I’d love some walkable neighbourhoods in my suburbia. Automotive industry invested heavily to ensure this was so. Dependence on a vehicle in most North American cities is not an accident
I'm going to take a slightly different tack, one that will probably also provide walkable.
We should be transitioning as many neighborhoods to be aligned around the e-bike, which provides a lot more transportation utility, a fair amount more range, but not nearly as much danger to pedestrians, climate impact, etc.
Walkability comes practically for free from such an approach.
The ebike should provide just enough range + concentration to enable the big box store. What is not talked about with walkable neighborhoods is that they are rich neighborhoods with rich people that don't mind paying twince Walmart costs.
Especially post-covid-inflation, this won't fly. You need SOME big box scale.
Because no one talks about the bodega in the slum. There's lots of poor neighborhoods with expensive bodegas that are poor people's only options. People do not rave about that.
Because if you want your kids’ peers in school to mostly be from households that earn a similar or higher income than your household, the best way to do that is to move to a school district with the biggest lots and homes you can afford, thereby ensuring the population of the school is made up only of people who can afford all the space and driving.
It is literally what makes “good” school districts “good”, the household incomes of the student population. And moving to a suburban place filters that nicely. Same reason why residents will often times oppose apartment developments, since they allow lower income residents to move into the district.
Right. Next time you see an American arguing that we need vouchers, realize that this would greatly help redistribute where wealth is. If people could send their kid to any school they wouldn't have to all live in suburbia. They could instead choose the environmentally and socially positive option without risking their child's education.
It is funny because, here in Paris, the urban core is where upwards life is and suburbia is the land of social despair. The opposite logic from the USA, which makes some forum threads awkward with both sides of the Atlantic talking past each other !
There's a lot of differences between the US and France that result in different suburb/city situations, but I think "white flight" and "redlining" cover a decent chunk of it:
recently though white flight (if we refer to the general progression of people to suburbs away from cities) is dominated by people of color. Suburbia is basically about as representative demographically as the rest of the country at this point.
Because almost without exception these neighborhoods were built a long time ago, are closer to the city center and are the most expensive in the city. Until a few years ago it was possible for upper middle class like the dear readers of HN to afford these neighborhoods in middle tier cities like Boise, Austin, Denver, Nashville, etc. but now even those are out of reach unless you are wealthy or willing to pay most of your income in mortgage AND have two working parents.
For about 20 years in there, we called that process gentrification and it was specifically led by ambituois young professionals (like those on HN) who bought into traditionally ethnic and/or ailing neighborhoods and filled them with cronut shops and ukelele performance centers (or boot stores and gastropubs).
But as you note, that movement petered out and more and more money came in and now those same neighborhoods are inaccessible to the same kind of people that first gentrified them.
Except that, as many predicted as gentrification became rampant, it's not really sustainable to drive all the service workers and their families out of the city center, and so now they just live on the streets outside of the cronut shops and gastropubs.
So if you give it another 10 or 20 years though, you can expect another urban flight to manifest and balance things out a little more again.
Because people doing that is why this will never change. Every time someone leaves the suburbs for the city, a vote in town elections goes with them. Every time, it becomes less likely that zoning or other local laws affecting land/property use will change. The only way to make the suburbs better, to turn all of these urban-design principles we all know so well into reality, is for more people to stay and fight.
"Move to the city" (or any other already-walkable place) is part of the problem, not the solution. For one thing, people won't do it en masse. Even if they did, those too-few places would become even less affordable, plus their power/water/waste infrastructure would get strained beyond breaking. It's a very privileged and selfish position to take. Instead, we need to make more such places, reconfiguring and repurposing buildings and other infrastructure where they are and where the people are. And that takes voting power. Don't tell people to throw that away.
Here in Seattle, over two-thirds of the land inside city limits is locked up in suburban-style low-density, single-family-only residential zoning. We would not need the suburbs if we could stop forcing people out of the city by prohibiting natural urban development. Seattle needs more people living in the city who want city life, so we can get these policies changed and build out proper urban amenities: mixed-use zoning, rapid transit, bike infrastructure, walkable neighborhoods.
