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.
The main trouble is that they tend to be owned by a single development company, so there's less likely to be organic development over time or any sort of fine-grained development. It'll just degrade until they sell the whole property lock-stock-and-barrel to have it happen all over again. It's the "Failure all at once" problem.
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. We haven't just lost the art of building densely - we've lost the practice of actually planning our cities for the people who will inhabit them.
In one of the suburbs of the city I live in, a developer is redeveloping an old mall into a mixed use downtown. While some Twitter urbanists are really mad for some reason that the suburbs are getting a downtown, I'm pretty excited and I know my friends who live in that suburb are too. But I also know the public realm connections to it will be pretty awful. One of my friends lives a ~10 minute walk from the location in a pretty dense apartment and townhome development, and there are currently no plans to create a decent pedestrian connection. The only way he'll be able to reach it on foot is walking along the road with multiple highway exits, which isn't typically a kind of road setup that people are looking out for pedestrians crossing. But a foot bridge over the highway and some clearing out of some wooded areas nearby would create a really nice connection to this new downtown - but in planning this development there's been no consideration of that. The only thing the suburb gov was concerned about was that nearby homeowners weren't too upset about the density.
I just read Marohn's book: Marohn, Charles L.. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town. Wiley. Highly recommended. His discussion of the town in England, Poynton, is fascinating, as is the video:
In addition to what you mentioned here, I suggest we build more small satellite offices. People can go a short distance from their houses to an office and then work in collaboration with others in the company, connected by large screen high def televisions. This is better than working from home. Commuting distances would be greatly reduced.
I think we could get a lot if we required that within even marginally urbanized areas, every supermarket should be topped by at least a 5 over 1, and in major metros a high rise. There's no greater convenience than having a full-service grocery store less than 5 minutes away by foot, and we would cut out a lot of car trips that way!
Interesting take, and I partially agree with you. Urban really just means "human environment," and human environment starts with a very simple criteria that has nothing to do with architecture. It's something like, "do the neighbors walk there?"
When we scale this up we see cities as a series of connected places (ie you can seamlessly walk through them) which together make for a vibrant, positive human environment. Suburbs are different because they're disconnected islands -- even when things are physically close they aren't meaningfully connected.
So, to the extent that a "faux urbanism" place creates a little island of that in a sea of suburban car-dependency... well, then yes I think it counts. Although I personally think it's pretty important that multiple independently owned/operated places link together, so if the island of human-scale architecture is a single-owner property surrounded by a moat of parking (zero human connection to the outside world) then I'm less inclined to say it's "good enough" and more inclined to say it's a nice theme park. (But I do like theme parks!)
Your post reminded me that I wrote about the idea of "good enough urbanism" aeons ago (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/4/4/good-enough-urbanism.html), and posited sort of the inverse of what you've written here. That the architecture of a building isn't that important, rather it's the social connection to the surrounding neighborhood that matters.
What is urbanism? How do your views differ in home rule v. zoning enabling act v. growth management type cities and towns? Is Chuck Marohn all knowing? What is your favorite place and why? Do you keep an urban diary?
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.
Hmm. What do you base 90+% on? That seems far too optimistic to me. You're right, though, that work is the one thing that probably can't be contained within communities - i.e. commuting, including long range, will always be normative.
Three miles to get groceries being "good" is kinda an absurd expectation that shows just how out of touch our country has become. Anywhere else in the world, or even in the history of our own country, and that would be seen as ridiculous. If you told someone a hundred years ago that the nearest goods store was 3 miles away, they'd probably think you're a hermit or something. Even in rural areas.
No wonder we use over a third of the world's gasoline despite only having 1/20th of the world's population.
I get what you’re saying, Dollyflopper, but 3 miles is a lot different than 3 blocks. For my family of 4, it would be quite challenging to carry a week’s load of groceries on a 3 mile walk or bike ride (unless I went to the store every single day to get 7 smaller loads). But if there’s a corner store just 3 or 5 blocks away , that changes the calculus. (Maybe that level of density is impossible to aspire to, but every little bit would help.)
My wife and I are very lucky in that we both work just a walking distance from our place of employment. We get by with just one car and on the rare occasions we need 2, we just borrow one from a friend.
3 miles is way too far to get groceries by bike unless you're in a Southern CA type climate, with rural traffic patterns, and a completely flat topography!
I *could* walk or bike to the store, just like my kids *could* walk or bike to school - our town's "main street" is less than 2 miles away.
But we don't, because I don't want to be walking on the shoulder of a wide road where people go 50mph. So to walk, I'd have to take a path that nearly doubles the distance, without actually being a pleasant walk (just less terrible). And I'm not going to make my kids walk either, because they would SURELY take the faster but far more dangerous route.
Now, is that my fault for picking a house in a nice neighborhood that's convenient to the 50mph road? Yeah, probably. But I wasn't considering walkability very much back then - I just sort of assumed there would always be some small amount of retail within easy walking distance (because every place I had lived before had that - even when I lived in this same town).
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.
The main trouble is that they tend to be owned by a single development company, so there's less likely to be organic development over time or any sort of fine-grained development. It'll just degrade until they sell the whole property lock-stock-and-barrel to have it happen all over again. It's the "Failure all at once" problem.
