My neighborhood is pretty barren. There is no real art or landmarks around it but there are plenty of neighborhood kids and adult manchildren like myself who area required to drive around to hit pokestops.
I have a flagpole in my front yard which I’ve tried to make a pokestop but I’m pretty sure its gonna get rejected.
My question is: what should I do? Just not play the game? Or is there a way to add pokestops to random barren areas?
Sadly you can’t submit anything thats in your front yard, or anyone elses, because its single family private residential property. If you lived at an apartment block with communal gardens then social spots in that would be okay though
Some people on the forum are great at looking at street view and satellite for areas and making suggestions - so if you want to share a general location please do
My recommendation is to look out for children’s play areas, churches, gyms, and walking trails locally. Community centres and cafes are also great. There might not be much, but recommend exploring on foot and trying to find some things
You can post ideas here for feedback too
There is no fence between it and the street in which kids play on. They could even take pictures and scan it without leaving public property. Theres just nothing close by accept for 1 gazebo which is about a 2 kilometers walk
Also, I’ve lived here for 20+ years. I know very well there is nothing close by. I live in the midwest of america and I live in suburbia.
It doesnt matter to Niantic unfortunately - thats just a hard rule for no SFPRP (Unless its a max power spot in which case SFPRP appears to be the preferred location 
)
A gazebo is good - nominate that as a social spot.
One of my good finds in a residential area was a plaque about a walking group that was at a doctors surgery. It served as the meeting point for their weekend walk, so it was a great place to be social AND exercise!
I was in your situation until a few years ago when the town put a greenway behind my house! Sometimes there just isn’t anything.
I guess you might need to get creative if there are really only houses around. Explore options for community projects resulting in eligible items, for example artwork?
Nominations must be on public or non residential land. So you won’t manage much on residential streets, and you’d need to accept that. Knowingly nominating things that are on SFPRP or creating fakes will risk your account.
So my solution here is to get my city to install art projects.
I can’t even get them to fix the roads here lol.
I’d rather just not play if my way to restock is to pay money or walk miles for a single pokestop.
Also I know this isn’t true because my previous household was sitting on top of two pokestops in entirely residential areas. Only reason I could reach level 40+
If you’re in a city there must be something? Or is the city just spread out so much that the suburbs are too far from anything eligible?
Im in the UK so we have a lot less space. I live in a village suburb next to a town, and we have a population of 300,000 in quite a small area so I do apologise if how things are here doesnt tally. I can walk to my town centre in less than 30 mins, and the village centre is 10-15 minute walk and has a lot of stops. There’s sparse waypoints in the other direction, maybe 1-5 waypoints per 5 minutes of walking, but lots of roads with nothing. I have worked for the last 4 years on submitting things to build the area up and it hasnt been easy
there is nature, there are telephone poles, street signs, fire hydrants… dirt…
Can I nominate a few big trees??? Theres no plaque dedicating the trees to anyone but they are… uhhh… trees.
I truly feel this game was designed without rural or suburban american players in mind. They just dont understand how big and spread out the midwest is.
Nearest gyms are two churches which I have to drive to. Nearest pokestop is a gazebo which is hardly visible on my phone.
I guess I’m just frustrated that I have to quit this game because I moved. Geographic location shouldn’t cripple players so much.
I do understand. I used to be able to see 3 gyms in game back in 2019, and almost no stops within a 15 minute walking radius. Now I’m up to 10-11 gyms and a lot of stops, mostly submitted myself. It’s not ideal but it’s not bad at all with a short bike ride or drive, or a bit of a walk to get somewhere with a lot going on.
I am lucky that being british, we are allowed to submit pubs, and those are more common than churches 
we also have some older houses that get turned into businesses or subdivided into flats, which then means that interesting architectural features on them become possible to submit. We also have corner shops in residential areas which often have post offices, murals on the side, or noticeboards located there which can all be submitted
Our council added some signposted cycling routes not too long ago, and I have been adding those to the games as a good place to exercise.
Allotments and community gardens are also places that can be submitted in suburban areas.
If you have any apartment blocks nearby then look for facilities there such as swimming pools or gyms open to residents -those are eligible too
Yes the gazebo belongs to the adjacent apartments.
Cool! Apartments might be good places to check out more closely - noticeboards, communal faciliites, play areas etc might exist there
The solution is not within Niantic’s proposed Point of Interest and Wayfarer eligibility criteria.
Japan’s Dragon Quest Walk is a near-perfect answer to the desert, and Niantic’s Monster Hunter NOW is a reasonably good answer as well.
I think if the PGO team follows those it will solve the problem, but they are not going to use these solutions even if they import the debris locations.
Also, this problem will not be solved by PGO because the Wayfarer team cannot force them to do so.
And if you live in the US, the problem is even worse because of US urban planning.
These require a trek of over 2km to reach, the apartments are closed off. The Gazebo is only a spinnable pokestop because its close to the stone wall blocking it off.
I’m in the Upper Midwest, and I’ve found a good deal of things to nominate in rural areas. We even have a thread with tips for what to submit in more rural areas here:
Also, Niantic is an American company…
Since you are new, I will presume you haven’t yet spent a ton of time reading through the threads on this forum yet. (Not criticizing, welcome to the forums!) There’s a ton of useful information, and the search function works reasonably well. I saw several posts about this same topic while searching that likely have some suggestions you could possibly use yourself.
The thread I was searching for to suggest you look at, however, is Tips for Rural Nominators. I haven’t read through it in a while, but I remember it being very good, with a lot of information that could be relevant to your situation.
Is your area really just endless sprawl of single family homes? No parks? Churches? Post offices or city hall? Interesting businesses? Gyms? A central business district?
Wayfarer and Niantic games are based on real world locations of interest. Specifically they’re looking for great places to be social, exercise or explore. If you live in an area that’s an endless stretch of just single family homes, I feel sorry for you, but you’re going to have a difficult time of finding anything that qualifies as a wayspot.
There are many here who are very good at looking at a map and identifying potential wayspots. Perhaps you could share the general location of where you are, even if it’s just the town?