Third Place IndexThird Place IndexI compared social infrastructure access data from the Third Place Index to loneliness prevalence data from the CDC to find out. The answer depends on where you look.
The National Strategy for Social Connection Act, reintroduced in the Senate in 2025, frames loneliness as a public health crisis and proposes investing in social infrastructure (parks, community centers, gathering spaces) as a remedy.
The premise is intuitive: if people lack places to gather, they become isolated. Build more third places, and connection follows. It’s the logic underpinning my interest in building the Third Place Index to begin with.
I was interested in investigating that premise, so I pulled at the edges of the Third Place Index and analyzed it against data from the most recent CDC Places data to find out if third place access and loneliness actually track together. I found a much more nuanced, and frankly interesting view into the connection than I expected.
The answer depends on where you look.
CDC PLACES 2025 loneliness estimates are available for the following 40 states and territories. States not listed did not have sufficient BRFSS survey data for modeled tract-level estimates.
Overlay the two and the relationship isn't a straight line. Tracts with moderate loneliness actually have more third places than the least lonely neighborhoods. But at the extremes, the pattern is stark: the loneliest fifth of census tracts have markedly fewer third places than everywhere else.
This speaks to a clear, but limited, suggestion that the loneliest census tracts also have the lowest third place access. But local context matters, and the ways social connection functions urban and rural settings are significantly different enough to have warranted splitting the two in the original TPI data set. I wanted to explore how this would track looking at rural and urban tracts separately.
Split by urban and rural, the story diverges sharply. In urban tracts, third place access falls as loneliness rises — the loneliest neighborhoods have a mean TPI nearly 10 points below the middle of the pack. In rural America, the line is flat or even slightly rising.
Rural loneliness appears to be a different problem — one that can't be explained simply by a lack of nearby gathering places.
What the data can't tell us is why. It's possible that rural social life runs through spaces the TPI doesn't capture — family land, church fellowship halls, informal gatherings. It's also possible that the places are there but function differently, or that rural loneliness is driven by forces that gathering places alone can't address. It’s an interesting pattern that quite frankly suggests that the Third Place Index may have blind spots to meaningful social infrastructure in rural settings. The explanation is still an open question for me, and one worth studying directly.
But the clear suggestion from this analysis is that in urban settings there is a connection. In the maps below, we can look at this in specific settings.
Let's zoom into Chicago to see how this plays out neighborhood by neighborhood.
Starting with loneliness alone. Notice where it clusters — the South and West sides, these are disconnected corridors.
Recolored by TPI. The same corridors that showed higher loneliness also show fewer third places.
Every census tract falls on a spectrum from crisis (few third places, high loneliness) to thriving (many third places, low loneliness).
Click a category for details
Chicago makes the national pattern look gentle. The least lonely tracts have a mean TPI above 60. Move to the loneliest fifth and that drops to 43.5 — a collapse of nearly 20 points, concentrated in the city's most disconnected corridors.
The highlighted tracts — neighborhoods rich in third places where loneliness rates are lowest. Lincoln Park, Hyde Park, the North Shore suburbs.
The pattern isn't universal — density, demographics, and history all play a role — but the spatial correlation is clear.
Census tracts span entire townships. It often takes a long car drive to get to the nearest city. Starting with loneliness alone: high and low sit side by side without the clear corridors you saw in Chicago.
Now recolored by TPI. Many rural tracts score high — churches, parks, community centers all count. But the loneliest tracts don't lack third places. The relationship that held in Chicago dissolves here.
The bills being discussed in Congress propose investing in gathering infrastructure to combat loneliness. This data complicates that premise.
In cities, the loneliest neighborhoods really do have fewer third places — a gap of nearly 10 TPI points between the middle and the bottom. But the relationship isn't linear. Moderate-loneliness tracts actually have the most third places nationally, suggesting that proximity to gathering spots alone isn't protective. Something else is present at the far end of low-loneliness tracts. What distinguishes the least-lonely tracts is a question this analysis can't answer, but it's one worth working to understand in the future.
In rural America, the data breaks the urban logic entirely. Lonelier tracts don't lack third places — they have slightly more. Churches, parks, and community centers are there. The loneliness is coming from somewhere else: distance, isolation, the erosion of institutions that a zoning map can't capture.
Building third places in low-access urban corridors could help — but only as part of a broader strategy. And in rural communities, the answer may look nothing like a coffee shop or a park. It may look like a ride to church, a functioning post office, a Friday night fish fry, or a neighbor who still checks in.
The responsible takeaway isn't a single policy prescription, rather it is the need to ask more questions. A one-size fits-all solution will not be sufficient in addressing the loneliness crisis on a national scale. We need a better understanding of how places support social connection, and we need that understanding to be localized.
Data: CDC PLACES 2025 · Third Place Index · U.S. Census Bureau
Analysis and visualization by Third Place Index · 2026
59,490 census tracts · 40 states · Loneliness data from CDC PLACES modeled estimates