[flagged]
Your comment would be fine without the first bits.
No it is not, suburbs with sidewalks are better suburbs. They should all have them (on both sides) and it should be a code requirement.
But suburbs with a deficit of sidewalks are not "Horror Movie[s]," like these obnoxious urbanists, who are apparently creeped out by the existence of parking, want to propagandize them as.
However some cities get it. Things like a parking lot by the park, but surrounded on 3 sides by dead end streets, that allow bikes and pedestrians directly into the park. Combine that with some paths in the park and the pedestrians and bikes have a lower distance than the cars.
Combine that with green belts (again with dead end streets up to the green belt) and you have highly desirable housing that allows bikes use the green belts to make for pleasant bike commutes, dog walks, and makes having a small home/yard MUCH more pleasant. It lowers the average temperature of the city, makes things less convenient for cars and more convenient for bikes, pedestrians, and public transit.
At the end of the bike path (usually a major road) put in a bus stop and a bridge for the pedestrians or bikes that want to keep on going.
It's really not that hard, but cities can be friendly to bikes and pedestrians and still usable by cars. It does work, it can substantially move the needle on the percentage of commutes that happen without cars.
I'd much rather have 0.15 acres with a local park that connects to a greenbelt where I can bike to work than 1 acre that I have to maintain myself and forces me to drive everywhere I go. I've noticed that decent bike/green belt networks (where you can commute on bike without spending most of your time on busy streets with bike lanes) are often the most desirable city in the area.
Suburbs can be built with sidewalks and bike paths.
I'm in a suburb in Australia where I can walk across one road to get to a small local shops or about 15 minutes safe walk from a reasonable sized supermarket.
I can ride on bike paths for 15 km to my job as well.
There are some places in the US like this. I used to ride on bike paths to work near Washington DC.
Many urbanists simply want walkable neighborhoods to be _literally legal to build_ so that they can live and raise families without as much risk from cars, which are in a race to the bottom with guns as the number one killer of kids in the US. The bar almost could not be lower.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities...
Edit:
You may also not be aware that your detached single family neighborhood is, on average, financially insolvent and can only survive with subsidies from continued sprawl or from denser inner cities.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
You imply that people have the freedom to not move to the suburbs if they don't like them because "this is America", but don't seem to be aware that there is decades of policy at every level restricting people from doing exactly that.
Long story short it's EASY to correct USA suburbs defects, just allowing mixing residences and commerce. While it's next to impossible evolving cities without rebuilding them. You'll never see a green new deal done NY, and we haven't enough natural resources to rebuild cities, while we can rebuild spread areas without making heat island of thermal mass, subsidence, health issues, big pollution and so on, the sole looser are the finance capitalists who need large cities to own en mass and rent en mass, selling services that are useless and unfeasible in a spread area.
The Strong Town model is definitively possible in a mixed suburbs like here in the Alps, while it's impossible in a modern city.
If I were a church going person, I'd go there maybe once a week.
I really don't understand the logic of having more churches than stores =)
I still fail to understand why, of course I understand that some people like sweet coffee vs others who like it bitter and others who do not like it anyway but I fail to understand a reasoning for suburbs and commercial spaces.
Commerce might means traffic back and forth and that's a good reason to not want it near a home, but SMALL commerce does not means much traffic anyway and "nearby" does not means "aside". A cemetery it's the same, I see reasons not wanting it aside homes, but the opposite... Well... I understand that for some a church nearby is important, but it's still not a residential home and host ceremonies so have various peoples and cars coming and going so again I see reasons not wanting it aside a home and still not much reasons not wanted it nearby.
Anyway, IF local resident like having church and cemeteries but not small store it's perfectly fine, my original comment was about the discussed articles where I do not agree in general, in conclusion in particular, but I agree about some sub-rubs problems.
What kind of thing are you imagining in your head when you say "commercial use"? A massive 10 acre parking lot with a 2 acre steel and glass megastore?
The thing I'm thinking about is most likely smaller than an average house in American suburbia and with a smaller plot. It's not a place where a family of 7 will drive with their gigantic truck and buy groceries for two weeks. It's something you (or your kids) can walk/bike to if you need to grab a few bottles of soda and snacks for a movie night. Or you stop by on the way home from work to get tonights dinner. You also can't buy 48 brands of cereal, maybe 2 or 3 of the most popular ones.
