[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]

> A store is a commercial place, and that’s exactly why it should be further away

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.

[theshrike79]

So a small corner store or 7-11 type operation is "commercial use" and somehow bad?

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.

[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.

[kkfx]

Actually I'm not against the suburbs, I simply agree with the article (just a bit) that the classic suburb model have issues because you can't buy anything nearby and so you need long trips just to buy some milk, that's is. I'm definitively against the city model, because IMVHO there is no way to turn a city into a "better city"m a city is just "a tool" you can use and than dispose and rebuild another, witch is practically next to impossible and so costly that we can't do on scale.

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.

[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?