Lockhart, TX's, urbanism problem is not the courthouse at the center of its civic square. That part is fine. The problem is the urban fabric surrounding it.
The problem begins with the parcels. Their street frontages are too narrow, encouraging buildings to extend deep into the lot and consume most of its area. That geometry leaves little room for interior courtyards, gardens, or mixed use programing.
The buildings are also too short and overwhelmingly commercial. Downtown therefore lacks the residential population needed to sustain public life throughout the day and week. Too few people actually live there to animate the streets, use the square, support local businesses, watch over public spaces, and turn the courthouse district into a great neighborhood. Where people live.
This is probably why there are many empty storefronts. It could be a great neighborhood, though, with the right zoning overlay, and maybe a few adjustments to the street layout, some new parks.
Your calendar was full at 21 and empty at 26 for a reason MIT discovered in 1950.
Researchers studied a housing complex called Westgate and found friendship was predicted by one variable above everything else: physical distance between front doors. Students living near stairwells and mailboxes made the most friends. Shared interests, values, personality? All downstream of foot traffic. They named it the propinquity effect.
Researcher Rebecca Adams later distilled friendship formation into three conditions: proximity, repeated unplanned interactions, and settings where people let their guard down. A college campus delivers all three automatically, dozens of hours a week of engineered collisions. Adult life delivers zero by default.
That's the entire mechanism behind days blending together. Your brain registers novelty from unplanned human contact. Remove the collisions and time loses its texture.
The fix is repetition. One dinner party changes nothing. The same gym class, same coffee shop, same pickup game at the same time every week rebuilds the structure school gave you for free. Friendship grows from accumulated accidental contact, so frequency wins.
College handed you a collision machine. Adults who stay social just rebuilt one.
@Empty_America Problem is these are only being built due to external factors and/or American stupidity. Well designed apartment with a parking spot moggs this in every way. But we don't build those. Only these stupid things instead.
@anishmoonka Nah, camera has nothing to do with the success of the OG iPhone. Could have shipped without one. People liked it for multitouch, web, email, apps. Camera only important (VERY important) for later models.