America's "First Car-Free Neighborhood" Is Going Pretty Good, Actually?

> Culdesac is a far cry from "the incremental urbanism and thickening our cities need. A dozen or even a thousand Culdesacs can’t solve that problem," because they would lack long-term growth benefits including "the resilience of a system where many hands have built the neighborhood and have a financial stake in it" and would reflect "a zoning and finance stream that favors industrial over incremental production."

It's interesting that one of the most walkable, lively and beautiful urban centers —Paris—was not built this way, but was the result of a big reform by Eugene Haussmann that flattened the "previous Paris" and put his new version on top, which was extremely centrally planned.

The idea of a community incrementally building their infrastructure together based on arising needs and desires is beautiful. But it's not practical in the 2020s where housing is much harder to build due to regulation, zoning etc.

Plus this "incremental" approach can go wrong as well. People forget that for the longest time, cities had higher mortality because they just grew organically and some of that wasn't actually great for humans.

The things we see have survived for a reason. Most cities have gotten rid of A LOT of things that grew "incrementally".

I think this incremental approach is a romantic idea and more is right than wrong about it. But it's also the 2020s where housing is crazy expensive and we have higher expectations of buildings and neighborhoods.

Along the east coast there are multiple communities on islands accessible only by ferry that are foot traffic only. You can tell they're real places because they have their own U.S. Post Offices (not just mailboxes).

For example: https://villageofoceanbeach.org/about

0. https://maps.app.goo.gl/NhiVJuSChWh2pvUP6

For comparison, the average officially recognized neighborhood in San Francisco is around 3.3 km². That "neighborhood" covers around 0.07 km².

Also I imagine that because its apartment based, people are more inclined to spend time outside rather than couped up in their apartment?

Source: Me, determined enough.

On a more serious note, it's unfortunate that US cities aren't more walkable and there are very few places where you can survive without a car.

I'll go to the "our team" and "about us" page of the org, look at who runs it and then google them and find the interview they did five years ago in their palatial suburban estate, sitting jauntily atop a stool next to the island in their 500 square foot kitchen.

They are all hyper-rich arrogant dickheads who want the masses stacked on top of each other in habicubes where they have to listen to couples fighting, smell the stench of their neighbor's disgusting cooking, and feel constant compression from crowding shoulder to shoulder up against each other as they march from their in-office job to their tiny, cramped, habicube.

My only question is why the rich dickheads who run media outlets and non-profits obsessed with turning everyone into the renter of a high-density nightmare hovel doesn't take their own medicine?

Why are they giving interviews to Dwell or A+U about how everyone should live in a dense city from inside their gated 30,000 square foot fortress of solitude?

There's a reason that the first thing anyone, anywhere, does when they get some money is buy an SUV or (in Europe and Japan) a station wagon and move out to an American-style suburb.

Once you get out of your "hip young urban professional" or "broke-ass" phase you realize the only thing that matters is sitting by yourself in a lawn chair on your wasteful suburban Bermuda grass lawn watching the sprinkler move back and forth in peace and fucking quiet.