How one city is trying to solve the loneliness epidemic
HOUSTON — When Ken Frederick moved from Dallas to Houston six months ago, he immediately noticed a major shift in the landscape. As a naturally outgoing 24-year-old, Frederick never struggled to find ways to socialize, yet in Houston, spaces for organic connection didn’t come as naturally. To him, Houston’s loneliness felt as though it was built into the city’s very infrastructure.
“In my building, there’s nowhere for students or postgrads to come and sit down and talk,” he said, highlighting the lack of “third spaces” or communal areas outside of home or work that are key to forming organic connections.
Frederick seized the opportunity to build connections in his life, as well as the lives of others. He started the Social Plant, a business that teaches people how to socialize, and hosts weekly Friday night volleyball outings. Within 30 days, his group had 250 members, he said. Some made new friends, and some even found love interests.
It was much-needed work. While Frederick was building a new community from the ground up, some of the region’s largest community connectors and organizations were mobilizing around a similar realization.
What is the loneliness epidemic?
Stephen Ives, president and CEO of YMCA of Greater Houston, recalls a pivotal moment at a YMCA conference years ago that predated national headlines about the loneliness epidemic.
Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the former U.S. Surgeon General, directly addressed the rise of loneliness, disconnection and isolation. “YMCA, we need you,” Murthy told the assembled leaders. “You are it.”
Murthy emphasized the YMCA’s unique position to address the public health crisis due to its ability to bring people together and its established brand reputation.
“That was a turning point for me,” Ives told Straight Arrow News. He said the YMCA has reflected on that ever since, and in 2010, embedded it into its rebrand mission to strengthen the foundations of community.
Murthy publicly called out the loneliness epidemic again in his 2023 advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community, noting that it harms both individual and societal health. He associated loneliness with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia and anxiety.
“The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity,” Murthy said in the statement.
Loneliness was a national issue, Ives knew. But it was one he hoped Houston could help solve.
After Murthy’s declaration, Ives approached Ruth López Turley, the director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, to study social connection and establish a baseline for the Houston area’s social health. The institute is an interdisciplinary research organization that focuses on the intersecting issues of housing, education, economic mobility, health and population.
“In Houston, we’re fortunate because we have the Kinder Institute, and I think what we’re demonstrating here is a good example of using that data and putting it to work for something,” said Ives. He noted that while more than a dozen YMCA CEOs in other major metro areas are uniting around other great ideas, Houston is the first to conduct a community-wide study in this specific, data-driven manner.
The idea spoke to López Turley personally as someone who considered dropping out of college at Stanford University due to feeling disconnected and like she didn’t belong as a Latina woman who grew up poor.
Who is most affected by the loneliness epidemic?
The resulting study found that loneliness is disproportionately affecting Houston’s young adults and those with lower incomes, specifically, those aged 18 to 29 and residents earning less than $35,000. This survey focused solely on Harris County and received responses from roughly 5,000 of its 11,000-member community panel, according to López Turley.
The data offered a silver lining: a sense of connection was a stronger predictor of life satisfaction than race, income or age.
“I was stunned to find just how consequential it was, and then it was a stronger indicator than income,” López Turley told SAN.
What manifested is a movement, “Stronger Together,” a partnership between the American Leadership Forum Houston/Gulf Coast, the YMCA of Greater Houston, the Houston Food Bank and the Kinder Institute at Rice University, which recently convened more than 100 leaders from nonprofits, government and business owners to discuss the findings. At the event, they challenged attendees to rally around a shared vision: establishing a baseline today so the region would fare significantly better in five to 10 years.
“When we’re talking about some of the challenges and problems that the Houston area is having to tackle, we are talking about systemic structural challenges,” said Daniel Potter, the director of the Houston Population Research Center, who specializes in demographic surveys. “You can’t do that in silos; you have to do that by tackling these things together.”
The movement aims to move beyond mere awareness to collective, systemic action, scaling solutions that address the loneliness epidemic head-on. By prioritizing region-wide connection, leaders believe the greater Houston area is positioning itself as a national model for fostering genuine community belonging.
Some of that work has already begun in smaller rooms. López Turley said a roughly 30-person focus group at the Houston Food Bank earlier this year began taking action.
How can a community solve loneliness?
“We wanted to get more ideas and actions,” she said. “These aren’t ideas that we’re just jotting down; the organizations in the room are going to follow up in terms of implementing these ideas.”
While these efforts are starting small, López Turley emphasized that they are designed for longevity. The coalition hopes to conduct a follow-up survey in one to two years to measure the movement’s impact, ensuring that the “Stronger Together” initiative continues to respond to the region’s evolving social needs.
With baseline data at their fingertips, change agents like López Turley and Potter can better identify the challenge and work to solve it. Potter pointed to two significant factors driving loneliness: a decline in social aptitude, where people increasingly avoid healthy conflict and the interaction necessary for deep connection, and the disappearance of the third space.
“We stopped learning how to socially connect,” he said.
This is worsened by the decline of organized religion, Potter said, which historically brought diverse groups together. As faith institutions have had less prevalence in some people’s lives, he said, alternatives have not stepped up to fill the void.
The first time Frederick read the findings, he was shocked by the results. As a Black man, he expected the data to mirror national trends that show Black people typically have higher rates of loneliness, according to data from the Mental Health Foundation. However, Houston told a different story.
Solving loneliness isn’t a stated mission for the YMCA. But Ives told SAN that he believes fostering connection is as important as solving homelessness and poverty. And, he said, it’s a more immediately attainable mission that provides a source of strength, empowering people to become the best version of themselves. These new findings, he said, will move the needle on those issues and provide a tangible path to action.
“We could create a more connected community, where people experience what it’s like to belong, experience what it’s like to have neighbors who watch out for them,” he said. “And I think that bit by bit, as we grow that in our community, it’s yet to be seen, the kind of impact that will have on the other issues that matter greatly to us.”
The work of transforming Houston into a region of connectors has already begun. As the Stronger Together movement takes shape, Ives believes the city is on a trajectory to see significant, measurable improvement by the time the next study is conducted, proving that a major metro area can indeed move the needle on loneliness.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
