Submission + - Americans have run out of places to hang out and We're paying with our Health (fortune.com)
GFS666 writes: The U.S. has lost a fifth of its movie theaters and nearly a third of its bowling alleys since 2001. A 2025 study entitled “Uneven access to essential services and amenities: Geographic disparities in ‘third place’ availability across the United States from 2010 to 2021” found the same pattern holds well beyond bars and bowling alleys. Using Census data, researchers tracked 12 categories of what sociologists call “third places”—among them coffee shops, libraries, museums, recreation centers, and restaurants—and found widespread closures across every single category from 2019 to 2021, with the losses hitting hardest in rural areas and communities with larger Black, Hispanic, and less-educated populations.
Not only are these places disappearing, the ones still standing cost more to walk into than they used to. Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the study’s researchers, immediately agreed when asked how much of this is an affordability story. “Absolutely. I mean, everything costs more,” she said. “Cost of living is so much more, and gentrification is absolutely happening.” It’s a dynamic she’s watched shrink the pool of people who can still afford to be regulars anywhere.
The health stakes of all [these closures] are not abstract. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, led a meta-analysis of 148 studies tracking millions of people over years and often decades, finding that chronic loneliness and isolation carry a mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A later paper she co-authored formalized that comparison, bench marking social isolation directly against smoking as a public health risk. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness, which Holt-Lunstad helped author, put a number on the danger: people who are socially disconnected face up to a 29% higher risk of premature death.
Not only are these places disappearing, the ones still standing cost more to walk into than they used to. Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the study’s researchers, immediately agreed when asked how much of this is an affordability story. “Absolutely. I mean, everything costs more,” she said. “Cost of living is so much more, and gentrification is absolutely happening.” It’s a dynamic she’s watched shrink the pool of people who can still afford to be regulars anywhere.
The health stakes of all [these closures] are not abstract. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, led a meta-analysis of 148 studies tracking millions of people over years and often decades, finding that chronic loneliness and isolation carry a mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A later paper she co-authored formalized that comparison, bench marking social isolation directly against smoking as a public health risk. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness, which Holt-Lunstad helped author, put a number on the danger: people who are socially disconnected face up to a 29% higher risk of premature death.
