A Tale of Two Photos
Above you see two photos. The photo on the left was taken in Halifax, Nova Scotia back 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 America in a different direction than it’s been heading since the 1930s.
Disenchantment with a Drive-Everywhere Culture
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 all adults would prefer to live in well-designed, affordable, walkable neighborhoods if they were available.
Today, many people, 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.
We rightfully 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 most Americans. More recently, the same holds true for most Canadians.
Two Countries, Two Sets of Overlapping Challenges
As I’ve written separately, desirable human-scale communities exist today, but they’re relatively few in number for different yet overlapping reasons in Canada and the U.S.
In Canada, the challenges are urban sprawl and government-engineered mass immigration used as a crude form of economic development that began and the early 2000s and accelerated under Justin Trudeau.
In the U.S., the challenges to quality of life are urban sprawl and an unresolved racial history.
These overlapping issues markedly degrade quality of life and make finding affordable, desirable walkable environments a significant challenge.
Understanding the challenges, however, would be the first step in producing a solution.
Drawn to Human-Scale Communities
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.
And survey data strongly suggests, most wage-earning, middle-class Canadians and Americans would like to experience the benefits of walkable, human-scale communities on a daily basis without having to get on a plane.
Raising Children in a Human-Scale City
Years after that trip, I did my master’s in city planning in Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia. My wife and I later returned to Halifax in 2007, bought a house, and raised three children.
At that time, Halifax was still, for the most part, a human scale city. We lived in an urban neighborhood that 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 doesn’t magically erase the challenges of being a kid, but it was a positive influence on our children’s development.
Erasing What Drew Us to Halifax, Nova Scotia
Unfortunately, much of the city they knew growing up in has been largely erased. I write about the demolition of historic Halifax separately in a series called Climate Rhetoric and Reality, and would like to say just a few words about this to put the experience into context.
Halifax began to change rapidly 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.”
In May 2023, the House of Commons formally voted to embraced this goal. Notably, a majority of Quebec’s politicians are on record that they reject the plan because of, “impacts on the future of the French language, Quebec’s political weight, the place of First Peoples, access to housing, and health and education infrastructure.”
Since Trudeau’s ouster in January 2025, the public sector has downgraded the viability of this plan, but the reality is that in-progress real estate development projects alone almost demand that the immigration spigots be kept on. This is very much the case in Nova Scotia.
The first decade of the plan’s execution destroyed the very the qualities that made Halifax a compelling middle-class city in which to live.
Indo-Canadian filmmaker Sangita Iyer released a well-regarded documentary in July 2025 called Canada Unplugged, which puts these changes into a national context.
Older buildings that defined Halifax’s character have been replaced by mid- and high-rise buildings that have accommodated newly arrived immigrants, as well as cultural refugees from Ontario, attempting to escape the excesses of unbridled growth.
Governance: Quality of Life Agendas Should Replace “Growth for the Sake of Growth”
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 benefits other segments of the 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. There’s a strong case, however, 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.
Strategic Goal and Rationale: Make Families the Backbone of Cities and Towns
With the right leadership in place at the local level, we could meet the challenge of making middle-class families the backbone of well-designed 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.
Market Demand
Surveys indicate 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.2
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.”3
The Human Scale’s Advantages Over Urban Sprawl
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.
Headwinds in the US and Canada
With the above in mind, there is clearly merit to the goal of expanding opportunities for middle-class families to live in attractive, safe, walkable environments. But does either the U.S., or Canada have even a prayer of making such an achievement beyond a handful of municipalities that serve as exceptions?
So much of urban America remains deeply troubled, and the world is watching. There appears to be no opportunity for meaningful cross-party discussions about an unresolved racial past that mars quality of life in the present. My own patriotic education suggests we need not be ashamed of the past, and there are tremendous benefits in understanding the past.
Every day we see increased authoritarianism used in an attempt to solve deep seated problems. And we see steps taken to further enrich the billionaire class. It’d be naïve to suggest these realities have no impact on democracy at the local level and a municipal government’s ability to realize four specific achievements required to consistently build human scale development.
Fewer people in Canada seem to understand or care about the country’s deep-seated pathologies. For example, in the first half of 2025, only three of several dozen people I spoke to about Canada’s demographic transformation knew anything about the Century Initiative, an influential lobbying organization that has largely defined federal immigration policy. And only one person I spoke to knew their federal government had voted in Ottawa to embrace the lobbying group’s objective to triple Canada’s population by 2021.
It’s simply unclear if the country is capable of deviating from the path of rapid, low-wage population growth, and so much damage has already been done. I no longer recognize the Canada I moved to over twenty-five years ago.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has flagged mass-immigration and a lack of R&D investment as two key reasons for poor economic performance over the next two decades and beyond.
The of course, there is the problem that is urban development in North America. 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 United States.
In Canada the picture is different but no better. Here, low density suburban sprawl mixes with vertical sprawl in the form of Asian-inspired high rise development in both city and suburb alike.
| 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.
- Tony Spina’s photograph is used with the permission of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. ↩︎
- 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 ↩︎
- “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 ↩︎