I think you've never experienced a small corner/neighbourhood store and your view of "commercial" is skewed to American Size things where everything is next to a 6 lane stroad with parking lots larger than many European cities.
Yes, exactly that. These types of commercial uses are only ever placed on the edges of suburban neighborhoods.
But they’re not “bad”. Nobody thinks of them as “bad”. They are simply commercial, and therefore don’t go inside the neighborhoods.
Supermarkets and big box stores are placed even further away.
- noisy party in summer till early morning
- smelly fertilizer for his garden
- noisy DIY hobby in early morning and late evening
of course the supermarket receive a truck to resupply and many cars of buyers but hey, it's one km away in nature. Similarly the blacksmith shed it's not at a spit of some homes, it's around 1km away. The local elementary school is at few km from most homes. It's still a spread area but you do not need to run 40+40km just to buy a bottle of milk. There are also some polluting factories, but of course they are planted at a sufficient distance from any home.
> The sound of a party or of children playing is not noise. Even the drone of a lawn mower is not noise.
If you casually came here for a vacations or something similar I can show you what I'm talking about... Yes theoretically children playing around a school should not make much noise, except when they do make many, with some of their parents helps picking them with a Harley, or a rusty old 4x4 with a holed muffler, often honking to attract their child attention, similarly a small electric lawn mower does not makes much noise, but a diesel small tractor at high rpm due to an old alternative mowing bar picking not only grass but also rocks and roots because the owner is not much good at regulating it's height from the seat and the ground is not a flat curated grass only surface but a mix of grass, pines wood, some brambles explicitly put due to same old litigation with another neighbor and his dogs freely moving around... Well... Ah, the fertilizer is manure discharged once per year by another neighbor from a farm trailer aside the border, than left here maybe few days because the neighbor who fertilize have something else to do... That's all part of the natural package. Here it's not like USA homes with a bit of short grass and white low fences, it's more vary, of course not at all terrible as described above but still have such aspects sometimes in the year.
That’s the key fact that folks like you miss: you’re the minority. And when you denigrate the suburbs, you are hurting your cause. You are insulting the people who see the suburbs as the ideal place for them to live.
Instead of going on about how the suburb they live in is not the dense urban city that they prefer, the folks who wrote this article should move to an existing city and then advocate to make it nicer. Don't try to turn a suburb into a city, turn a city into a better city.
BTW if peoples living in the suburbs like them there is no issues at all, I do not denigrate anyone of them. IF some would like to live still in single family homes BUT also with some shops around without being in the city than the solution it's easy in nature or adapting a suburb, that's because suburbs and empty space could be changed a small step at a time, while cities can't.
That's is. I'm definitively not pro-urban as the article author.
So urbanize de-urbanization? Your proposal is to kill suburbs.
It's simply a spread area, where there is no need for traffic lights, tall buildings, downtown and so on, where you can both work (not only from/at home) and live. It offer the advantages of the urban model and of the rural model together and essentially none of disadvantages of both.
USA have enough ground to spread their population, so... Instead of getting the worse of "extreme" model (dense city of high rise on one side, empty areas with just nothing for many miles) you can get the best of both models, what's wrong with that?
There are surveys on what people want, from 2021 :
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america...
The numbers in 2021 of preference :
19% Urban, 46% Suburban, 35% rural.
Like the Brownstones many people like, can't do that. Walkable cities like in major European cities (low-mid size buildings, stores and cafes on the low levels), illegal.
There is a midpoint between 500 sqm house in a suburb and a 30sqm apartment in a 5 million person city. But not in the US, you can't do that.
What most people actually prefer would be a 200sqm two story house, with stores and schools within walking or biking distance - with proper safe sidewalks, not those foot-wide weird concrete things Americans tend to build.
But highways get built and my taxes get redirected to support your commutes instead of improving our inner core, so complaints will continue.
My biggest issue with suburbs is that they are all built around the car being the ONLY method of transport. Public transit options are essentially non-existent and walking is extremely impractical due to everything being planned around cars.
When you combine this with the suburbs being cheaper than living the city, you get people who are, rightfully, pissed about the conditions they need to live in.