Have you been priced out of living near friends?

Welcome back to Mate Investigations. For the month of April, I'm exploring platonic proximity - or why having friends in your neighbourhood, on your street or in your home represents a particularly potent source of connection. Last week, I traced the origins of this aspiration back to my childhood. This week, I'm focusing on the wider context, from the influence of nineties sitcoms on our decision-making about where and how we live (above the paywall) to the significance of the housing crisis and the legacy of the pandemic (below the paywall). If you haven't read last week's post, I recommend starting there. I hope you enjoy reading it. Let me know - and help others find my work - by clicking 'like' or leaving a comment.

When my bum wasn’t on a skateboard, it was on a cushion, strategically placed several inches from the TV while the theme music that soundtracked my childhood blasted through my parent’s living room. I was six when the first episode of Friends aired in September 1994 and each series acts as an anchor for my memories.

The storylines and script have aged as well as Ross’ pager. As Adam Sternbergh put it a piece for Vulture examining the show’s influence on popular culture, ‘while Friends inarguably excavated the Zeitgeist, it was a very different geist, in a very different Zeit.’ But for those raised on it, the Friends friends were the original influencers - and the apartment was aspirational for reasons beyond rent control.

The ease with which they walked each other’s floorboards enabled a familial intimacy. So central was the theme of home life to the show that the apartment was the seventh character - and my favourite episodes all took place there; The One Where No One’s Ready was my first taste of a truth it would take me hundreds of nights to learn: that the real magic happens before you leave the house.

The flat-sharing formula would be replicated in the shows that followed in its footsteps, from How I Met Your Mother to New Girl, but it was Lena Dunham’s Girls that got me in the gut. Perhaps it was my age when I watched it (I was in my early twenties too) but the scene in which a sobbing Jessa climbs into Hannah’s bath - before shooting a snot rocket into it - remains one of the most tender depictions of platonic intimacy I’ve ever seen on screen.

But if the sitcoms of the nineties and noughties shaped our domestic aspirations, they were clear that flat-sharing had a shelf-life. In perhaps one of the most relatable episodes of a show in which it was considered normal to hang out with friends on a Tuesday morning, Chandler and Monica say goodbye to the people with whom they’ve built a life in favour of a house in the suburbs.

This kind of decision-making has a name; coined by journalist Amy Gahran, the ‘relationship escalator’ is the idea that we level up our romantic relationships according to the default set of societal customs, with the presumed goal of permanent monogamy and cohabiting. It’s an expectation we’ll examine in more detail, but for the purposes of proximity, it amounts to this: you can live with your friends, but only until you live with your partner.

And yet, while popular culture was showing us what living with friends could look like, technology was mixing the messaging. The irony of setting up my Facebook profile from my university halls isn’t lost on me. It was September 2006 - and for the first time in my life, I’d landed in a living situation where friends really were across the hall. But even as I revelled into the novelty of my real friends, I had one eye on my virtual ones.

'Friends’ were collected in Fresher’s Week like Pokemon cards in a playground. No matter that it had been decades since you ran naked through sprinklers together, they were now part of your social network - and interactions as insignificant as a gifted tampon in the club toilets were fair game for four words that would become conversational catnip: ‘add me on Facebook’.

That we were in our Erasmus era only underlined the belief that friendships could go global. While I chickened out of spending a year at my university’s campus in China - I was in the first throes of my friendship with Jess - my friends were more ambitious. One spent a year navigating the bureaucracy of the European Parliament in Strasbourg; another spent a year navigating the bureaucracy of procuring alcohol as a 19-year-old in New York.

But the diligent exchange of dissertation-length messages sustained connections that might otherwise have caved. Read between the lines of the painstakingly-performative love letters we posted on each other’s pages and the message was loud and clear: you no longer needed to walk the same floorboards to be friends.

Some would come home, others would scatter - and by my mid-twenties I had friends in Paris, New York and Vancouver. By then, I was working in London where, thanks to policies prioritising landlords (see: uncapped rent rises, tax benefits for short-term lets and no-fault evictions) finding somewhere to live was more likely to be dictated by your finances than your friends.

At the same time, the ubiquity of SpareRoom made it easier than ever to live with strangers; the number of people in the UK looking to rent via the platform has almost tripled over the past decade. And while some friends did recreate the uni house formula, such set-ups were few and far between. My boyfriend could only afford the rent of the five-person house he shared with his own uni friends because it was just that: a five-person house; he was the sixth - his monthly payments reduced because he lived in the boiler room.

I’d have my own run-ins with the London property market. Aged 25, I’d turn up at the two-bedroom flat I’d rented with a friend in east London to learn that not only was it, in fact, an open-plan office but