Infrastructure gets upgraded when the tax base arrives to justify it. Yes, you are right, "we need to make more such places", and the low-density neighborhoods closest to the city center are the most efficient places to do that.
It is a genuine tragedy that so much sprawl has been built over the last 60-70 years. Much of that construction can never afford its own maintenance without subsidy from the city centers. To make this sustainable, we must densify and contract.
The low-density areas within city limits are functionally suburbs. You basically said as much yourself. Whether they have their own name and mayor or town council is a historical accident, not significant in this context. For example, Detroit is one of the geographically largest cities in the US. I lived there, and I lived in an adjoining suburb. There was no difference with respect to density or development type. The stroad near our house in Detroit was actually worse than the stroad near our house in Hazel Park. Whatever you can do within the "suburban style" parts of Seattle you can do in a politically separate suburb, as long as there are votes.
Cities absorbing their near suburbs (as Detroit did long ago except for Hamtramck and Highland Park) and using weight of numbers to force change would possibly allow for greater density and more walkable areas in those places, but nowadays no current suburb would allow that to happen (because of property values, school funding, etc.) so it's a pipe dream. Transit would not be affected, since that's usually regional anyway. Again, the only way to affect how suburbs are built is to vote there. Running away helps the individual, but doesn't help society, and I'm sorry that people would rather not hear that about themselves but it's the truth here in reality.
> Whatever you can do within the "suburban style" parts of Seattle you can do in a politically separate suburb
I can't speak to Detroit, but here in Seattle, I just don't believe that's true. For example, look at Greenwood - close to the dense part of the city, it has a classic grid layout and there's already a good commercial core. Great bones, ready to pop, it just needs a zoning change and some transit investment:
Compare this to a neighborhood in the suburbs, built in the sprawl era - for example East Hill, in Kent. What can be done with a place like this, full of wide roads, big box stores with vast parking lots, and meandery low-density cul-de-sac blocks which don't connect to each other?
Move to a place like that and vote all you like, the whole structure of the place has been built around cars in a way which will be very difficult to fix. Lest you accuse me of cherry-picking a particularly obnoxious example, here's Totem Lake, equally hopeless:
If Seattle relaxed its zoning and let urban development happen throughout, we could fit an enormous share of the region's population growth into the city limits. This would create a virtuous cycle where investment grows, rapid transit development becomes increasingly economical, the economy diversifies, and services improve. That can't be done in a remote suburb, because urban value is a function of proximity to resources.
> Again, the only way to affect how suburbs are built is to vote there.
Why do any more suburbs need to be built at all? Fix the cities and there will be plenty of space.
Pure wishful thinking. Is there any empirical reason to believe this would be more true with everyone living in a couple of dozen large cities (as if that can even happen - see later) instead of in a greater number of more self-sufficient smaller cities and towns within a region? It's not like every company even in your own metropolitan area wants to be in "Seattle proper" is it? I used to work at a large one that basically moved out and they're not the only one. Investors didn't seem to mind one bit.
> Why do any more suburbs need to be built at all
I never said that they should. They need to be rebuilt, not built anew. More precisely, they need to be reconfigured to avoid the waste and ecological damage of tearing down one place and then building somewhere else.
> Fix the cities and there will be plenty of space.
Fix the suburbs and you'll have plenty of space too. Consolidation can happen as easily in each town as in the central city, and without some of the downsides - increased prices and decreasing affordability (already a major problem in Seattle), power distribution, waste disposal, what traffic still (and necessarily) remains, etc. I've been to Seattle. Consolidating most of the region's population into Seattle city limits would not be a utopia; it would be a nightmare even from a new-urbanist perspective. Ditto for the many other cities I've been to. A certain level of geographic expansion is inevitable, but not all such expansion is sprawl.
More importantly, restructuring suburbs in place is the only way this can happen. People just won't move to the cities en masse. The current milieu of property values, school funding, etc. won't allow it. Changing those realities would be even harder than adopting a strong towns[1] or missing middle[2] approach in the places where people are and will remain. And that requires people voting where they are instead of running away.
