Heres Your New House. It Comes With Friends.

Kiara Aponte and Samir Husain loved everything about the Tudor-style house they bought in a leafy Houston suburb.It had a brick fireplace in the sunny living room and a yard with climbing roses.

Upstairs sat a pair of Jack and Jill bedrooms where Ms.Aponte imagined future children quarreling over the connecting bathroom.But beyond their property line, something was missing.

There were sidewalks, but nobody walked on them.They identified their neighbors not by name but by the car in the driveway.

No one ever popped over to borrow eggs.“There weren’t a whole lot of interactions, period,” Ms.Aponte said.“Just like a smile, wave and move on type of type of situation,” Mr.

Husain added.In 2024, two years after paying $280,000 and moving in, they left in search of better neighbors.The couple told the story of how they fell out of love with their house during a lunch at Della Coffee & Wine, the social hub of a new master-planned development called Indigo.Indigo sits about 30 miles from downtown Houston and about a 15-minute drive from their old house, next to a cow pasture and a prison.

Despite being in the suburbs, the development has a village feel.Ms.

Aponte and Mr.Husain live along a car-free parkway with a view of sidewalk plantings and strolling neighbors instead of a wall of cars.Housing developments reflect the times in which they are built.

Developers erect gates when people are worried about crime, market big kitchens when land is cheap and turn dining rooms into offices when the world is mired in a pandemic.Today, with social isolation a major preoccupation, consultants are using phrases like “emotional reliability” and “community as an amenity” to describe buyers’ desires for places that foster connection and neighbors who like hanging out.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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