This is such a good point. Urbanist and their critics tend to run toward extremes. But car-lite is a great lifestyle.
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. We haven't just lost the art of building densely - we've lost the practice of actually planning our cities for the people who will inhabit them.
In one of the suburbs of the city I live in, a developer is redeveloping an old mall into a mixed use downtown. While some Twitter urbanists are really mad for some reason that the suburbs are getting a downtown, I'm pretty excited and I know my friends who live in that suburb are too. But I also know the public realm connections to it will be pretty awful. One of my friends lives a ~10 minute walk from the location in a pretty dense apartment and townhome development, and there are currently no plans to create a decent pedestrian connection. The only way he'll be able to reach it on foot is walking along the road with multiple highway exits, which isn't typically a kind of road setup that people are looking out for pedestrians crossing. But a foot bridge over the highway and some clearing out of some wooded areas nearby would create a really nice connection to this new downtown - but in planning this development there's been no consideration of that. The only thing the suburb gov was concerned about was that nearby homeowners weren't too upset about the density.
I just read Marohn's book: Marohn, Charles L.. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town. Wiley. Highly recommended. His discussion of the town in England, Poynton, is fascinating, as is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vzDDMzq7d0
In addition to what you mentioned here, I suggest we build more small satellite offices. People can go a short distance from their houses to an office and then work in collaboration with others in the company, connected by large screen high def televisions. This is better than working from home. Commuting distances would be greatly reduced.
I think we could get a lot if we required that within even marginally urbanized areas, every supermarket should be topped by at least a 5 over 1, and in major metros a high rise. There's no greater convenience than having a full-service grocery store less than 5 minutes away by foot, and we would cut out a lot of car trips that way!
Interesting take, and I partially agree with you. Urban really just means "human environment," and human environment starts with a very simple criteria that has nothing to do with architecture. It's something like, "do the neighbors walk there?"
When we scale this up we see cities as a series of connected places (ie you can seamlessly walk through them) which together make for a vibrant, positive human environment. Suburbs are different because they're disconnected islands -- even when things are physically close they aren't meaningfully connected.
So, to the extent that a "faux urbanism" place creates a little island of that in a sea of suburban car-dependency... well, then yes I think it counts. Although I personally think it's pretty important that multiple independently owned/operated places link together, so if the island of human-scale architecture is a single-owner property surrounded by a moat of parking (zero human connection to the outside world) then I'm less inclined to say it's "good enough" and more inclined to say it's a nice theme park. (But I do like theme parks!)
Your post reminded me that I wrote about the idea of "good enough urbanism" aeons ago (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/4/4/good-enough-urbanism.html), and posited sort of the inverse of what you've written here. That the architecture of a building isn't that important, rather it's the social connection to the surrounding neighborhood that matters.
What is urbanism? How do your views differ in home rule v. zoning enabling act v. growth management type cities and towns? Is Chuck Marohn all knowing? What is your favorite place and why? Do you keep an urban diary?
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.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/grocery,+Woodbury/@44.9324115,-92.9495155,15.04z?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MDkyMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Hmm. What do you base 90+% on? That seems far too optimistic to me. You're right, though, that work is the one thing that probably can't be contained within communities - i.e. commuting, including long range, will always be normative.
Look at the map. 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'll all walking and biking distance from a major store.
Please choose to drive, they don't have to drive. Density isn't going to change that choice.
Three miles to get groceries being "good" is kinda an absurd expectation that shows just how out of touch our country has become. Anywhere else in the world, or even in the history of our own country, and that would be seen as ridiculous. If you told someone a hundred years ago that the nearest goods store was 3 miles away, they'd probably think you're a hermit or something. Even in rural areas.
No wonder we use over a third of the world's gasoline despite only having 1/20th of the world's population.
I get what you’re saying, Dollyflopper, but 3 miles is a lot different than 3 blocks. For my family of 4, it would be quite challenging to carry a week’s load of groceries on a 3 mile walk or bike ride (unless I went to the store every single day to get 7 smaller loads). But if there’s a corner store just 3 or 5 blocks away , that changes the calculus. (Maybe that level of density is impossible to aspire to, but every little bit would help.)
My wife and I are very lucky in that we both work just a walking distance from our place of employment. We get by with just one car and on the rare occasions we need 2, we just borrow one from a friend.
3 miles is way too far to get groceries by bike unless you're in a Southern CA type climate, with rural traffic patterns, and a completely flat topography!
I *could* walk or bike to the store, just like my kids *could* walk or bike to school - our town's "main street" is less than 2 miles away.
But we don't, because I don't want to be walking on the shoulder of a wide road where people go 50mph. So to walk, I'd have to take a path that nearly doubles the distance, without actually being a pleasant walk (just less terrible). And I'm not going to make my kids walk either, because they would SURELY take the faster but far more dangerous route.
Now, is that my fault for picking a house in a nice neighborhood that's convenient to the 50mph road? Yeah, probably. But I wasn't considering walkability very much back then - I just sort of assumed there would always be some small amount of retail within easy walking distance (because every place I had lived before had that - even when I lived in this same town).
Aohhh