“Americans Don’t Want Walkable Cities”
The title of this essay is an argument you’ll frequently hear from well-meaning people. Both Europeans, who generally live in communities that more closely approximate what Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo calls a “15-minute city”, and Americans, who very often live in car-dependent suburbia, will say this.
Americans have a reputation for being fat and lazy. And people who say this aren’t entirely wrong, but in some ways you could call this a “chicken or the egg” situation. Are many Americans obese because they protested against walkable cities, or is the lack of walkability (as well as diet-related factors) making us fat and lazy?
I tend to think the latter is closer to the truth. But again, both these possibilities can reinforce one another in a sort of “doom spiral”.
The argument is that because Americans don’t want to walk anywhere, their cities aren’t built for that. Because we’re not environmentally conscious, we like our gas-guzzling vehicles and getting stuck in traffic on the freeway.
To be clear, the Republican Party in the USA is the only major political party to deny that the climate crisis is caused by human activity, or even that it exists at all. I’m not going to dispute this. However, the problem of walkability (or the lack thereof) isn’t strictly a “left versus right” issue.
In this essay, I attempt to refute three common arguments that Americans don’t want their cities to be walkable.
The first argument, which is probably especially poignant if you’re an American over age 30, is that many people in my country look back on their college years with considerable nostalgia. If you’re from Europe or any other place that has walkable cities, you might find this ridiculous. After all, earning a post-secondary degree is a stressful process that for many involves late-night cram sessions, research papers, and high-stakes exams that can make or break your grade. This isn’t unique to the United States at all.
What is far more unique to the USA, however, is the way we design most of our cities.
Sprawling Detroit suburbs, taken from Reddit.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the University of Michigan. Image taken from Reddit.
Look at these two photos and tell me which looks like a more appealing place to live. Yes, some on the right demonize higher education and avoid sending their children to college on “principled” grounds. But not all of them. Not remotely.
It’s often been observed that when you grow up in an American suburb, you don’t get a whole lot of freedom. Until about age 16, there’s no chance for you to acquire a driver’s license, and until you have one, you can’t go anywhere on your own. Some of these suburbs have been described by Redditors as “luxury prisons”. In fact, some might literally rather live in one of those Norwegian prisons that look like college campuses - at least there, you have community even if you lack freedom.
Anyway, college. While you still have to attend classes, you generally have a lot more choice in terms of which courses to take than you did in high school, let alone middle school. More importantly, the majority of American college towns are built with students in mind, and not all students bring their own vehicles to campus. As such, they need other ways to get around, so the cities have these methods in abundance.
While the stereotypical American suburb inhibits chances to form a community, college is the opposite. There’s a reason Greek life is popular at American universities and why there’s so much emphasis on social events.
Anecdotally, even as someone who grew up in a walkable suburb by this country’s standards, my parents kept hammering into me that I needed to join some club activities to make the most of the college experience. Even now, I regret not attending more such events due to my autism-induced lack of social stamina. But that’s a story for another day.
Cinderella mascot in front of the castle at Walt Disney World. Image taken from the Visit Orlando website.
Now let’s talk about something else. Although international tourism to the United States is currently in freefall, understandably so, one of the most popular attractions for such visitors (as well as millions of domestic tourists per year) is Disney World. And honestly, I see that as a national embarrassment. It’s far from the most important shame related to my nationality, but it’s still there.
I understand that Reddit is hardly a scientific source, but this thread from last year is just perfection. Disney World, after all, has a monorail connecting many of the parks and very little car traffic. Literally, when I looked up “are there any cars in Disney World” for this essay, most of the top results related to the movie featuring Lightning McQueen rather than parking.
But my point still stands. For many Americans in the middle class, Disney World is the ultimate family vacation. Personally, as someone who went there as a child, I have no desire to go back for a number of reasons. The food’s probably awful, it’s ridiculously humid and pretty hot all year round, and they say the lines for rides are insane these days. And that’s not an exhaustive list.
