Distant By Design
Proximity does not always mean walkability
This morning I want to go into a little more detail on a point in my Thursday piece, and specifically a comment I received that sparked a small back-and-forth. I wrote, basically, about how modest increases in density, and generally incremental sort-of urbanist changes in suburbia, are worthwhile.
For example, if you could cut the amount of driving the average suburbanite has to do by a quarter—or, more ambitiously, make it feel possible to ditch one car (out of two or three), that would be a really big deal from an urbanist point of view. Forget turning sprawling, car-dependent suburbs into walkable paradises. It would be almost revolutionary to get these places to the point where anything could be done without a car trip. And that wouldn’t require wholesale transforming or reimagining them, either.
One comment pushed back this way:
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 + strip mall 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.
Another wrote:
I think the biggest problem with a lot of these suburban developments isn’t the development itself, but the fact that city (suburb) planners largely spend so much time nitpicking the zoning and dictating the height of a building or how many apartments there are, etc., instead of spending that time planning the public realm and the connections to other neighborhoods and locations.
But the most skeptical comment was probably this one:
People are job dependent, not car dependent. 90+% of people living in modern suburbs can walk or bike to the store as it is. Increasing density won’t change their habits.
He included a Google Maps link and added:
Almost no one in Woodbury east and south of I94 / 494 is more than 3 miles from a store. An easy bike trip.
Pick your modern burb, rinse and repeat. They’re all walking and biking distance from a major store.
People choose to drive, they don't have to drive. Density isn't going to change that choice.
In other words, 1) commuting and job access cut against total walkability as a habit (I agree—the notion that people will work within their New Urbanist/walkable/etc. communities is always too much of an expectation) and 2) the notion that suburbs are unwalkable is a figment of the preference for driving and not an actual observation about these places. I disagree.
Here’s the relevant Google Maps satellite view:
This whole view is only about four miles across. So except at the very corners or edges, the absolute distances from any given home to the nearest grocery store or supermarket (and lots of others stores) is a mile or two on average. That is definitely walkable if you have some time and like walking, and it’s absolutely bikeable in just a few minutes.
But if you zoom in, it looks different.