isn't the "third place" concept not widely known/accepted? (1st place: work, 2nd place: home, 3rd place: communal spaces) The availability/quality of these 3rd places _directly_ correlates with QoL/happiness of people. I would get severe depression when I only swap between home/work/car, thats not a life, thats surviving, in isolation.
My "quality of life" is 1000% better than if I required a crowded train to take me to an urban "communal space" in order to enjoy nature.
What do you mean imposed by law?
One town over has many more 6+ story buildings and townhouses. So folks over there have made a different choice about what kind of situation they want to live in. Is their town more walkable than mine? Not really but it does have even more variety on Main St due to increased density - great. They were clearly able to do the thing you're talking about because they wanted to.
// It is a compelled choice, even if only for a minority of the population.
I think we agree here, the point is that the law aligns (rather than contradicts) the desires of the local population. Which is different than people dying to replace their colonials with tenements but the government not letting them.
To some extent "everything" is compelled choice. I am precluded from building a cement factory in the middle of Bryce national park, but that probably is in line with the majority of people's desires.
The original comment above asserted that laws are forcing our communities to look as they do. My point is that the laws seem to by-and-large enable us to have our communities as we wish them to be.
This type of construction does not fit in the zoning requirements of many American suburban areas. That is a walkable community by your own description.
Building walkable communities does not require high rises.
Seems like zoning reflects people's desires and provides a diversity of lifestyles which is good. If a community/development wanted to be more walkable, they can make the zoning call on a very local level.
Prices increase, and some people cannot afford to live there. Where do they go?
If they move to your town, they are now "dissenters" for being the less-than-50% part of the population that might vote for things like higher density or mixed-used developments.
It's difficult to vote your choices in a place you don't already live.
You also describe a spectrum of types of places to live in a close geographic area that is not at all representative of most of the US. Being two-towns-over from Queens puts you in a majorly urban metro area with a level of density somewhat unique to older American cities and the Northeast in general.
In my experience the towns and neighborhoods with close density building (not necessarily high-rises, you can get way high density with single and double story development than the average Target/Costco suburb), are seen as very desirable in the housing market and generally command very high prices. Places with a Main Street, with local shops and restaurants, with walkable housing and mixed development.
These are the "cool neighborhoods" that people visit but often can't afford to live in. If supply of these places met or exceeded demand I would think they would be more affordable to buy housing in.
Your own single-family home but so close to the neighbors that it's basically "I'm not touching you!" with enough space for the HOA-paid lawn service to squeak their mowers through twice a week.
Perfectly manicured grass, and no trees except a few sproutlings along the road because they were all cut down to raise the fill for the new roads and houses.
Your friend could live half a mile away as the crow flies, but they live in a different gated HOA community than you do, and you'd have to trespass through yards to walk directly there, so the route by road is more like 5 miles.
Every task you may want to do requires getting in your car and sitting at three traffic lights minimum.
The car pickup line at the elementary school overflows onto the main road everyday at 3pm with hundreds of Chevy Tahoes each picking up one child. These children may live within a few miles of the school but sending them out to walk or bike along the 50mph six-lane road that connects all of the gated communities is of course outright dangerous.
Shops and restaurants are dominated by chains because there's so little spontaneity of finding a new place, and not enough concentration of population or foot traffic for cool local businesses to find a niche.
...
I'm totally cool with living out in the woods, in a true rural lifestyle. I also like being places where maybe my personal living space is a bit more closed in but I get something in return for that. Walkable amenities. A sense of neighborhood or town community. Walking and biking trails. Cool local restaurants and shops and breweries that couldn't survive in the low-density rural environment or in the suburban hellscape.
It's that weird in-between that the US loved to build for the last 50 years, and is still building in a lot of places, that just seems dystopian to me.
Edit: And ironically lots of us Americans love visiting both of those other ends of the spectrum, and talk about what a lovely time they had, and then go back to their gated HOA suburb and get ready for the next day's school run.
Yep, bingo. People asking whether we really want these kinds of development only need to look at the price of housing in desirable walkable town centers. The home-buying market craves more of it.
I’m in a fairly small town but the price of a townhouse walkable to downtown is easily double an equivalent single-family detached suburban house a 10 minute drive away.
That's a form of third place. You don't need to be actively sharing it with other people but everyone still agrees that it's shared.
