Benefiting from the Sound Judgement of the Past
In July 2007, my wife Christine and I moved from Washington, DC, back to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I had gone to grad school. At the time, we had two small boys and a daughter on the way. Previously, we had lived in several cities and knew that Halifax checked two key boxes. The city had walkable neighborhoods filled with middle-class families. And we could afford to buy a house. We’d spend the next 18 years in one of those neighborhoods.
During the period our neighborhood was constructed between 1900 and 1919, something very special was happening in Halifax. City officials, developers, and home builders were creating neighborhoods that accommodated the automobile rather than creating places built for the automobile. They were still building places for pedestrians, just as people had been doing since the dawn of civilization. And what they built contradicted loud, prominent voices at the time that equated urbanism with the worst, oppressive qualities of the industrial city. The neighborhood, as it was originally built, serves as a masterclass in neighborhood design.
At the time of our return, many older parts of Halifax still served as an example of what constitutes good human habitat. Since the early 1960s, however, this Canadian municipality has engaged in a pattern of decision-making that degrades or erases the very qualities that have made the city a compelling place to live.
It’s a pattern that persists to the present day and undermines the long-term viability of what we experienced when we were raising our children. In fact, there’s some irony in my drawing attention to the design excellence of the neighborhood in which we lived. In May 2024, Halifax’s municipal council approved zoning changes that now allows for the destruction of much of what I describe below.
With this caveat in mind, I’d like to show you what the people shaping Halifax over 100 years ago created in terms of an exceptional mixed-use, human-scale urban neighborhood. During the time Christine and I lived in the neighborhood with our children, it was a middle-class community benefiting from sound judgment in the past.
Features of Good Neighborhood Design
The features listed below have played a crucial role in making the neighborhood work so well, and in the rest of this article I’ll touch on each one.
If you’re interested in the underlying urban design principles I describe here, check out the Michigan Association of Planning’s document titled Pedestrian Scale Design and the Public Realm.
Shared Commercial District Between Neighborhoods
I’ve highlighted the neighborhood where we raised our children on the map below. On the north side, it shares a commercial district with an adjacent neighborhood built about the same time. In this common commercial district, my family and I could find—among other things—groceries, camping equipment, coffee shops, hardware, automotive supplies, restaurants, bars, rock climbing, eyeglasses, tailors, paint, banks, and an old-world place where you can get your shoes repaired. You could walk or bike to all these places.
Tightly Coupled Relationship Between Life in Buildings and on the Street
These neighborhoods were rooted in the relationship between life on the street and life in the buildings themselves. It’s psychological but not abstract. When out walking, I sensed the potential for life behind a window, on a porch, or on the other side of a front door. In this way, I felt a connection to the buildings I walked by.
When in our house, I was aware of periodic activity on the sidewalk and street, which sat a few feet from the front door as shown below.
It’s not that I was constantly disrupted, but I knew the public realm was a short distance away. The neighborhood was alive in the sense that I was aware of life on the street and sidewalk.
Tree Canopies
When I left our home, one of the first things I noticed were the trees that lined the streets. I’d walk beneath towering maples and elms that produced a beautiful canopy. These street trees filtered the air and shade homes in the warmer months.
That these trees brought me happiness is supported by recent Australian research conducted at the University of Wollongong. The study discovered that individuals living in neighborhoods with a higher concentration of tree canopy tend to have better mental and general health. A study published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers found that street trees have a positive impact on traffic, reducing noise and improving pedestrian safety.
Varied Lot and House Sizes
Living within walking distance of shops, restaurants, and services means you need a well-designed, compact environment that provides critical mass to give these local businesses sufficient numbers of customers.
Most houses in this neighborhood have lots that are roughly 30 feet by 100 feet in size. This is an ideal dimension that balances the need for compactness with the desire for one’s own space. This said, the neighborhood has a variety of lot sizes, as shown below. The lot that is outlined in red on the map is a standard lot measuring 30 feet by 100 feet.
Lot sizes vary to accommodate homes of different sizes. Below are homes sitting within a block of one another that contribute to a diverse housing mix.
Diverse Housing Mix
Diversity comes in other forms as well. The neighborhood includes a mixture of housing types, namely single-family, duplexes, townhouses, and apartments. This mix is another key element of a compact, pedestrian-oriented environment that provides local businesses with sufficient numbers of customers arriving by foot or bike.
Small Side Yards and Parking in the Rear
Halifax’s early 20th-century city builders accommodated the automobile by making two simple, yet key decisions. First, they created side yards that were little more than the width of an automobile. Second, they built garages against the rear lot line that residents could access from the street via a driveway through the side yard. This gives people two options in terms of where to put cars: park them on the side of the house in the driveway or park them in the rear.
What this means for me is that as I walk down the street, I pass houses whose frontage is devoted to human activity rather than the storage of lifeless vehicles. This is perhaps the single most important attribute of the human scale. Garage doors that dominate the front façade of houses kill walkability.
