Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Apple, Getty
This past October, as I sat in my parents’ garage on Long Island, taping up boxes, stuffing clothes into suitcases, and counting the growing number of items I’d accumulated for the moving trucks, I considered how to introduce myself to the tenants of my new Bed-Stuy building. My landlord had added me to the building’s WhatsApp group five days prior, and I’d been overthinking how to enter the chat ever since. Name, sure. But age? Profession? Tendency to practice yoga at odd times? An apology in advance for triggering the fire alarm due to an inability to properly use a gas stove?
Coming back to New York after living in Paris for nearly a decade, I was surprised that such a group even existed. For one, it’s taken me ages to get any of my American friends to use WhatsApp to begin with, when it had been the de facto way to communicate in Europe. But mostly I was surprised because in the 13 years I’d lived in NYC before moving abroad, I could go years without knowing my neighbors’ names. In Paris, on the other hand, it was considered rude if you didn’t say “bonjour” to the butcher, the baker, and the actual candlestick-maker, let alone someone you lived next door to.
It appeared that something had shifted. Talking to your neighbors, at least online, has become a lot easier — and even customary. When I hired Compass broker Erin Kirschenbaum to help me find an apartment, she would often talk about a building’s WhatsApp group as if it were an amenity. “As a broker, you’re never able to describe the exact makeup of a building in terms of who the neighbors are for fair-housing purposes, but you are certainly able to say there is lively and warm communication happening,” she says. In her experience, renters see “any positive and active internal communication as a plus,” and typically, she said, “that’s what WhatsApp groups offer.”
Once I moved into my building and started mentioning its WhatsApp group to others, it turned out a lot of people had one too. In the case of Ross Belfer, who lives in an industrial high-rise in Redhook, his 55-member WhatsApp group is the place to write, “Hey, I’m on the roof. Anyone’s welcome to come have a glass of wine.” Belfer, a single father to 5-year-old Henri and a goldendoodle named Grover, also messages the group to arrange impromptu playdates for his son. “I just write in the WhatsApp group, ‘Any kids under the age of 12 are welcome to come over and play on Henri’s trampoline!’ and they come knocking.”
Many building WhatsApp chats have branched out into an ever-growing number of subgroups; chats for tenants with kids, those with dogs, those into gardening, one for owners and another for renters, and the always useful buy/sell/trade chat. Ariel Abramowitz is a member of five different WhatsApp groups in her Harlem building (it has eight total), including one for pet owners. Not only is she finally learning fellow dog owners’ names — “That’s a classic thing if you’re a dog owner, you know the dog’s name, but you didn’t know the owner’s name” — but she gets trusted vet recommendations and knows who to ask for extra poop bags and treats if she runs out.
For the most part, the chatter in the groups is logistical. It’s a lot of “Anybody else having brown water come through the kitchen sink?” “Has anyone else had success with the water pressure by changing the showerhead?” and “My flight was delayed, can someone store my Cook Unity delivery?” Package pickup — and theft — naturally make up a big percentage of what’s discussed in the chats, including my own. The groups are also the ideal forum for offering up fresh-baked brownies if you have a surplus or, as I saw in one group, extra stacks of hay “for your stoop decoration or pet horse.” I quickly learned, however, that not everything moves; after I offered, in my 30-member group, an extra (sealed) container of perfectly fresh New Zealand mussels from my family’s seafood-distribution business … crickets.
The groups also seem to facilitate a next level of neighborliness that I’ve yet to take advantage of: letting members inside your apartment when no one’s home. I suspect I will get there eventually, especially so that someone can water my plants when I’m away or check if I’ve left the oven on, a thought I have almost daily as soon as I’ve left the apartment. But even if I’ve yet to give my neighbors a copy of the keys, I’ve spoken to plenty of people who seem to have no qualms about doing that. “You’re kind of operating in good faith with all these people,” says David Palmieri, who’s been a member of his Upper West Side building’s group for a year and mostly uses it for “low stakes” requests like lightbulbs or secondhand merch for his kid. He credits the “softer initial interaction” of screen chatter as an informal vetting process: “Then, when you see them in the elevator, you kind of put a face to a name, and you’re a little bit more comfortable. It’s less awkward than knocking on someone’s door.” It’s also much easier than asking a friend to shlep across town to shovel your stoop if you’re away or to take in a package.
For Tiffany Yanetta, her Crown Heights building group became the best place to discuss how to press the management about not having access to balconies because of construction work. “We collectively sent a letter asking for a rent reduction during those months, and we got it,” she says. “I don’t know if that would’ve happened without the group, so that was major.”
But, as with any group, there are some challenges. Or should I say, challenging people. You know, the “chitty, chatty cheerleader types” who send messages 24/7, said one member who preferred to remain anonymous. Like, “Oh gosh, we’re hearing from X, Y, and Z again!” Or the members who forget about basic group-chat etiquette and discuss things that should be taken into smaller groups or offline, like owners publicly discussing how much they should charge renters in a shared owner-renter group.
The best way to ward off conflict, suggests Abramowitz, is to limit public messages on a certain subject to two-to-three reply-alls max, before taking it to a DM. But ultimately, she admits, “There’s no real moderator or adult in charge.” It seems inevitable that what happens in the WhatsApp group mirrors online norms in general. “I think we’ve gotten very comfortable as a society just yelling shit online instead of being like, ‘Okay, what is or isn’t inappropriate to say to people who literally live next door to me?” There is always, of course, the option to mute or exit the group, which is now possible to do quietly, without announcing it or leaving behind a digital trail. But no one I spoke to felt the need to go that far — yet.
In some cases, the buildingwide WhatsApp might expand into something even more familiar: the block association. The residents of 3rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Park Slope now have a blockwide WhatsApp group that consists of 156 members from eight subgroups in a combo of rental buildings, condos, co-ops, and single- and multi-family brownstones.
Alexandra Carter, a real-estate agent with Corcoran, is one of the group’s admins. She remembers when they were raising only about $500 for their annual block party before they started the channel. Now they’re raising upward of $4,000, which covers the cost of two bouncy houses, craft stations, chocolate tastings, and more. Beyond the fundraising, though, it’s where everything else gets coordinated: Who’s cooking, who’s bringing the supplies, who’s doing the outreach, who’s inviting whom. And all that party planning, in turn, meant one annual block party grew into two, which spurred a discussion about blockwide spring planting, which prompted more casual interactions on the street and everyday acts of generosity, like Carter’s next-door neighbors shoveling her sidewalk when they thought she wasn’t home (she was). Their WhatsApp megagroup has split off into even more subchannels, side projects, and IRL meetups. Still, some things have not changed. Carter said someone recently asked for an egg in the chat and she knew what would happen: “You’re gonna get that egg.”
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