America's broken housing market is making millennials and Gen Z lonelier

• Millennials and Gen Z are the loneliest generations. 
• It may have a lot to do with car-centric neighborhoods that lack public space.
• Experts say shared spaces that facilitate connection within communities are key to fighting the loneliness epidemic. 

To cure loneliness, we're often told to see our friends in person, perform acts of kindness, or meditate. 

But what if our homes and neighborhoods are to blame?

Millennials and Gen Z are the loneliest generations. While the most commonly cited culprit is social media, it turns out our homes and the layout of our cities or suburbs could also be making us lonelier.

"We need to think beyond just the individual," Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University and a leading loneliness researcher, told Insider. "We often neglect the built environment."

She added, "We assume that this is a personal issue, and it's up to the person to somehow either get the help they need or that we need to hurry and provide some kind of treatment or intervention for these people, when it's part of a larger system of how our communities are designed, how our policies and practices, how our environment is impacting this that makes it either easier or harder to connect with people."

As house prices and rents have surged beyond most Americans' budgets, younger people are increasingly unable to afford to live where they want to. Communities with more greenery and shared space that facilitate connection are much more expensive to live in, meaning millennials and Gen Zers are getting priced out of places that could help them stave off loneliness.

The increasing costs of connected neighborhoods and lack of choice is a recipe for social isolation and loneliness, said Jennifer Kent, a researcher at the University of Sydney who studies links between health and the built environment. 

"People have less and less choice over where they're going to live," Kent said. "That kind of precarity is just really bad for your mental health, let alone your sense of belonging to a place." 

'Incidental interactions' are key to connection 

Loneliness and being isolated aren't the same thing. Loneliness is a perceived lack of connection — the discrepancy between the social connection someone has and the connection they want. This varies widely depending on a person's personality and desires, experts say. Social isolation is an objective measure of connection and time spent alone. 

"People can be isolated and not feel lonely and people can not be isolated and still feel lonely," Holt-Lunstad said. 

Still, social isolation is associated with serious health issues, including premature mortality. Holt-Lunstad's widely-cited research has found that loneliness and social isolation have health impacts comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Living alone, as a single risk factor, increases the risk of premature mortality by 32%, she found. 

But regardless of household size, feeling connected to the neighborhood and community a person lives in is key to combating loneliness. 

So-called "incidental interactions" are an underappreciated way people can reduce loneliness. These are the casual conversations we have with strangers at the dog park, the coffee shop barista, and the neighbors in the lobby of our building. 

Loose connections, or weak social ties, with the people in our communities help people feel a sense of belonging and safety, researchers have found. 

But we need shared spaces to facilitate these interactions, Kent said. 

This is where the built environment — green spaces, common areas in apartment buildings, and events like concerts and farmers' markets in public places — is key. People who live in communities with more walkable neighborhoods, shared space, greenery, and diverse types of housing, feel more socially connected and less lonely.

Ideally, these spaces should feel safe and inviting. 

"Making sure that those spaces are adequate, that they're not overcrowded, that they don't become sites of tension, is also really important," Holt-Lunstad said. 

A major project in Barcelona, Spain, to reduce car traffic and increase greenery in dense residential neighborhoods has boosted residents' mental health. Efforts to make much of the city greener and more walkable are expected to reduce both visits to mental health specialists and the use of antidepressants by 13%.

Erin Peavey, the health and wellbeing design leader at the architecture firm HKS, said becoming a mother opened her eyes to "the monumental impact that my built environment made on what it allowed me to do or not." 

"To walk to grocery stores, to strap my daughter onto my chest and just be in community with other people — that didn't always have to mean we were talking," Peavey said. "A lot of times it was like those micro-interactions or just sitting and sharing space in a cafe with others." 

In her work, Peavey has come up with six design strategies for creating third spaces — places that aren't home, work, or school — to facilitate social connection. They include making public spaces accessible, engaging, unique, and green. Having benches, murals or other art, and businesses that are open at various times of day and night all help attract and keep people in these spaces. 

But neighborhoods need to be dense and walkable in order for people to easily access these places because cars and physical distance get in the way. 

And denser, more walkable communities with high-quality public spaces are much more expensive to live in. Home buyers in the biggest cities in the US pay 35% more to live in a walkable neighborhood and renters pay 41% more, according to a report published earlier this year by Smart Growth America. 

On the flipside, in less dense areas, people are more likely to have their own backyards and less of a need for shared green spaces, Kent said.

"In the suburbs, it's not necessarily that it's low density, it's that people have enough of their own private space that they don't feel obliged, like they don't feel like they need to go out and use public spaces," Kent said. 

A car-dependent life, more of a feature of less dense areas, is also a contributor to loneliness. 

"If you and I walk past each other on the street, and we might wave or smile if one of us has a dog or a third object, like we might, you know, chat about whatever," Peavey said. "If we pass in a car, we may not even see each other at all." 

The housing crisis has limited our choices 

A nationwide housing affordability crisis has made it harder for Millennials and Gen Zers to live where they want to. 

Both renters and first-time home buyers are dealing with serious headwinds from housing shortages and skyrocketing costs. Millennials and Gen Zers are living with their parents for longer and buying homes at lower rates than previous generations did at their age.

Longer commute times and living far from friends and family can also exacerbate loneliness, experts say. 

There aren't enough family-sized apartments in urban areas to keep up with demand, in part because studios and one-bedrooms are more profitable for developers to build. So millennials with young kids looking for bigger homes are often priced out of the cities they live in and pushed into the suburbs. 

Peavey noted that parenting can be an isolating experience, particularly in less dense, walkable areas with common spaces that families can share with each other. 

"It's great to be able to remember that we were meant to co-parent in small villages or tribes," Peavey said. "We weren't meant to do it all alone and I think we've been given this false sense that we were."

Do you feel socially isolated in your neighborhood? Have you moved due to loneliness? Reach out to this reporter at erelman@insider.com. 

This story was originally published in April 2023.