Street Wall Filled with Human Activity or the Potential for Life
The shallow setback of the houses and minimal distance between homes create street walls filled with life or the potential for life. These street walls, combined with the relatively narrow width of neighborhood streets, work together to create a sense of enclosure, creating what are essentially outdoor rooms that provide space for living. As humans, we find these places psychologically comforting. Many of us travel across the Atlantic to experience this feeling in European cities and towns.
Private Space in the Rear
I highly value living in a walkable city, but I also want my private space. Halifax’s city builders addressed both desires. Rather than waste space on large side and front yards, they minimized the size of both, which allowed them to create larger backyards than they could have otherwise on small, 3000-square-foot lots.
As homeowners, Christine and I had a backyard where we could toss a ball with our children and have a pleasant garden. It was big enough without requiring much maintenance. The front of the house consisted of a porch and a small front yard measuring 10’ x 7’ in which we planted periwinkle, sweet william, and a few boxwood bushes. It took little effort to maintain, and it contributed to an attractive public realm. This made walking past the house more pleasant for others.
The variety of lot sizes, house sizes, and housing types in these neighborhoods also provided the opportunity for families with different income levels to live in the same neighborhood and walk to the same schools. To give you a sense of the number of children in the city at the time we raised our kids, there were six public and two private schools near the two adjacent neighborhoods I’m describing here. Most every kid I knew in the neighborhood walked to elementary school, junior high, and high school.
A School That Children Can Walk To
For years, a big part of our lives as parents had been the elementary school in the center of our neighborhood. During that time, 70% of the children walked to school. Most who didn’t walk came from outside the neighborhood.
Our boys began walking to school on their own in grade 3. Our daughter did the same in grade 4. Parents of younger children would socialize in the school playground or park in front of the school. Often, these interactions led to the formation of friendships that would not have taken root if parents hadn’t been mingling about day after day.
Having grown up in suburbia, I saw the differences between how my childhood friends grew up versus how our children and their friends experienced life outside the home. In Halifax, I never knew a kid in our children’s peer groups who pined away to live in the suburbs. The middle-class kids we knew enjoyed city living. They valued the freedom they had to walk everywhere they typically wanted to go without relying on a ride from a parent.
Coda: A Masterclass Worthy of Replication
We raised our children in what was at the time one of the most viable middle-class urban neighborhoods in North America. As I mentioned, it was designed during a brief period when neighborhoods were built with the automobile in mind, yet they were still compact and pedestrian-oriented.
America’s challenge to build these kinds of places today is neither an inevitable outcome of consumer preference nor the automobile’s existence. The fact is, in 1938, the federal government created regulations that had the effect of banning the creation of walkable, human-scale neighborhoods. Canada adopted similar policies which produced similar outcomes that mandate auto-dependency.
Today in Halifax, municipal policymakers ignore the lessons offered by the neighborhood I’ve described, as they’re committed to deeply flawed ideas regarding the benefits of mass immigration. Their focus is on expanding suburban auto-dependence and erecting urban high-rises as fast as possible. The relevance of the human scale to quality of life is ignored.
In the United States, there’s more reason for optimism both in cities and suburbia. Committed residents in a variety of American cities have worked hard to improve and preserve neighborhoods. Competent and engaged municipal governance is an important part of any success story here. Examples include Columbus Ohio’s German Village, Providence Rhode Island’s Federal Hill, Portland Maine’s Munjoy Hill, and Philadelphia’s Queen Village. All these places share many of the same qualities as the neighborhood our children grew up in.
Looking at suburban municipalities in America, we find a handful taking steps, partially or in whole, to overcome the rule of perpetual urban sprawl. Places like Tigard, OR, and Dublin, OH, for example, have enacted regulatory reform leading to the creation of human-scale development.
Gaithersburg, MD, is the most prominent suburban example because they’ve been delivering human-scale development for over three decades. They’ve completed projects that are home to thousands of people in places like Crown Downtown, Kentlands, Lakelands, Spectrum, and Watkins Mill Town Center.
I hope that the list of American municipalities embracing change grows in both suburban and urban contexts. The choice of where to live shouldn’t be between auto-dependency on the one hand and over-crowded cities on the other.
Civic leaders can help foster change by having new conversations with communities. A great deal is known about the social, economic, environmental, and health-oriented benefits that the human scale offers. We should talk about these benefits to help make sense of how well-designed walkable communities can form the basis of a life well lived.
Change depends on a municipal government realizing four specific achievements to overcome the rule of perpetual urban sprawl. The steps are not abstract. It’s been done, and municipalities can replicate success with informed, committed political leadership. Our children thrived living at the human scale, and I suspect others would as well if it were available to them. Today, the options for such a life are limited in number. It’d be wonderful to see that change.
