The Shrinking Space Between Home and Work

Americans often divide life into two settings: home and work. But life frequently involves the third-place informal gathering spots such as diners and coffee shops, bowling alleys and barbershops, church basements and library meeting rooms.

These third places, a term popularized by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, are crucibles of friendship, apprenticeships in citizenship, and the everyday practice of pluralism. It’s in keeping with the long American tradition of volunteer associations, acknowledged by observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame). Sadly, we use them less; now, we need them most. Our New Year’s resolution for 2026 should include a simple but demanding commitment: to reinvigorate third places in our communities—and their presence in our own lives.

The quiet disappearance of shared space

The 2024 American Social Capital Survey by the Survey Center on American Life shows how dramatically our relationship to public and commercial gathering places has changed. Asked about parks, gardens, libraries, community centers, and similar spaces, half of Americans say they never or seldom visited a park in the last year, and only 15 percent report going once a week or more. For libraries, the numbers are even more stark: 63 percent say they never or seldom walked through the doors in the past 12 months, and just 17 percent visit at least once or twice a month.

Even when amenities exist, they often don’t function as true third places. Fewer than half of Americans said people in their community could gather with neighbors in restaurants or diners (46 percent), coffee shops or cafés (41 percent), gyms or fitness centers (37 percent), or neighborhood markets (35 percent). Bookstores and retail spaces, the stuff of nostalgic civic life, barely register.

The Survey Center created a “Civic Infrastructure Scale” based on access to ten types of public and commercial spaces that could serve as neighborhood gathering spots. The results are sobering. More than one in five Americans—21 percent—live in communities with no access to these places. They report having nowhere to meet or talk to their neighbors. Another 36 percent have only “minimal” access, meaning they can use only 1 to 3 types of gathering spots. Only 18 percent enjoy “extensive” access to seven or more.

This is what researchers increasingly call a landscape of “civic deserts”: communities that may have houses and highways, but few or no places where people naturally bump into one another. Americans with a high school education or less are roughly twice as likely as college graduates to live in such civic deserts—28 percent versus 14 percent.

The consequences are not abstract. In neighborhoods with little civic infrastructure, few coffee shops, parks, or libraries, people have fewer friends and report more difficulty forming new relationships. Americans who lack access to gathering places are more than three times as likely as those in the most amenity-rich communities to say they have no close friends at all (32 percent vs. 9 percent).

Social Wealth and Social Poverty

The geography of third places mirrors America’s education and class divides. The Survey Center also finds that Americans with college degrees are far more likely than those with a high school education or less to live near and regularly use third places. They are more likely to say they can congregate with neighbors in parks or gardens, and more likely to report that libraries or community centers serve as genuine hubs of community life.

These differences add up. In high-amenity neighborhoods, where cafés, parks, and other local spots are available, residents are much more likely to report having a regular place to go, to have casual conversations with people they don’t know well, and to feel closely connected to their communities. In very high-amenity areas, 75 percent say they have a local hangout; in low-amenity areas, only 23 percent do. Nearly half of residents in amenity-rich neighborhoods report at least monthly conversations with neighbors they don’t know well, compared with one in four in low-amenity places.

You see the pattern: Rich networks of third places and the friendships, information, and mutual help that flow through them have become yet another advantage for the college-educated and upper-middle class. The ability to cultivate this social wealth of strong social support is becoming, as Daniel Cox and Sam Pressler of the Survey Center colleagues put it, a privilege rather than an ordinary feature of American life.

When third places dry up, it is not only leisure that suffers. These are the informal opportunity structures of our communities: the bars where someone hears about a job opening, the barbershops where town gossip and practical advice circulate, and the church hall or park where civic leaders emerge. When we lose them, we erode the mechanisms of upward mobility and civic learning, thereby creating social poverty.

Why Third Places Matter

Third places matter because they are stubbornly inconvenient. They require us to leave the house, to deal with other people’s noise and quirks, and to accept that not everything will be tailored to our preferences.

But those inconveniences are features, not bugs. In third places, social differences are softened by the shared rituals of the space—a weekly trivia night, the unspoken rules of the pickup basketball court, and the quiet norms of sitting near the identical strangers in the same pew each Sunday. People of different ages, incomes, and political views inhabit the same room, standing in the same coffee line or cheering for the same home team.

