Maybe the industrial revolution made cities too unpleasant? Were we too spoiled by the automobile industry and government roads? White flight from cities into the suburbs?
That said many suburbs botched their expansions with tract housing and poor urban design, because that made the most money for developers and appealed to a now diminishing taste for dispersed living.
However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough.
Optimizing for individual transport in cars and public transport are not compatible goals. The first reason being that if individual transport is made available to most people, they will opt out of public transport and therefore all political will for maintaining and increasing quality of public transport will disappear.
And optimizing for cars means you can't optimizing for walking or other forms of transit.
Look up Levittown.
Not a good idea, but still normal in many suburbs.
I'm glad to now live in a human-scale city in Eastern Europe. There are three "western style" grocery stores with a 5 min walk and (not including all the low-cost high-quality locally-grown fruit and vegetable kiosks). It's a bit difficult to convey how much better (or natural, rather) this way of living is to my suburb friends and family back home without experiencing it first hand.
I get that, if you have a car it probably doesn't bother you, but the amount of logistics to have your children and maybe elderly no longer able to drive shipped around for everything must be enormous? I don't have kids but just from remembering what me and my siblings did on ourselves (from getting hair cut to going to sport clubs) from kindergarten age onwards, by walking and later cycling. I'd have to hire a driver. I only remember ever been in the car as a kid when going to another city or weekend trips.
Just reading this makes me feel kind of claustrophobic.
In terms of walking for leisure and exercise, some do, but not everyone. I see people walking/jogging/biking through the neighborhood throughout the day. But the rate at which people do is likely lower than those living in more urban areas. As mentioned by commenters above, just about the only reason to walk outside in the suburbs is leisure/exercise. The nearest non-residential area from me is about 1 mile away, and that's the city core, with some restaurants, dental offices, etc. The closest grocery is probably another half mile. And I'm far closer than most. I'd say the average distance to a non-residential area for most of the city's residents is closer to 2 miles, and the average distance to a grocery store is probably near 3.
But even strictly for leisure, there are likely fewer people walking here than other cities/countries. When I lived in Japan, I went walking because if you go outside, you are basically in the street. It incentivizes walking somewhere like a park, or a shop, or path, or somewhere interesting. In a neighborhood like mine, most people have large enough yards where they can easily relax there. You can throw a football or kick a soccer ball easily. Houses with kids will often have swing sets or trampolines in their backyards. I'm in Indiana, so I estimate no less than 40% of households have a basketball hoop in their driveway or on the street in front of their house. A lot of the things that drive you to walk places in denser cities simply don't exist. Walking outside becomes a decision to walk for the sake of walking, because most people already what they would be going to a park for at home (greenery, space, playground/sporting equipment, even pools are common), and you aren't going to be close enough to actually walk to many destinations.
It's popular to imply Americans don't walk. It's true the culture is more pragmatic (why walk when I could drive and get more done), but it's not true that it's unusual to see people out walking on sidewalks, parks, and lakes.
My neighborhood has a walking trail around a small lake (takes 45 minutes to do a lap). There are 20-50 people walking it at almost anytime of day.
The idea of walking anywhere is insane. To get from a typical suburb to the nearest business district or strip mall would usually require walking several miles along the shoulder, with frequent illegal crossing of arterial roads.
And of course in other places in the world where cities are old and streets are too small for sidewalks. Back streets in such places are comparable to alleys in the US.
I would have walked if there were any affordances at all, but ended up driving more often than not.
The Northeast has a lot of old places that you will see small strips of sidewalk and then no sidewalk, and then sidewalk again. Because they force the new construction to have it, but the stuff that was already there won't.
Often the businesses get crammed together on some busy streets with fast-moving traffic, large parking lots, and few sidewalks.
In some places you'll have continuous miles of nothing but housing. In others it's an organic "spread out and up" from a core area. It basically comes down to what the local economy can support and the level of development that happened between 1865 and 1945.
Having hard cutoffs from "most residences are apartments/duplexes/multi-family, businesses on every corner" to "residences and residences only, 99% single family" to "tractors commonly seen on the road" is pretty distinct to the areas surrounding major cities that were formerly sparsely populated until they were built out rapidly in the 1950s through 1970s.
An American suburb is, basically by definition, never more than 15 minutes drive from a grocery store, a doctors office, a dental office, some sort of clothing store, at least one bar, at least one restaurant (usually 2+), at least one hair dresser, etc. It will usually all be ugly (strip malls are common), but it will be affordable and economically sustainable. You can walk or bike anywhere (sidewalks are usually nicer than in the UK), but usually only car-based public transit is actually convenient (mainly because suburbs prioritize saving cash, and car-based public transit is always the cheapest transit).
