[10-1-100]

Did you know that in most of the US it's illegal to build anything other than car-dependent single family suburbs? For many top US cities over 70% of the land is zoned _exclusively for car-dependent detached single family homes_.

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.

[kkfx]

I'm in the French Alps, so a spread area, NOT designed to sell cars, and well we have walkable areas without physical ads (shop windows) in nature and the simplest difference between the USA suburbs is just the fact that here homes and commerce are mixed, so you have a supermarket nearby a blacksmith, few other shops and so on, while some works at home in presence, like a barber with the shop in the basement.

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.

[db48x]

The whole reason that people _like_ suburbs is that they are not mixed in with commercial uses. The houses are only near other houses, plus a few churches, parks, cemeteries, schools, etc. If you take that away, you take away what people like about them.

[theshrike79]

So churches and cemeteries need to be within walking distance, but a small mom & pop corner store is absolutely horrifying?

[db48x]

You are the one using words like “horrifying”. Folk who like the suburbs just think that the store should be further away than the church. That’s all. The store isn't horrifying, it’s just commercial.

[theshrike79]

I visit the corner store near me almost daily, it's easy to walk the 5 minutes to grab more milk or some other ingredient I'm missing.

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 =)

[db48x]

It has nothing to do with how often you visit, or how many of them there are. A store is a commercial place, and that’s exactly why it should be further away. People who prefer the suburbs don’t want to live next to commercial uses.

[kkfx]

Why? What's wrong in a supermarket, a 500m² (~5400ft²) shed one km (0.6 miles) from your home? It's not open 24/7, it does not smell or smoke, generate special noise, heat and so on. In between a pine wood, a small lake, a bit of grass. My nearest neighbor "pollute" much more with:

- 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.

[db48x]

Nothing, to you. But commercial places are commercial. The idea behind a suburb is that the only thing near you are your neighbors, and a few amenities such as churches and parks and elementary schools. The sound of a party or of children playing is not noise. Even the drone of a lawn mower is not noise. If you can smell your neighbor’s fertilizer, then you don’t live in a suburb (or he used way too much and killed all his plants).

[kkfx]

Well, and why this specific idea should persist? Or more precisely why the alternatives should be dense cities, suburbs or isolated countrysides instead of a mixture of them?

> 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.

[db48x]

You’re still missing the point. Regardless of how much you like your neighborhood, 50% of Americans would prefer to live in a suburb. Even if there were no constraints such as money or family obligations, they would choose a suburb consisting entirely of houses over your neighborhood which mixes residential and commercial uses. Your neighborhood might be great, but it isn’t what most Americans would choose. In fact, only about 20% would choose it; the rest want to live far out in the countryside with as few neighbors as possible.

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.

[timeon]

> just allowing mixing residences and commerce

So urbanize de-urbanization? Your proposal is to kill suburbs.

[kkfx]

I do not call "urban" being spread in nature... Mixing does not means being ATTACHED. I have a supermarket, a small shed covered with solar panels at less than one mile from my home but still far enough I do not hear trucks resupplying it, nor customers cars. There is a blacksmith as well, it's near the supermarket but far enough from other homes. There are some polluting factories but they are FAR enough away from all other homes. We are far more spread than a typical USA suburbs with all homes stitched aside but we still have to travel much less to live. It's definitively not urban since there is nature all around, no traffic, no transports except for rare trucks, school-buses etc easy to overtake anyways because even on mountains roads offer enough space nearly everywhere.

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?