Master-Planned Communities Now Sell Friendship as the Main Feature
Source: NYT > Business (paywall)
Developers are packaging social infrastructure—shared kitchens, organized activities, built-in community rituals—as the primary product, not the home itself, because isolation anxiety now outweighs traditional housing concerns like square footage or location. They're treating belonging as a scarce commodity: the premise is that people will pay premium prices for engineered social cohesion rather than build it organically. The bet reveals a real market gap and a troubling reality: developers, not neighborhoods, now design our social lives.