LawnStarter Survey: 3 in 10 Tampa-St. Pete Homeowners Say Neighbors Are Practically Strangers
John Egan
For many homeowners in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL, metro area, their neighbors are virtual strangers.
In an online survey conducted by LawnStarter on the SurveyMonkey Audience platform, about one-third of homeowners (34.7 percent) in the Tampa-St. Pete area said they don’t know their neighbors very well or at all. Meanwhile, 13.1 percent said they know their neighbors very well and 52.2 percent said they know them fairly well.
Along those lines, 24.3 percent of homeowners in the Tampa-St. Pete area said they know the names of only a few of their neighbors, with 2.7 percent saying they don’t know any of their neighbors’ names. On the flip side, 59.9 percent said they know some of their neighbors’ names and 13.1 percent said they know all of their names.
Elsewhere in the survey:
- 86.5 percent of homeowners said a neighbor has been inside their home.
- 95.1 percent of homeowners like their neighborhood.
- 23 percent of homeowners have argued with a neighbor.
- 12.2 percent of homeowners have called the police about a neighbor.
Andrew Kirby, professor of social and behavioral sciences at Arizona State University, says he finds the survey results “very encouraging,” given that the number of people who don’t know their neighbors at all (less than 3 percent in Tampa-St. Pete) and the number of people who hadn’t been visited by a neighbor (13.5 percent in Tampa-St. Pete) are relatively low.
“Contrary to popular belief, neighbors living in HOAs and gated communities seem to be no different than those living in traditional neighborhoods with regard to interaction,” Kirby says. “While some families enter and exit via the garage, many neighborhoods are actually designed to foster interaction, with walking trails and small pools and play areas where parents and children can play.”
The age makeup of a neighborhood’s residents can play a part in the level of neighborliness, according to Kirby.
“Research suggests that connections can emerge relatively quickly, and we can imagine that children will provide an important glue,” he says. “At the other end of the scale, older adults have more time, disposable income and interest in working with their peers on keeping the neighborhood attractive.”
The LawnStarter survey was conducted online Feb. 4-18, 2016, among a regional sample of 702 adults over age 18 who own homes in the metro areas of Charlotte, NC; Raleigh, NC; Jacksonville, FL; Tampa-St. Petersburg FL; and San Antonio, TX. Respondents for this non-probability survey were selected using a SurveyMonkey Audience. As the sample for the survey self-selected for participation, sampling error cannot be calculated.
Photo: Flickr/Matthew Paulson
