MangoMan wrote:I Shrugged wrote:
I would love to be in a walkable place with stores and restaurants nearby and such. My kids have lived in big city residential neighborhoods, so I've seen it. It's cool, but it's expensive, crowded, and there is a lot more crime than in the suburbs. People have voted with their SUVs and wallets. They want a biggish house on 1/4 acre, with room for their pool and all the kids' stuff, in a safe area with good schools, and easy access to the interstate highway. The horse left the barn. The ship has sailed. The genie is out of the bottle.
^this
In fact people DO vote with their wallets to live in walkable areas--that's why they are so expensive, as you rightly point out. It's simply a market signal that there's an undersupply problem.
The expense and frequent crime problems faced by residents of these neighborhoods are primarily by-products of poor government policies. Allow the supply to increase and most of the problems vanish.
"big city residential neighborhood" is the wrong model to visualize. I don't particularly like living there, either. But, as I have written before, it is absolutely possible to have
a walkable low-crime neighborhood full of single-family homes and good schools. I know because I live in such a place! I have half an acre and live in a single-family house, yet I can easily walk to two supermarkets, three banks, two pharmacies, a park, more than a dozen restaurants, two hardware stores, and a whole bunch of other interesting and useful places. It is lovely, but the walkability was mostly by accident. The place was clearly designed for cars, not people, because you need to cross an 8-land state highway to get there--something I'm always willing to do but that my wife subconsciously avoids, especially when she's bringing the kids (Nathan Lewis has written extensively about female aversion to the dangers of traffic as a pedestrian
here). As a result, she was driving the half-mile from the commercial center to home when
three weeks ago she was hit by a car while making a left turn onto the state highway that runs through the commercial district. Nobody was hurt, but our car was totaled, destroying thousands of dollars worth of value and hundreds of pounds of precious natural resources.
It's a simple failure of city planning and urban design--both government policies. There is absolutely no reason for an 8-land state highway to bisect a commercial district and separate most of it from nearby residential neighborhoods. It should run around the periphery, if it has to be there at all. It's bad for pedestrians: the roaring traffic makes them nervous. It's bad for motorists: slow local traffic merging onto fast highway traffic without onramps (no room) is a dangerous mix. And it's bad for businesses: there's no protection from the traffic; out-of-control cars can and do crash into buildings and the diminished pedestrian traffic depresses sales.
These are purely government-created problems. Americans don't prefer state highways to run through our downtowns. That's just the way a defective city planning board did things decades ago and now we're stuck with it because change is scary. But we already have a cultural pattern for walkable, conservative, low-crime towns with good schools and still enough room to spread out with modest single-family homes: the "main street" model of yore. It's not some weird experiment. It's simply returning to a model that worked for hundreds of years, with a few tweaks: scale back zoning, optimize the streets for pedestrians instead of vehicles (back then it was carriages, today it's cars), and focus on revenue-positive development.