That is lovely, I admire them.
We couldn't even live next door to our friends, we ended up not really friends anymore for many reasons.
My DH and I have almost several times bought housing that would be one huge apartment building and all friends would be in it, each time it fell through though. Probably a good thing, we were all interested when only one of us had children and now us having 3 kids, we have the smallest family by far :)