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People need people and a more simplified, social-centered lifestyle.

That’s the key motivation for a major trend in today’s housing market. Increasing numbers of homebuyers tend to shy away from large, maintenance-heavy homes with spacious yards in favor of small, basic homes in intimate neighborhoods. They want to live close, but not too close, to neighbors.

Thus, architects and developers are responding by planning small groups of single-family homes — perhaps six to 12 small homes — in a setting of neighbor-friendliness. These mini-communities sometimes are referred to as pocket neighborhoods.

Typically, these are clustered groups of neighboring houses gathered around some sort of shared open space — a garden courtyard, a pedestrian street, a series of joined backyards or a reclaimed alley — with a clear sense of territory and shared stewardship. They can be in urban, suburban or rural areas, it was noted by architect Ross Chapin, author of the new book “Pocket Neighborhoods.”

These are settings where nearby neighbors can easily know one another, where empty-nesters and single householders with far-flung families can find friendship or a helping hand nearby, and where children can have shirttail aunties and uncles just beyond their front gates, Chapin said.

A pocket neighborhood is not the wider neighborhood of several hundred households and a network of streets, but a realm of a dozen or so neighbors who interact on a daily basis around a shared garden, a quiet street or an alley — a kind of secluded neighborhood within a neighborhood, he explained.

Neighbors have a shared stake in the common ground they live next to. Because of their watchfulness, strangers are taken note of and children are free to play. Neighbors are on a first-name basis: “Tom and Melissa live across the way.” These are the first ones to call on in an emergency and the closest to join you for an impromptu order of takeout pizza, Chapin said.

Jim Woodard writes for Creators Syndicate, creators.com.