Third places help transform anonymous residents into recognizable neighbors and acquaintances into friends. They also provide a low-stakes training ground for citizenship. In these spaces, people learn to debate without unfriending, to compromise on turning down the air conditioning or the rules of the game, and to see others as more than their online avatars or voting patterns. In an era of polarized politics and atomized media consumption, that apprenticeship may be one of the most valuable functions third places serve.

A New Year’s Resolution

So, what would it mean to make 2026 the year of the third place? A third-place resolution would still be personal, but with a distinctly civic twist: I will leave my house and be with other people, in person, on purpose, in the place where I live.

It’s one of the few resolutions that, if widely adopted, would improve not just the lives of individuals but the health of communities. Here’s how we could take that resolution seriously.

First, as individuals and families, we can resolve to show up. The most important way to support third places is to use them. Resolve to spend an hour once a week, at a local third place: a diner, a café, a park, a library, a church hall, or a community garden. Bring a book instead of your phone. Say hello to the staff. Learn a neighbor’s name.

If you have children or teenagers, make third places part of their lives, too. Regular trips to the library or the basketball court can quietly teach them that community is something you do, not just something you talk about. The habits we model—walking to the park instead of streaming another show—are a citizenship curriculum.

Second, institutions, businesses, and congregations can become third places, not just sell to them. Restaurants and coffee shops already function as de facto third places in many communities. But more could do so intentionally: host open-mic nights, book clubs, language exchanges, civic forums, or regular “neighbor hours” with lower prices to encourage people to linger.

Libraries and parks should embrace the role Oldenburg envisioned for third places: spaces where conversation is the primary activity. Some are already doing so, with library-run discussion groups, repair cafés, and maker spaces that turn quiet stacks into buzzing laboratories of community life. Others need resources and political cover to move in that direction, especially amid culture-war fights that can make public institutions risk-averse.

Faith and civic groups—Rotary clubs, mutual aid societies, and arts organizations—can treat their physical spaces as neighborhood assets rather than merely as meeting rooms for members. That might mean opening the fellowship hall for community dinners, making the front lawn a true “commons,” or co-sponsoring events with secular organizations to draw a broader mix of neighbors.

Third, policymakers and philanthropists can stop treating third places as optional extras and start treating them as infrastructure. We have clear evidence that neighborhoods rich in public and commercial amenities produce higher levels of trust, safety, connectedness, and civic engagement. If zoning codes make it impossible to build small cafés or corner stores, if transit decisions strand residents far from parks and libraries, or if public budgets neglect community centers and local gathering spots, we should no longer pretend those are neutral choices. Those choices determine who gets to live in a place with real civic life and who is consigned to a civic desert.

Local governments can audit their own “civic infrastructure” the way they audit roads and water systems, identifying which neighborhoods lack viable third places and targeting investment accordingly. National and local philanthropies can fund third-place experiments—especially in working-class and rural communities with limited access to social and civic amenities—not as boutique projects but as part of strategies to strengthen social capital and improve economic mobility.

In recent years, some communities have used philanthropic dollars and public-private partnerships to revitalize downtown parks, reimagine underused shopping centers as community hubs, or convert vacant buildings into multi-use spaces with child care, job training, and gathering spaces under one roof. These examples suggest a simple, hopeful truth: third places can be rebuilt, and when they are, people show up.

The resolution beneath our resolutions

Our New Year’s resolutions often assume we are solitary, self-improving, self-optimizing individuals. But loneliness and isolation are not problems we can solve through sheer individual effort. And they are not problems we can afford to ignore.

A different kind of resolution would start from a different premise. At bottom, we are social creatures. Our health and flourishing depend not just on what we do in private but also on what we do together in public. And much of the work of rebuilding the American community will be done not in grand national summits, but in the humble third places of everyday life.

If 2026 is to be a better year for us as individuals and for our fraying civic fabric, it will not be because we bought better self-help apps or discovered new ways to streamline our days. It will be because we chose, stubbornly and repeatedly, to leave the house, walk down the street, and sit for a while in the places where neighbors become friends.

A resolution like that might be the hardest to keep. It may also be the one that matters most.