Candidate for Harlem’s City Council Representative

The Harlem East Block Association (HEBA) is planning on endorsing a candidate for city council as soon as possible, hopefully by early April. To accomplish this, they are meeting with candidates and then going to survey their members on who HEBA should endorse.  Note candidates will be asked to fill out a questionnaire. A draft is included here (a simplified version from last year). 

In the meantime, please distribute the YOUR VOTE MATTERS poster in your buildings to register voters and collect neighbors’ contact information. 

Yusef Salaam has agreed to come speak to the HEBA. He was one of the Exonerated Five and has been a criminal justice advocate since then. He agreed to take a walk with us around the neighborhood on Feb 13 noon. We are starting at La Marqueta. Please come meet him in person and show him our challenges. This is a great way to advocate for our community. He will then speak to us on zoom on Feb 24 (Thurs) 7pm.

Quote from him “This gives us the opportunity to be able to restore Harlem to the greatness that it is and could always be.” (read more here)

Friendships

Friendship, after all, has life-sustaining properties and has been shown to improve both physical and mental health. Psychologists say that although strong social ties can be maintained through technology, nothing beats face-to-face contact. And it’s no secret that coming together is easier the closer you are. 

With Valentine’s Day — and Galentine’s Day — approaching, I called up a few psychologists and friendship experts to talk about the role that physical proximity plays in keeping and developing social ties. 

Here are the highlights from our conversations.

Friendship as a basic need

One thing they all emphasized: It’s not frivolous to prioritize friendship. “I think so many times we view it as: if we have time, then we’ll give attention to our social life. Or, oh, it’s a luxury to be able to go out and see friends,” said Andrea Bonior, a clinical psychologist and the host of Baggage Check, a mental health podcast. “When in reality, we know that having strong friendships predicts our longevity, it helps our immune system, it makes us more resilient and protected against certain mental and physical health disorders.”

The friendship radius

Many of us already have a “friendship radius,” defined as “the distance we are willing to travel to spend time with friends,” said Elizabeth Laugeson, a clinical psychologist and an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

“For some people in urban settings, their radius becomes smaller because it takes more time to travel distances in congested areas,” she says. “In rural settings, people may be more willing to travel longer distances to be with friends because there are fewer alternatives. Whatever your friendship radius is, we are more likely to spend time with friends that we can easily access.”

Robin Dunbar, a psychologist and the author of Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, says that a 30-minute radius is the real sweet spot. One study on interpersonal contact in Canada in 1978 showed that the frequency of face-to-face encounters starts to decline once the distance between friends or relatives reaches five miles; phone contact started to dry up at 100 miles.

“If you don’t see them regularly enough, friendships decline very rapidly,” said Dunbar. “You have to be able to walk around there, bang on their door, and say, I feel like crap,” he said. “Because at that point, there is only one thing that you need, and that’s a hug.”

Proximity matters 

Dunbar argues that FaceTimes and Facebook messages can’t compete when it comes to fostering friendship. But Laugeson points to the Covid lockdowns as evidence that “true friendships can survive the challenge of physical proximity.”

Still, there are unique benefits to living close by. Besides the immediate comfort and regularity, being a neighbor can also breed spontaneity. “It’s a lot different to bump into somebody frequently because they happen to live on your street, and you have the ability to sort of see them on a random day without planning,” said Bonior. “Any time you have to plan, there’s more possibility that the planning itself is going to thwart getting together.” 

Don’t stay closed off

Cultivating a community that closely reflects your existing social networks has drawbacks, too. Even if all your like-minded friends move to you, experts say you should still be open to making new and unexpected connections in the neighborhood. “We expand when our world expands. We get to know those different from ourselves,” said Melanie Ross Mills, the author of The Friendship Bond. “We stretch ourselves beyond our ‘community comfort zone.’”

From Bloomberg’s CityLab: https://www.bloomberg.com/citylab


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