After elaborating that the author had the wit to say, maybe the question isn't, why do they do this. Maybe the real question we should be asking is, why aren't the rest of us doing the same.

I think about that a lot. especially when - after we've been through decades of relentless government penury and abdication of responsibility around social and societal infrastructure - politicians start talking about social isolation as a dog whistle for xenophobia.

https://theconversation.com/britain-is-already-becoming-an-island-of-strangers-but-immigration-isnt-the-driver-256724

In the UK they called it "austerity", I think because of the British total cultural commitment to describing self-inflicted misery in terms of ennobling character traits and nationalist pride, but it's the same neglect all over: when was the last time anyone near you broke ground on a community center?

Not a shopping mall or coffee shop, but an actual third-space you can just go and hang out if you want for no reason, not need to pay anything, community center?

You can't remember, can you?

And that's the pattern.

Neglect and ignore that "the public good" means public social infrastructure and public social spaces, for decades, and then point at anyone who's trying to do what they can with the approximately nothing they have to make their cities and communities more real, more connected, more beautiful - Ethiopian corner conversations, Caribbean barbecues in parks, teenagers with spraypaint turning bare concrete into art, the list is endless - and blame them for the decay.