How to make friends in a new city (when you don't know anyone yet)
- Elle Beecher Hogan
- Jun 15
- 5 min read
The boxes are mostly unpacked.
You found the grocery store. You found a coffee shop you sort of like. You've been there four times now, and the barista still doesn't know your face.
And somewhere around week three, it lands on you... usually at dinner, standing over the sink, eating something you didn't bother to plate: "I don't have anyone here."
Not yet.
So let me give you the real answer up front, the one I wish someone had handed me the week I moved:
The fastest way to make friends in a new city is to pick one recurring, in-person thing and go back to it every single week until the faces turn familiar.
Not five things, once. One thing, five times.
You don't need to become more outgoing. You need repeated exposure to the same people. Friendship, almost always, is just the byproduct of showing up to the same place enough times that "hello" stops being a decision.
That's the whole engine. Let me show you why it works, and exactly how to run it.
Quick sanity check
Here's what I want you to hear before anything else:
You are not bad at making friends.
You just packed the machine that was quietly making them for you into a truck and drove away from it.
Think about your last city. The gym where you knew the front-desk guy. The coworkers you complained with at 4 PM. The neighbor with the loud dog. You didn't build most of those friendships on purpose. They accumulated. They were the residue of seeing the same people, in the same places, over and over, without trying.
Then you left all of it behind at once.
So the ache that shows up in a new city isn't a sign that something's wrong with you.
It's a sign that your environment got deleted.
It's not a connection problem.
It's an environment problem.
And the good news about an environment problem is that you can rebuild an environment. On purpose. Faster than you think.
How to actually make friends
This isn't clever. It's just how humans have always done this, stripped back to the parts that work.
Do these four main steps:
Pick one thing that repeats. A run club. A pottery class. A bouldering gym. A free Saturday morning walk for strangers who want to have real conversations. (Gentle plug... that's what we do!) The only requirement is that the same humans come back to the same place on a schedule. Skip the one-off festival, the giant mixer, the meetup of 200 randos you'll never see again. Those feel productive and produce almost nothing. You want small, and you want recurring.
Go back four times. This is the secret almost nobody actually uses. The first time, you're a stranger. The second time, you're a face. The third time, you're "oh hey, you again." The fourth time, you're a regular. And regulars get invited to things. Most people quit a new place after one slightly awkward visit and decide it "wasn't for them." The awkward visit was the toll. The fourth visit is the city.
Stop hunting for the perfect event. Hunt for one event that feels good. New transplants treat friend-making like a dating app: swiping through 10 activities looking for the magic one. The magic isn't in the activity. It's in the repetition. A mediocre thing you do weekly will out-friend a perfect thing you do once. Every single time.
Be the one who makes the ask. At some point, "person I see every Saturday" has to become "person I texted on a Tuesday," and someone has to say the slightly scary sentence. Let it be you. (If that makes your stomach flip, I wrote a whole piece on it: How to Ask Someone to Hang Out Without Making It Weird. Go read it after this.)
Here are the exact scripts to use, because new-city brain forgets words:
"I'm new here and still figuring the city out. Any chance you'd want to grab coffee after this sometime?"
"I always end up talking to you at this thing. Want to get lunch?"
"A few of us go to [place] after. Wanna come?"
And the text, two days later: "Hey, it's [name] from [the thing]. Really glad I ran into you. Free this weekend?"
That's the move. Just a small, specific, slightly-too-honest invitation.
And most importantly...
Give it a season, not a weekend.
This is the part that keeps you from quitting too early.
A new city doesn't click in two weeks. It clicks over two or three months of small repetitions. And then one day you realize you have someone to text when something funny happens, and then you have three, and then someone calls you the new person who somehow already knows everyone. It compounds. Quietly, then all at once.
Let me tell you about Connor
Connor lived in Baltimore and couldn't find his footing there.
Surrounded by people, connected to none of them. Every interaction forced, surface-level, exhausting.
He found The Board Walks on X before he'd even decided to move to Austin.
And something clicked... not "this looks like a nice event," but if I move there, I have somewhere to go on my first day. A place to show up and meet people and actually talk.
Six months later, he made the move. And the first thing he did... seriously, the first thing... was show up to a walk.
He's been to over 50 walks since. The only ones he's missed are when he's out of town. There is, in his words, "no place he'd rather be on a Saturday morning."
The friends he made aren't acquaintances. They're his ride-or-dies in Austin. The whole city changed shape because he had one recurring place to put himself, every week, until the faces turned familiar.
He didn't network his way to belonging. He walked his way there. Same trail, same morning, over and over, until it was home.
Connor even called the walk "Austin's premier friendship accelerator" in a newsletter he wrote called The Definitive Guide to Austin’s Social Scene.
(But lucky for you, we're not only in Austin.)
Wait... what's a walk?
If you've never heard of us, here's the whole thing in one breath:
The Board Walks is a free, 5-mile walk that happens every Saturday morning in cities all over the world.
No phones. No pitching. No agenda except a long walk and a real conversation with people who showed up for the same reason you did. You don't have to be impressive. You just walk, and you talk, and somewhere around mile three a stranger asks you a question that sticks with you for a week.
It started with eight people in Austin in 2022. It's now more than 20,000 people across 16+ cities, spread entirely by word of mouth... because the thing it gives people is genuinely hard to find anywhere else.
If you just moved somewhere and you don't know a soul, this is the cheat code.
A recurring place, full of people who are explicitly there to connect, on a schedule, for free.
It's the exact machine I described up top.
Already built, waiting for you to show up four times.
Come find your people
Find your city and RSVP for this Saturday → here
Bring nothing but yourself and decent shoes. Walk slow. Talk real. Come back next week. That's the entire instruction manual.
And if you're ready for a smaller, deeper room... there's a quieter door inside this one called The Board. We don't pitch it. You'll find it when you're ready.
See you on the trail.
Elle Beecher Hogan is the founder of The Board Walks — a free, phone-free, 5-mile Saturday morning walk happening in 16+ cities around the world. She started it in July 2022 with eight people and a tweet. Now, she tends the global network of hosts and members.
