There was a viral tweet recently saying something like “Americans only obsess over college so much because it’s the only time they get to live in a walkable neighborhood,” and Ben Southwood thinks there’s something to this:
But living in walkable neighbourhoods alone does not do the job. Most Americans do not choose to live in walkable neighbourhoods, developers do not maximise profits by building walkable neighbourhoods, and walkable neighbourhoods don’t usually have the highest location-adjusted prices. (Though see many admirable projects trying to change this on Coby Lefkowitz’s Twitter feed.)
Americans rarely live on walkable streets. There are some very high rent neighbourhoods that are walkable &mdsah; Manhattan, Georgetown, and so on. There are bungalow courts and assisted living areas for older people. These two neighbourhood types involve clustering, based around affordability or other restrictions, and are often desirable.
Then there are trailer communities, and there are some neighbourhoods of public housing that are in some sense walkable, although the walks tend to be across bleak windswept open spaces or within poorly kept up towers and blocks. These two neighbourhood types tend not to be people’s first choice, and are generally seen as less desirable.
As will be clear if you read my first post, or the title of this very Substack, I think the reason people loved their college days so much, apart from the fact they were young and beautiful, with perfectly functioning brains and livers, is that at university one has all one’s best friends within two minutes walk. And they’re almost always free to hang out.
Compared to the small town example I looked at before, people at a given university are probably more like potential friends. Most importantly, the students all chose to be there — unlike prisoners, who also live in walkable neighbourhoods. And they chose to be there in part because of an organising feature of the university, probably making the intake similar to each other in some way, possibly fitting some cultural type.
In short: it’s also about clustering.
RE: “Americans only obsess over college so much because it’s the only time they get to live in a walkable neighborhood”
Spent eight years at an Ivy during 1960s and early 1970s. Mugged twice on campus during those years. Learned that campus police and police worthless.
Dan Kurt
I do think clustering is important too, but it astonishes me how little grasp people of the economics of this. Southwood says: “developers do not maximise profits by building walkable neighbourhoods”
Yes, that’s because it is against the law to build a walkable neighborhood that also makes money. It is absurd to cite market forces when the options have been so severely constrained by regulation.
Now, it would be another matter if we talked about what the zoning codes are intended to do, and what they actually do, and what big changes would do to the desirability and therefore price of walkable housing, but I find so many commentators surprisingly obtuse about this.
The European version of “walkable neighborhood” would, in America, be generally described as an urban hellscape. I’ll keep my grassy front yards and houses that don’t touch. There’s plenty of kids out wandering around the neighborhood. No need for sidewalks where there isn’t that much traffic.
“Our betters” keep trying to herd us into tiny, cramped urban blocks.
Benjamin I. Espen: “Yes, that’s because it is against the law to build a walkable neighborhood that also makes money.”
It isn’t, actually, against the law, it’s only against the lawyers.
Everything involves trade-offs. A real walkable neighborhood with coffee shops, bakeries, parks, libraries requires high population density. That in turn requires multi-story apartment living. And successful multi-story living requires each resident to give a decent amount of consideration to everyone else in the building — which is especially difficult for children.
Some Chinese cities do this quite successfully, but it requires a hefty dose of shared culture, which is often absent in today’s West.
Gavin Longmuir: “…a hefty dose of shared culture…”
Very funny, friend.
Gavin:
I think that is the point I’m trying to make. A higher density walkable neighborhood made largely out of single family homes, not apartments, is possible to make. But in the US at least doesn’t fit in the permissible kinds of construction. People have forgotten it can exist.
Benjamin: “A higher density walkable neighborhood made largely out of single family homes, not apartments, is possible to make.”
That would be interesting to learn more about. Superficially, comparing that walkable neighborhood with a standard suburb, it seems the requirements would include much closer spacing (row houses versus stand alone), probably smaller houses, with minimal yard space — the space savings devoted to common areas & parks. And maybe car parking at some distance from home — tote those groceries!
There would still be the issue that higher density housing would require people to give a lot more consideration to not doing anything that might annoy their neighbors. Culture as well as design. Libertarians might be the ideal occupants.
I may be wrong, but I think suburbs could be made more walkable and socially interconnected if they were oriented more like a cell wall. One side would be the “transit” side, with design and implementation oriented to make driving and parking optimal, while the other side would be the “social” side, with lawns, paths, parks, woods, and social spaces. No, it wouldn’t be conducive to cramming McMansions in every available space, and it would be quite arduous to design and construct them, but it would very likely be highly profitable for the builders, as it’s hard to find a set of parents who wouldn’t bend over backwards to live in a thriving community with safety and beauty as the guiding elements of design and operation.
KD: <i<"the other side would be the “social” side, with lawns, paths, parks, woods, and social spaces."
Construction would not be difficult — it is the design that is the challenge. Start off with a basic assumption about how far people will HAVE to walk (not choose to walk) to navigate about the compound. 20 yards? 100 yards? A quarter mile? See what that means in term of actual layout.
Then, unless parking is integrated into the housing units, make an assumption about how far people are prepared to walk while carrying groceries (shorter!) and then do it again.
The idea of a walkable neighborhood is great, but the devil is in the details. My guess is that a realistic plan would end up with multistory living/subterranean parking built around a central area with some open space, a school, and a few shops. If you look at wealthy Middle Eastern cities where people don’t want to have to walk outside in summer, that kind of layout is quite common.