The past couple of years, the amount of kids out on Halloween has dwindled down in my neighborhood. This year, my wife and I were at her cousin’s house and we saw maybe a couple of kids walking around. My wife blames people going to Trunk or Treat things. We both work in retail, so we see more of the public, and nobody was in costume. What was everybody’s experience with Halloween this year?
There’s definitely something to this popular neighborhoods theory.
As an anecdote from my dense urban area, there’s a stretch of a few residential blocks that have become the most popular spot within walking distance of my home, and it’s largely due to the trick or treating “geography” of the area: horizontal density of lots of participating homes per block, wide sidewalks, single lane roads with lots of stop signs and crosswalks (inconvenient for through traffic).
The blocks with major stroads get avoided for pedestrian safety reasons, and the blocks with big apartment buildings or commercial storefronts get avoided because there’s not a lot of trick or treating available.
So it creates hot spots, which feed back onto themselves as the residents of those hot blocks lean more heavily into decorations and candy and costumes the next year.
And what I’m describing is kinda a micro sized distribution of this phenomenon, where the hotspots are only maybe a 2x2 grid of city blocks, next to completely dead zones of 2x2 city blocks. I imagine in a suburban area that clustering effect can intensify, especially if everyone is driving.