Even so, plenty of people spend thousands of dollars on such trips. It’s not just the “Disney Adults” who make loving the mouse their whole identity. On some level, people want to spend time in a place where they don’t need to drive. Half As Interesting, a YouTube channel whose videos are narrated by Sam Denby of Wendover Productions, recently made an excellent video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU2qPc22Eac) about how this transit does not extend outside of the resort’s boundaries to the actual city of Orlando.
Disney World isn’t the only domestic tourist destination that’s notably more walkable than most places in America. There are also plenty of small towns all over the country that get seasonal visitors depending on what recreational activities are near it. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, but most walkable small towns in the United States are in one or more of three categories.
1: Places built prior to the wave of suburbanization that came to the United States in the aftermath of World War II.
2: Places that get a lot of seasonal tourism, particularly from domestic visitors.
3: Places that have become prohibitively expensive for all but a relatively small percentage of the population to live in.
Of course, as stated above, these three categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they frequently reinforce one another, and that leads into my third rebuttal to the claim that Americans don’t want walkable cities.
Corporate greed is very often blamed for many of America’s ills. Our for-profit health care system, for instance, is due to the greed of insurance companies. You won’t see me defending said system on this blog, that’s for sure.
But not everything is a grandiose corporate conspiracy to swindle us. Sometimes it’s just supply and demand. If more people want a commodity than the amount of that commodity that exists, we should expect that commodity to become more expensive. (Yes, in a perfect world, housing would not be seen as a “commodity”, but rather as a “human right”, but that’s not the world we live in).
As stated above, many of America’s walkable communities, often referred to as “streetcar suburbs”, were built prior to World War II. By the USA’s standards, these are ancient places that existed before the advent of single-use zoning in the country.
Commercial building beside a home in Roland Park, Baltimore. Like many modern-day “streetcar suburbs”, it’s unaffordable for most Americans. Image taken from the website for Long & Foster Real Estate.
Single-use zoning basically means that a given tract of land can be used for strictly commercial use, or strictly residential use, but not both. This is why so many American cities have suburbs where there are several square miles of homes that all look nearly identical to one another and you can’t walk to anything that isn’t someone else’s house who happens to live nearby. (And even then, if your subdivision has no sidewalks, you’re out of luck).
One of the most prominent streetcar suburbs in the United States is relatively close to me: Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. This sounds like it should be an ideal place to live if you don’t want the hustle and bustle of a densely urban neighborhood, but also don’t want to rely on your car for every little thing. There’s just one problem.
If you go to the Chestnut Hill, MA page on Zillow today, you’ll find that the cheapest real estate available is a one-bed, one-bath condo for more than half a million dollars. And that’s the bare minimum of what you’ll need. Even that’s out of the price range for probably more than half of Americans. Basically all of the single-family homes for sale in Chestnut Hill will run you a million or two, or more.
Many of the other “streetcar suburbs” are just as costly. On some level, it makes sense that it would be expensive, because such neighborhoods have high demand and relatively low supply. But the fact that high demand exists would seem to imply that many Americans want to live in an area with accessible amenities.
Overall, the narrative that Americans don’t want their cities to be walkable because they’re addicted to their cars is a convenient one. I can understand why many people believe it, and to some extent, some people here are addicted to their cars, and some are too lazy to walk anywhere more than a couple blocks away.
But to act like “car addiction” is universal among Americans misses the point. There are numerous factors that make our cities car-dependent, and keep our cities car-dependent, systemic issues that won’t be solved overnight. Public desire, including those conspiracy theories about “15-minute cities”, is far from the most important factor.
I’m under no illusion that even my relatively progressive home state is going to be as urbanist-friendly as, for instance, the Netherlands within my lifetime. But the myth that everyone in the USA, or even a majority of the American population, wants to live in sprawling suburbia, is just that. It’s a myth. And it needs to end.
