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It will come from infilling and improving cities, not from doing anything with irreparable suburban sprawl. And their locations are too far-flung and far-removed from urban centers to be worth expending a great deal of resources on "fixing" them anyway.īut I do think we will see some level of change for the better. They're simply incompatible with the urban form due to awful street layouts, even in cases where you can upzone them, which is usually a virtually-insurmountable political challenge anyway. Changes are also being made in a number of cities, large and small, toward better land use policy.Īuto-oriented suburbs will not change substantially, that part is true. It's often far from perfect, but pedestrians and cyclists are given much more consideration today. I've already seen a lot of change just in the past decade or so. I agree with your first sentence, for the most part, but the rest seems entirely too pessimistic. If it is made easier, smaller developers could go ahead and build three to five unit buildings on individual lots, things that wouldn’t necessarily change the neighbourhood visually and could increase rapidly the available housing supply. There is also a point to be made for removing obstacles for construction and redevelopment, as if construction is difficult only big projects with higher profits will get made. If the right changes are made (no parking minimums, rezoning) they can be a good opportunity for creating good urban islands in the middle of the suburbs, and they may be a kickstart for the transformation of the wider suburbs. I do think malls now present a really good opportunity to create good urban spaces in the suburbs: they’re well connected by road, they’re huge swaths of land owned by one company and right now they are on the decline. “Walkability”, as “it is nice and safe to walk on this neighbourhood” is not enough by itself to generate a lively environment: you need places to walk to and from, and fast paths between those places. I think the main methods will be infill, street reform and lot partitions. 1 - regarding parks, 2 - regarding transit In any case, a normal person easily walks 0.5 miles in about 10 minutes so if you want a walkable neighborhood it doesn't matter how nice your sidewalks are if the destination is not closer than that.

Others show that maybe it's more like 0.5 miles.

Yes you have a beautiful sidewalk and yes that's better than no sidewalk but some studies show that people don't really like to walk more than 0.25 miles. Incidentally this is the problem I see with a lot of "new urbanism". But you can't just cram a bunch of people somewhere and call it walkable. It would also naturally encourage density because people would want to put their business and their home on the same lot (maybe stacked on top of each other). If your neighbor on one side is also a bakery and on the other side is also a hair salon, well maybe you will walk to those places. If we completely liberalize the zoning to allow people to run businesses (within reason) from their neighborhoods, that would be a huge help and would immediately boost walk ability. And people will actually walk even if the infrastructure sucks if walking is the best way to get somewhere, so if it takes only 5-10 minutes to walk people will do it.

People walk when there's a good reason to walk i.e. So let's say that a house built in 1970 might reach the end of its "life" around 2050, if you have the magic combination of: laws changing so that a radically different use of that land is allowed economic pressure significant enough to convince developers to buy up several lots at once enough people willing to sell at the same time ability/willingness to alter the shape/direction of roads then, maybe, some of these suburbs could change. But if you look at the suburbs from at least the last 50 years, the only way these can become walkable is if there is a reorganization of the urban form as the current generation of homes become unlivable. The oldest suburbs definitely are (and always were) walkable.