What we tend to have is third spaces that are policed in some manner. Often by commerce, as that does a pretty good job of keeping away those considered undesirable without literally calling police. Some call this privatization, which is accurate but overlooks that the money-based gating of access is a key feature.
At this point, entire generations have grown up in unwalkable suburban life, using cars as the only mode of getting from point A to point B from the day they were born, with a strip mall as the only place to go - and even then only if you have to run an errand or get the occasional meal out.
Having been been isolated from a real third space like public plazas since probably the 60s or 70s, it's no surprise that today's suburban generation views them with suspicion, confusion, and disdain. They like their strip malls just fine thank you very much, and anyway, how would they park their car?
They all know what a park/playground is
Municipal parks, like the kind you can find in Savannah GA, are nice third spaces. But I think there are very few such parks in suburban America that are not also mostly playgrounds. I would not count nature reserves as real third spaces.
Except you're probably not allowed to drink beer there anyway, because a law against drinking in the park provides a convenient excuse to keep the park clear of homeless so everybody else can enjoy it.
The vast majority of parks I see around me aren't just a playground. Those mostly seem pretty rare.
Reality disagrees with you. Just search for parks on Google maps for SV and you will see so many where playgrounds are just a small part and the rest of the park is for everyone - https://www.google.com/maps/
My favorite ones: Las Palmas, Cuesta, Washington. And if I want to drive for ~15-20 min: Shoreline, Rancho San Antonio, Baylands.
I don't get why so many in the comments think suburbs only have strip malls as the places to go. I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc. In my current suburb almost all of these kinds of features are connected by separate bike trails and transit.
There's a city park at the end of my suburban street with pavilions, playgrounds, a fishing pond with a dock/platform in it with picnic tables, picnic tables and grills dotting the tree line, a paved running trail, and a few different sports fields. No driving, not a long walk. This is the experience for pretty much my whole suburban city, not some one-off thing.
Indeed, that suburbs offered better access to many of those things than did cities (especially poor parts of cities) used to be one of the big arguments offered against suburbs. The argument was that suburbs had those things due to racism--suburbs were mostly white and so governments built those things in the suburbs.
Any grocery stores? Cafes? Restaurants? Bars?
There are a few restaurants and a corner store at the edge of my neighborhood. I can hop on the bus right outside my house and go to several different supermarkets, a farmers market, several cafes, several different kinds of bars, loads of restaurants, trampoline parks, movie theaters, arcades, bowling alleys, classical/music theaters, and more.
Connecting from the bus to the light rail, I can access the sports complex downtown for my favorite teams, a nice zoo, a few different universities, several suburb town center areas, the large state fairgrounds, a few different bar scenes, and one of the largest airports in the country.
Were you really trying to suggest suburbs don't have grocery stores?
You haven't really lived in US suburbs then. I live in one and within 0.6-0.8 mile radius, we have 3-4 parks and 2-3 libraries. Within 15-20 min driving distance, we have amazing parks. We meet other people regularly in such places without having to buy anything. And thanks to California weather, those are accessible except when it is raining.
So please stop your FUD.
The place where I grew up had a town center with offices above shops, and plenty of open areas for people to gather; it was designed for being a "third space."
Then (a few years before COVID), it went under new management who was livid that so many people were spending time there without shopping and they did various things to make it much less desirable to go there if you aren't shopping. About 30% of the stores/restaurants went out of business in a year. Turns out, for the right sized pies, a large slice of a smaller pie is worse than a small slice of a larger pie.
we have public open spaces as large as some EU nations
feel free to tally up parkland in North America by acreage vs the EU...
Take for instance, Pioneer Square in Seattle. If you look at the structure of the parks, buildings, sidewalks and streets it should be very nice. Lots of nice trees, wide sidewalks and it's pretty flat and easy to walk around. But in reality it's filled with awful people which ruins it.
American third spaces used to be bowling alleys, community centers, and Elks / Masonic Lodges. There's a shift away from those and now our third spaces are gyms, McDonald's, and malls.
Wherever old people congregate is a de facto third space.
https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-mcdonalds-old-p...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/mall-st...
This is not common concept to me neither.
If a person insists on zero disruption, they likely will avoid shared spaces all together, since even shared private spaces can't provide protection from all disruption all of the time.
Every society makes its choices and some of those seem weird when you look on the other side of the fence. The US is unique, sure, but so are other countries.