Gas Half Full
Sometimes you see the sentiment expressed, by snobs or radicals, that suburbia is basically unsalvageable and should ideally not exist or be the subject of slow, incremental improvements. Hopeless! Why bother? Lipstick on a pig, deck chairs on the Titanic, etc.
It should be clear to anyone who’s followed me for awhile that I absolutely do not take this view—nor, in my experience, do the vast majority of urbanists. While some of us would like to see a lot more density in suburbia, we understand that there just aren’t enough people to urbanize all of America’s developed land. Nor is there any moral or political world in which most of that land will or could somehow be abandoned or depopulated. From those pretty obvious facts it then follows that most of American suburbia will continue on existing in something like its present form.
This is why we should focus on allowing rather than requiring. What we can do is loosen the land-use rules in these places (by which I mostly mean convincing localities to change them—I have mixed feelings about state or federal preemption of zoning), and just see what happens. Give people a more liberal ruleset and more possibilities to express or discover their preferences.
Most suburban places will never “become” cities. But more to the point, there isn’t some single identifiable moment when a place does become dense/urban/walkable/etc. These characteristics exist on a sliding scale, and any little push in that direction would be a good thing.
Specifically, here, I’m thinking about how making it possible for people to drive less to go about their day would be a big deal for a lot of people and communities, even if it doesn’t lead to urbanism per se. Having enough proximity—homes near transit, businesses near homes, streets safer and more welcoming to biking and walking—for some percentage of families to go from three cars to two or two cars to one? Transformative. Literally half as car-dependent as before.
This is my argument in favor of quasi-urbanist or frankly faux-urbanist developments that incorporate a little bit of walkability or mixed-use development within a very small area and otherwise exist in a totally car-dependent landscape. (I’ve written about developments like this here, here, and here. Some are better and more functional than others.)
To urbanists who look down on these developments as insufficient or tacky or whatever—I mean, do we think that’s worse than building subdivisions and strip plazas separately from each other? I would say it’s a good and useful thing to make it possible for people to ditch or shorten car trips, regardless of whether the sum total of that reduced driving is “urban” in some form or not.
Some driving is adventurous and delightful. But most everyday driving is just a chore. If a diluted form of urbanism in new developments or infill projects could, say, shave an average of two minutes off the average car trip in a region—wouldn’t that be big?
You could describe this all as “make suburbia better.” I think that’s the wrong way to express it; “better” is a subjective value judgment. What I’m describing here is more like “Make suburbia fuller—more room for more people and more things and more opportunities.” Fill in the empty stretches that demand a car trip here and there and back again, all the time.
I think of a talk Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn gave, a bit where he noted the often-stated impression that some place is “overcrowded” or “full.” Full? Get out of the car, he said, and walk along a typical commercial strip. Observe the landscaping setbacks and the retaining ponds and the oceans of parking and the grassy medians between every commercial property. Look at how much empty space there is—how much liminal, unpleasant, empty nothing there is between everything. “Overcrowded” is a perception we form from behind the windshield. It is not an observation of something true on the ground.
Every little step towards filling in and thickening up contains the full essence of urbanism. There is no critical mass at which this becomes worthwhile or legitimate. And, more concretely, even a modest amount of reduced driving and greater proximity counts for a lot in a lot of places. So we should take what we can get, and realize how much it is.
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I think the strongest counterargument is that so much of what's already built in these places is not compatible with modest improvements.
Take my grocery store. It's built on a "traditional" stroad, in a "traditional" anchor + stripmall L-shaped setup. Large parking lot that of course spends a lot of time empty but actually I'd say reaches 60-90% of its peak just about every day, which is more reasonable than most of them.
If we plop down a 5-over-1 on the stroad-side corner and give preferential rents to the employees, we may significantly reduce the employee parking requirements and cut out a lot of their road trips. But anything short of 5 stories -- for instance, maybe closer to the typical exurban "2-over retail" projects you're advocating here -- isn't going to have enough market-rate housing for those employee rents to pencil out.
My point in bringing this up isn't that "ZOMG see, we can't EVER do these projects". Perhaps as nucleation sites for walkability in exurban areas, they might be somewhat tolerable, though I'm still skeptical that they actually save any more car trips than the average stripmall already does. Rather, my point is, I don't think exurban 2-over-retail is going to be a meaningfully large portion of the formula for solving the housing crisis. They're just not something we can rely on! To the extent that it at least subtly habituates skittish exurbanites with the kind of walkable urbanism they typically fear and hate, maybe it's at least marginally more valuable than another hateful stripmall, which seem to have had the same sort of numbing impact on the American psyche as Soviet apartment blocks did on their citizens.
But at the end of the day, if you asked me to rehabilitate my stroad, I wouldn't start with my grocery store, nor the dying one across the stroad that would be a PERFECT candidate for paving over with a brand-new 2-over-retail New Urbanist project. No, I'd start about a mile away, where the last vestiges of the older urban street grid mean that some traffic calming and trading some frontage parking lots for park-in-the-back could create the nucleus of a Main Street style renewal. So, it's not so much out of hatred for the 2-over-retail, or some ideological purist objection. I just sincerely think that there are better places to start the work that needs to be done.
I also think those "faux urbanist" developments you mention are a great trend. Part of the reason they look faux is that they're new - they'll probably look less faux as they get more lived in (and, hopefully, become a magnet for further development around them). But there is definitely something frustrating about how so many of them come so close yet stop just short of what they should be. You'll get this cluster of very attractive row houses on pretty, tree-lined blocks, without so much as a coffee shop on the corner. No commercial life at all. And since most of them are built in the middle of nowhere, there's either nothing next door to them or they're plopped next door to weird preexisting things that nobody needs to have in strolling distance.