Go Visit Your Neighbor

Go Visit Your Neighbor

We no longer live in a time when people know all their neighbors and consider them to be friends.  A shocking number of people have never had a conversation with their neighbors and some couldn't pick them out of a lineup.  Introduce yourself or invite your neighbor over for coffee.  Neighbors are not only a great potential source of friendship, they make us feel more comfortable in our homes, which is where most of us spend much of our time.

New houses are being built across the country with an amazing new feature: front porches.  According to the National Association of Home Builders, space that once might have been dedicated to a living room is now more likely to be used for a front porch.

Architects, builders and town planners see the front porch as one remedy to the unhappy and unccomfortable social distance that characterizes many neighborhoods.  Many of us don't know who our nieghbors are, and often we don't know anything about them.  This, despite the fact that we have something tremendously important--our neighborhood, our surroundings, the place we begin each day! Front porches are making a comeback because most of us would like the chance to venture outside our front door and meet the people on our street.

Greater community interactions can increase happiness by almost 30 percent according to a 1997 study done by Sugarman in Psychological Foundations of Happiness.  So get out there and visit your neighbor!

If you'd like a house with a front porch, we would be more than willing to help yo ufind one with just that feature! Give us a call today!

Hope you all have a great week!