When people have regular conversations with their neighbours, more than just a smile or a wave, those neighbourhoods are safer, there’s less crime and people feel much more optimistic about the possibility of working with each other to solve local problems.

The first and last time Dave Meslin and his neighbours hung out together in their midtown Toronto neighbourhood was during a fire on their street that drew everyone from their homes to share in the experience of watching the flames.

“It made me think we’ve never all been together or hung out on the street and here we were, 30 or 40 of us just watching the fire while it was happening,” says Meslin, a writer and community organizer.

“After being in Vancouver, it made me very aware of the disconnect we have with our neighbours.”

Meslin was speaking in Vancouver in September at a community summit called Alone Together: Connecting in the City, a series of talks and public sessions on why that city has so many lonely people.

Recent research by the Vancouver Foundation found that social isolation was the single largest concern for residents in the metro Vancouver region, a surprise to many community organizers like Meslin, who thought homelessness or housing affordability would rank higher.

The concerns raised by the research findings and the summit, the first of its kind in Canada, prompted one Vancouver city councillor to propose a council motion creating an Engaged City Task Force.

The task force will try to increase neighbour-to-neighbour engagement and find ways for the city to connect with its citizens and vice versa.

The Vancouver Foundation, which manages more than 1,400 endowment funds worth almost $735 million, held the summit along with Simon Fraser University Public Square, an initiative by the university to engage community groups.

Denise Rudnicki, the foundation’s director of strategic engagement, said the negative attitudes that stem from loneliness — such as feeling less trusting of others or a lack of cohesion with neighbours — can spread within a community.

“This survey held up a mirror in the community and everyone could see themselves in it,” she said. “When people have regular conversations with their neighbours, more than just a smile or a wave, those neighbourhoods are safer, there’s less crime and people feel much more optimistic about the possibility of working with each other to solve local problems.”

Rudnicki said it comes down to residents connecting and trusting each other. Trust can jump the fence to spread to the larger community committed to solving social issues from cleaning up a park to addressing homelessness.

The survey also found that people who live in highrises over five storeys had a diminished level of trust, putting the onus on developers, especially in the dense downtown Vancouver areas, to figure out ways to engage residents. Simple things such as putting shared laundry facilities near a rooftop garden may be one way to foster engagement in the residential silos.

Twenty-five per cent of people surveyed said they felt lonely in metro Vancouver and one in three said they found it hard to make new friends in the community. One person wrote that in the seven years he’s lived in Vancouver after moving to the West Coast for a job, he has never been asked to go out for a beer.

Shauna Sylvester, executive director of Simon Fraser University Public Square, said the summit repeatedly heard that many felt disengaged from the community despite Vancouver’s widespread use of social media and its reputation as one of the most livable cities in the world.

“Why is it we have become so cloistered in our social network interactions but we aren’t choosing to connect with the people around us?” Sylvester said.

“We heard that if you’re in Saskatchewan or in Winnipeg and you first move there, you would receive 10 invitations for dinner in your first week, but people go months or years without receiving an invitation here.”