If you truly need to drive 40+ minutes to get to a grocery store, you don't live in a suburb. You are either in an exurb, or just plain rural area.
which to a lot of the rest of the world is a really, really long ways and essentially "not in the same area".
Think beyond suburbia, which is really quite small in the scheme of things.
But I think that's separate from the car issue, mostly. Originally satellite communities had commercial services - local shops and the like. But those were phased out due to a lack of demand, I think due to societal shifts that were egged on by marketing "cool kids have cars" - and the like.
St. Louis, MO.
Remember Ferguson? That's a 10 minute drive from the richest neighborhood in StL.
Look up North and South Delmar in St. Louis; the opposite sides of a single street. That's redlining.
But thinking of my daughter getting hit by a stray bullet was terrifying, and we got a mortgage and moved to a house worth 6x the price a few months later. It was sad because our neighbors behind us were Venezuelan refugees with two kids and we got along really well.
I’m not ashamed of wanting to keep my children safe, and I’m not going to put them at risk so I can fulfill others vague notions of “inclusiveness”. The police took 45+ minutes to show up any time I called.
Funny thing is, the middle class neighborhood I live in now is much MORE diverse, not less. We have Africans, Southern Asians, East Asians, Spaniards, Russians, and all manner of professionals from all over the world. We bought the house from some Pakistanis. Heck, my neighbor is a convicted felon for dealing in his younger days but even him and his wife and six kids are okay.
With that mindset a business could bring in outsiders and be bad for their property value.
I am extremely biased as I'm in my mid twenties and don't even have a driver's license as the only time it comes in handy in Oslo is if you're moving furniture.
People got rich enough that the noise from the bar on the other side of the block or the mechanic shop across the street made their list of "big problems" and they complained to local government until government restricted everyone's property rights.
The great migration to the suburbs happened right after schools were desegregated in the US.
White Americans moved to the suburbs to avoid their children from attending school with black children. Milliken v. Bradley was the last nail in the coffin.
The return to cities has coincided with white people having less children and children at older ages along with less racist views.
(On paper Black people were also entitled to GI bill benefits, but in practice this didn't really happen.) From Wikipedia:
> In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs about 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-white veterans.
The idea of suburbs was created by Levitt & Sons when building Levittown, PA post-WWII. A neighborhood that had explicit terms that the owners would not sell or rent to non-white people.
They are powerful enough to tear down so many street-car rails all over America.
There is only a very small segment of the population that benefits from constantly driving everywhere and they aren't the ones in the cars.
Look up the Koch Brothers. They fund PACs that pretend to be grassroots campaigns to shut down public transit expansion and successfully unfortunately.
Also the street cars collapse was very much due to automaker lobbying, like someone else said, you don't need to kill it directly; just make it unsustainable. Basically how Republicans govern; you don't kill it directly, you just choke it to death.
Capitalism. Economies of scale. Taxpayer subsidies for car infrastructure. Nowadays Amazon, Uber Eats, etc.
Try actually running a local dairy or restaurant or electronics store and see how long it takes for you to be crushed out of existence by people driving to the supermarket 5 km away, or just ordering from VC funded loss-making delivery companies, or the like.
My weekly grocery run? Grab the car and go to Costco, otherwise my grocery budget would double.
There used to be racial covenants that ensures racial segregation. As soon as those were rendered illegal, people started zoning for "public safety" and such. The original decision (Euclid?) that rendered zoning legal explicitly states concerns about lower income people degrading neighborhoods if multi-family residences are allowed.
And as soon as you start allowing such restrictions on what sort of construction is allowed, you start outlawing small business next to residences. And home buyers appreciate these restrictions because there's chance of a business growing and causing more traffic and "outsiders" (those that can't afford to buy a huge parcel of land) coming into their bucolic suburban life.
Subsidized FHA loans were also envisioned as a strong anti-communist play; who would fall prey to the temptations of socialism if they own their own home and can use it to keep out non-whites? (Redlining restricted these subsidized mortgages from being used for any home that had a chance of becoming racially integrated.)
The rise of the automobile and destruction of commuter rail lead to a ton of land accessible to people who worked in cities. And in conjunction with the exclusionary zoning that was used to protect the capitalistic gains of property values, the idea of mixed-use zoning became antiquated and counter productive to financial and social interests.
