier walkable city can let you skip some of that.

And you’re not just paying for an apartment or a home. You’re paying for your evenings, your health and your friendships —- potential life-changing upgrades or downgrades. Everybody has to do their own math. Just make sure you count all of it like what I’ve shared as my city comparison data shows.

A word to young people

If you’re young and deciding where to live, most people will tell you to follow the job and the rent. Fair enough, but don’t stop there. Your twenties are when you make your friends, find your people and build your habits. A place where you can walk to a lecture, a gallery or a city council meeting makes all of that easier. The great comedian Nate Bargatze came to life when he moved to NYC with his wife.

Gosling’s talk also mentioned that curious, open-minded people tend to gather in certain cities like NYC. Move to a place like that and some of it rubs off. Gosling has the research to back this up. With psychologist Jason Rentfrow, he studied personality tests from more than half a million Americans and found that curious, open-minded people cluster in places like DC, Massachusetts, Oregon and California. Those are the same places at the top of my list. People pick places that suit them, and those places shape them right back. Where you live shapes who you become.

So before you sign that apartment lease or buy a home, ask yourself two questions. Can I afford it? And will this place help me belong?

If I were to retitle this essay I would argue that where you live will determine how long you will live.

A note on the numbers: six of the 11 cities were scored from big public event calendars instead of our own newsletters, so treat a gap of a point or two as a tie.