This is the first article in a three-part series introducing the idea that it’s worth the effort to expand opportunities for middle-class families to live in walkable, human-scale communities.
Above you see two photos. The photo on the left was taken in 2018 when our daughter was starting grade 6. She’s the one getting a piggyback on the far left. My wife Christine and I raised her and her two older brothers in an urban neighborhood adjacent to the downtown of a city of 70,000 residents. The age and degree to which these kids in the photo were free to navigate the city depended upon parenting style, personality, and gender. But at some point, relatively early on, they all negotiated the place on their own terms in the absence of fear.
The photo on the right was taken in July 1967, by Tony Spina, chief photographer of the Detroit Free Press.1 A week earlier, racial unrest in Newark had claimed 26 lives, and caused over 700 injuries. Detroit was the next city to descend into chaos and violence on July 23rd. Over the next five days, 43 people would die, and afterwards, large swaths of the city lay in ruins.
At the time, I was a four year old living in Toledo, OH. Rioting in Toledo started on July 24th on a commercial street close to where my dad had attended high school. As young Blacks from that same school hurled Molotov cocktails at white-owned businesses, I was playing in my grandmother’s backyard, blissfully unaware of what was going on a few minutes away. The consequences would remain largely hidden from me until much later, when experiencing difficulty trying to find the kind of place in which we ultimately raised a family.
Returning again to the photo of my daughter and her friends, there are many who are drawn to the kind of place they grew up in. These kids lived life on their feet, fear free, in an urban environment that provided access to both nature and a viable downtown. Part of the reason these kinds of places are not widely available to the American middle class has a lot to do with the story of the boy in the other photo. Making the effort to understand that story and thinking differently about the kinds of places we build might just take us in a different direction than we’ve been heading since the 1930s.
I grew up in suburban Pennsylvania, and most of my friends went on to lead very happy, satisfying lives in similar environments. Today, they love where they live and don’t pine away to live in walkable communities of the sort in which we raised our children. But the fact is, they had little choice in the matter for reasons relatively few understand. And if recent surveys reflect reality, about half of adults would prefer to live in well-designed, affordable, walkable neighborhoods if they were available.
Today, many Americans, particularly those in their twenties and thirties, are less enamored with the drive-everywhere culture that previous generations embraced. Multiple factors are at play, but concerns over traffic alone provide some insight. The average American now spends over seven weeks a year sitting in a car. And in several regions, people spend more time stuck in traffic than they do on vacation.
Lots of people—me included—value the simple act of walking, using our feet for much of daily life just as our species has been doing for the past 300,000 years. Studies show there are social, financial, environmental, and health-related benefits to living this way. Yet finding an affordable, safe, walkable, attractive, mixed-use neighborhood in which to live is beyond the reach of many. The reasons are many, but the core of the problem is how urban sprawl and an unresolved racial past intertwine to make finding the walkable environments we desire a significant challenge. Understanding a challenge, however, can help lead to solutions.
Years ago, I had a job lined up coming out of college and my new employer was kind enough to allow me to defer my start date. I took out a small bank loan, bought a backpack, and lived on the cheap for two months in Europe. Two impressions stuck with me. The first was my ability to travel for weeks using just my feet and a rail pass and experience so much that I perceived as positive in terms of places and people. The second impression was the sound of children playing in schoolyards and elsewhere in city after city. Their presence, and the accompanying laughter, shrieking, and chatter, suggested to me that a city could be safe, offer residents a high quality of life, and be a home to middle-class families. It’s something I think many Americans would like to experience without having to get on a plane.
Years after that trip, I did my master’s in city planning in Halifax, the provincial capital of Nova Scotia (Canada). My wife Christine and I later returned to the city, bought a house, and raised three kids in an urban neighborhood, which had many of the same characteristics that I’d experienced in Europe. About half the households in the neighborhood were wage-earning, middle-class families. In any given year, parents in the city sent roughly 5,500 kids to one of thirteen schools within a ten-minute bike ride from our home. Seventy-five percent of these kids, including our own, attended public schools.
Our children grew up with a different sense of physical freedom than I had as a kid in my Central Pennsylvania subdivision. They walked to schools, athletic fields, shops, movie theaters, cafes, restaurants, the dentist, a vintage record store, and a fair bit more. And they did all this in the absence of fear for their safety. The reason for this has nothing to do with supposed Canadian moral superiority and everything to do with geography. Had British colonists been able to grow cotton in Nova Scotia, American flags would fly from every pole in town. And they’d have the very same difficulties rooted in an unresolved racial past.
Living in a safe, walkable city didn’t magically erase the challenges of being a kid, but it was a positive influence on our children’s development. Unfortunately, much of the city they knew growing up in has been largely erased. Halifax began to change in 2015, in relation to a government-engineered program of mass immigration executed in the context of Canada, becoming what Justin Trudeau described as the “world’s first post-national state.” Plans are to take a 2015 population of 35 million and increase it to over 100 million by end of century, and create so-called “mega-regions.” The first decade of the plan’s execution destroyed many of the qualities that made Halifax a compelling middle-class city in which to live. Older buildings that defined the city’s character have been replaced by mid- and high-rise buildings that have accommodated new arrivals from India, and China, as well as cultural refugees from Ontario, attempting to escape the excesses of unbridled growth. I write about this in a separate article titled Climate Rhetoric and Reality: The Case of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
As unfortunate as these changes are, what is relevant here is the fact that for almost 18 years, my family and I experienced what it’s like to live in a safe, predominantly middle-class, walkable, human-scale city. It was fantastic. And what’s good for a family might just benefit other segments of the broader population. For example, if you’re a young single female drawn to city life, the fact that children thrive in a city is relevant since their presence is a harbinger of your physical safety. If you’re older, being able to routinely walk to places and interact with community members in a shop, park, or on the sidewalk brings its own benefits.
