My parents moved recently to a new home in a suburb on the outskirts of a major city. As empty nesters, they wanted a slightly smaller place, nice and airy, with some modern conveniences like central air. The whole subdivision is new construction, so they had quite a few choices, and they ended up in a pleasant, cozy three-bedroom unit with off-street parking.
The neighborhood sits on the side of a gentle hill, so it has some nice views. A short walking distance from their place, there is a small public park, maybe half an acre in size, where you can sit to read a book or walk your dog. The place has a couple of slides, a few swings, and a small jungle gym. It is not exactly pretty or all that pleasant (concrete benches, small trees), but it is always lively—a place that both my parents and I always like to spend some time around.
There are a couple of things that make this park a busy place. Right next to it, there is a small shopping area. It has a decently sized—but not large—supermarket from a major chain, with good, affordable food. Right by it, there are a few shops (a slightly upscale butcher, a sushi place, a bakery), as well as a few small stores (a spa, a newsstand, a small hardware store). Facing the terrace, there is a small diner and an ice cream shop, both with some outdoor seating. Just up the street from the square, past the shops, there is a neighborhood primary school.
Every day, when kids come out of school, you see a stream of parents walking down to the square and running errands, getting some groceries, or picking up takeout. The park is busy with kids and families, or just some retired couples like my parents taking a stroll. You see folks sitting on a terrace, chatting with other parents, having a coffee while their children play. The newsstand is small but does brisk business, as there is always foot traffic around. As people come by every day, the bakery always has fresh pastries and bread—not fancy, but with the crisp taste of something that just came out of the oven.
The best part is that almost no one drives. The supermarket has a parking garage below it, taking advantage of being on a hillside, but it is fairly small, and it is not free; if you drive, you must pay a few bucks for the privilege. The streets, despite being newly built, have a lot more room for pedestrians than cars, and they are themselves fairly narrow. Across the street, at a roundabout, there is a bus stop served by three lines, all with frequent service (20-minute headways). At the bottom of the hill, less than a 10-minute walk away, there is a commuter rail line that can take you downtown in 25 minutes. Quite a few folks stop by the square to pick up dinner on the way back from work. This is a place built for foot traffic, consciously designed for people to spend some time together outside their cars.
Now, this kind of space requires some density. The park is surrounded by a mix of four-floor apartment buildings, with four units per floor, and rowhouses. The buildings are single-stair, with one small elevator shared by all units, and a garage underground. They end up holding around 30 units per acre, with some buildings sharing a private courtyard with a nice swimming pool. The rowhouses are dense but quite large—maybe 10–15 units per acre, with small backyards.
It is not a cheap neighborhood, as both the apartments and houses tend to be large, and they are very close to a train station. But this is not a dense, cramped neighborhood in a city; it is a new subdivision, built from the ground up. It is just that its planners consciously decided to make it walkable, with some sense of a neighborhood.
Now, this nice little suburb has two main problems. The first one is that it happens to be 10 miles out of Barcelona, Spain, so we cannot all move there. The second one is that pretty much all of it would be wildly illegal not just in Connecticut, but in most of the United States, as it runs counter to about every single zoning and land use practice here.
For starters: a small supermarket, with a small parking garage. Mandatory parking minimums would force any developer here to surround the store with at least a couple of acres of parking spaces. Second, a grocery store, right in the middle of a neighborhood. Mixed-use zoning is a rarity in Connecticut. Third, a school, in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Connecticut, for some insane reason, has established that an elementary school needs a ten-acre lot minimum, plus an additional acre for every 100 students. The cute little school right next to the park would end up being much further away. Fourth, an outdoor food service area where you can get alcohol this close to a school and right next to housing on a public park, is so outside anything we have in our zoning codes as to be considered science fiction. Fifth, rowhouses and multifamily buildings are essentially impossible to build without copious amounts of lawyering anywhere in our state, so the housing is also out of the question.
None — absolutely none — of these rules, regulations, or prohibitions make much sense by themselves. Combined, they make putting together a small, common space with foot traffic, room for the kids to run around, groceries, and a place to eat and have coffee completely out of reach. As a result, every time we build new housing developments in Connecticut, we end up with these strange, isolated large apartment buildings (“luxury” condos, sometimes) surrounded by parking lots, far from everywhere, in neighborhoods that feel more like a place to warehouse cars and people than a place to live in.
Building decent, welcoming, pleasant neighborhoods is not hard. The people that planned this subdivision were not visionaries or innovators; they just followed the very traditional, tried-and-true idea of having places where people want to go close to each other, and some room to be social and walk around. New England might not be as sunny as Barcelona, but even here we brave the outdoors for winter festivals with little trouble. In the rare towns and cities where neighborhoods like this still remain, they are really popular.
To build these kinds of places, however, we need to make them legal again: abolishing parking minimums, legalizing single-stair buildings, smaller elevators, and denser housing, allowing mixed-use areas and more reasonably sized schools. Nothing in this list cost money, but together will really help us building much nicer places to live.
What are we waiting for?