So a century later, we are finally realizing the massive health costs, societal costs, and economic costs of our unsustainable suburbanization; infrastructure is aging out without the tax base to maintain and rebuild, and the suburbs--filled with wealthy residents paying lower taxes--have drained the economic centers of cities, while those wealthy suburbanites benefit from the commerce that high density cities enable, and which low-density suburbs disallow.
We have subsidized an unsustainable style of living for the white middle class, and as white middle class boomers have benefitted, they have declined to allow for basic investments in the future that would extend prosperity to future generation.
This, I think, is the story of the decline of the American empire, just as much as mismanagement by a fascist-leaning a factual political party. During the decline of the USSR, even with massive amounts of state propaganda and misinformation, at least they were able to muster state power to clean up Chernobyl. I'm the twilight of the US, we have hollowed our our scientific institutions like the CDC and FDA because they don't serve the political goals of the ruling political class, and we can't even muster a response to a pandemic that countries with widely-regarded corrupt governments such as Italy have dealt with handily. I think this rot comes from our racist segregation which lead to our poor century of city planning.
(This, of course, would need several books to fully justify my wild claims, but one book that starts to is The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.
(I've upvoted and favorated your comment.)
This is a solid argument, but I don't see the link between this and racism/classism.
Perhaps it implies a link to some kind of 'systemic classism', as when individual people make decisions to benefit themselves, those with money tend to have more agency.
It seems like everywhere cars and rail allowed suburbanisation people jumped at the chance to get a comfortable home on large lots at a cheap price. It turns out massive, exclusion-zoned suburbs were short-sighted, and many places are now pursuing a 'city of villages' planning strategy.
It's not obvious to me that, if you take out any explicit class or race biases, the world wouldn't have followed the same path with respect to businesses in these suburbs.
If racism and classism didn't exist, we probably would've built less highways because building them through any residential areas would've been politically impossible (indeed, the first successful freeway revolts were centered around rich, white areas.) Given that it would basically be impossible to draw a straight line through an urban area without hitting a residential area, it would've made highway travel for commuting much less feasible, making it much harder for suburbanization to spread widely due to longer road travel times.
As a comparison, Frankfurt in western Germany has a population of 5.8M and land area of 5,700 sq mi. Atlanta has a metro population of 6M and land area of 10,494 sq mi.
> The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/12863721751177912...
Fear-momgering about blacks being able to move into your neighborhood, like what's happening in this Tweet, is what shaped the single-use suburban dream. Levittowns, the first cookie-cutter suburbs lacking any sort of small commercial businesses, were very explicitly segregationist.
It may be possible to disentangle the racism from the classism, but in the specific example from the US, they are so tight that I have a lot of difficulty being able to find any space between them.
I don't think you need racism or classism to describe the behaviours that lead to neighbourhood shops disappearing from suburbs, or not being planned for in the first place, though examples exist where those things are intertwined like you've illustrated.
What I don't see is the causal link. This phenomenon occurs in other places in the world, places that don't have the same interweaving of racial issues throughout society that the USA has, and it doesn't occur in some locations within the USA that does have those same issues.
It may be true that all suburbs in the USA were founded for racist reasons, or that the residents make all decisions about perceived house value and their community based on racist ideals, or that city planning policies are put in place to fulfil racist agendas, however;
It seems far more likely that the underlying causes are driven, like the rest of the world, by
- rational individual economic decisions, and
- policy informed by lobbyists
Now the effect of these decisions or policies may well be racist or classist - like I said above, people with money tend to have more agency, and it's definitely true that the USA has had and continues to have significant divides in wealth between various racial groups.
There are also examples of specific, explicit racism that have caused this effect, but those pale next to the impact that the widespread adoption of the car (and many other things!) had on decision making.
These decisions changed the way our world works, the true impact of them took decades to register, and we are only now adjusting for what we have learned. There are racial and classist components to these impacts, but that doesn't mean the decisions were (on the whole) motivated by race or class.
Some other sources of how systemic racism in government has been used to further single-use suburban planning:
Segregation by Design by Jessica Trounstine https://urbanaffairsreview.com/2019/06/24/segregation-by-des...
Neighborhood Defenders by Einstein, Glick, and Palmer https://www.politicsofhousing.com/neighborhood_defenders/
A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow in South Florida by NDB Connolly https://history.jhu.edu/2014/02/19/a-world-more-concrete-rea...
Every talk I've seen by NBD Connolly is outstanding but this is the first I saw and the one that really motivated me to find more sources on this topic: https://youtu.be/DjmUWfMEhfE
I share your view that we're seeing a large scale decline of the American empire btw. - Covid response lays this out quite clearly. It will remain to be seen whether it drags down Europe as well.