Municipal governments often pursue economic growth for growth’s sake, believing bigger is always better. Here, I’m making a case for municipalities, both urban and suburban, to pursue a quality-of-life agenda and build at the human scale to increase opportunities for wage-earning, middle-class families to have the experiences we did. The path to success requires overcoming significant obstacles that differ in urban and suburban contexts.
In the 1960s, the nation met Kennedy’s challenge of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” With the right leadership in place at the federal, state, and local levels, we could meet the challenge of making middle-class families the backbone of well-designed American cities and towns offering a high quality of life to young and old alike.
Any worthwhile goal stands atop a solid, clearly understood rationale. Let’s start with unmet market demand. In our flawed, messy project called America, a majority of people have been saying they prefer to live in walkable, mixed-use, human-scale communities for years. Back in 2014, Nielsen—considered the top market research firm in the world—surveyed millennials and found that 62 percent, or 51 million people, wanted to live in vibrant, walkable cities or towns.[i] More recently, in 2023, the National Association of Realtors conducted a nationwide poll which found that “79% said being within an easy walk of other places and things, such as shops and parks, is very/somewhat important.”[ii]
Extensive research supports the claim that walkable, human-scale communities offer significant advantages over auto-dependency. Below are ten of relevance to municipal leaders and others focused on expanding opportunities for the middle class to live life on their feet.
Human-Scale communities:
- Give people back weeks of their lives that they would otherwise spend in a car.
- Provide residents with greater levels of ambient exercise tied to health benefits, such as reduced levels of obesity and incidence of cancer.
- Emit fewer transportation-related emissions at a time when the impacts of climate change grow more severe.
- Use land efficiently in a way that enhances quality of life. This includes preserving valuable rural land (and rural culture) and providing people in existing suburban communities with destinations such as town centers like Downtown Crown (Gaithersburg, MD) and Bridge Park (Dublin, OH).
- Are significantly more environmentally friendly to build and operate than high rises.
- Meaningfully reduces the chances of you or your child dying or being injured in an accident.
- Are considered more visually appealing than the dominant suburban landscape according to visual preference surveys conducted since the 1980s.
- Promote greater levels of social capital and mental health.
- Increase household savings rates by reducing the need for vehicle ownership, and eliminating costs associated with maintenance, gas, and insurance.
- Provide children with greater levels of physical autonomy, promoting stronger social skills achieved through greater levels of face-to-face interaction within a community.
With the above in mind, there’s merit to the goal of expanding opportunities for middle-class families to live in attractive, safe, walkable environments. But does the country have even a prayer of making such an achievement? So much of urban America remains deeply troubled. At the same time, people have been talking about the ill effects of urban sprawl in earnest since the 1990s, yet decades later, single-family houses with the obligatory two-car garage still dominate search results on realtor.com in metro areas across the country.
Note: In recent years, much has been written about ending single-family zoning and dismissing many of the people who live in single-family homes as NIMBYs. Advocates cite the need for affordable housing as the rationale behind the movement. The general approach is to allow developers to enter auto-dependent, single-family neighborhoods, knock down homes, and erect apartments, duplexes, or townhouses. Laws recently passed in California, Maine, and Oregon allow for variations on this theme. Several other municipalities, such as Minneapolis, Austin, and Arlington (VA) have implemented similar changes in their local zoning regulations. I question crude solutions to complex problems. These changes may not produce well-designed, affordable, walkable, mixed-use communities of the sort for which Good Human Habitat is advocating. In the absence of meaningful community consultation and participatory design to shape what occurs in existing neighborhoods (e.g., context-sensitive design standards), all bets are off in terms of positive outcomes. |
So, are we condemned to a future that looks like a variant of the past? Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. We know that to achieve any goal, it’s necessary to understand what obstacles stand in the way of achieving our aims. These obstacles need to be addressed. The path forward isn’t an easy one, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor and democracy just might get a boost.
[i] The actual quote from the Nielsen report reads, “Millennials (62%) prefer to live in the type of mixed-use communities found in urban centers where they live in close proximity to a mix of shopping, restaurants and offices.” See Nielsen Company 2014 Report, “Millennial Breaking The Myths,” August 2014, https://www.slideshare net/slideshow/nielsen-millennial-report-2014/37655031
[ii] “2023 National Community & Transportation Preferences Survey,” National Association of Realtors, April 2023, https://cdn.nar.realtor//sites/default/files/documents/2023-community-and-transportation-preferences-survey-slides-06-20-2023.pdf
- Tony Spina’s photograph is used with the permission of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. ↩︎