Support Healthy Growth In America's Cities and Suburbs

Mixed developments are legally prohibited in many areas despite being a highly effective form of development that produces places where people want to live. Instead, Americans have been forced to deal with waves of identical suburban developments that strictly separate the three main areas of human life - home, work, and commerce. Although building contractors adore this model for how easily it lets them build new developments, the final product of suburbia is unsustainable, unhealthy, and undesirable compared to the classic neighborhoods of old.  The problems of modern suburban developments(and some potential solutions) include, but are not limited to:

American suburbia being unwalkable, which creates problems for children, who can't spontaneously play with their friends, since it's impossible for them to walk to their friend's houses; teenagers, who require a car the instant they turn 16 if their parents don't want to keep chauffeuring them everywhere, and who are more prone to committing suicide in America's suburbs than in classic rural and urban areas; and the elderly, who are unable to drive cars, and are thus completely helpless if they want to live independently in the suburbs. Biking from place to place is similarly difficult, but for shortness' sake I will only discuss problems with walking.

Winding dead-end roads designed to prevent people from ever having a car on their street that's not from their neighborhood - and to disguise the rows of identical houses erected in a rush to build entire new sections of suburbia - make navigation difficult enough in a car, and make walking from house to house nearly impossible. Walking to shop or to work is often completely impossible, since the workplaces and stores are often too far away to walk to. Even if someone did want to try to walk, many suburbs skimp on sidewalks, forcing pedestrians to risk walking in the road or trudging in whatever weeds and garbage are on the side of the road. Instead, most people have to drive a car, which costs them money as they're forced to keep the car(or two, or three depending on how many working adults and how many teenagers are in the family) well-fueled and maintained.

The walkability issue is easily addressed: Ensure that virtually every road has a sidewalk(and preferably a bike lane), have roads connected in a grid system to allow people to make shorter trips and avoid congestion on certain streets(bearing in mind that grid systems don't necessarily have to be strictly rectangular arrangements of streets; curves are allowed, the main idea is to make sure all roads are highly connected with all other roads), and put homes, stores, and workplaces nearer to each other. Streets should be narrower to make it easier for pedestrians and bikes to get across safely and to discourage cars from speeding. Traffic quieting methods such as planting trees on the side of the road are also a good idea to encourage safe driving, which benefits cars, cyclists, and pedestrians equally.  Remember, cities and towns are for people, not cars, and the needs of people to get from point A to point B should be a higher priority than making it easier for cars to go everywhere with perfect ease.

The excessively large houses, seas of asphalt created by huge parking lots and giant roads, and general low density of suburban development wastes a tremendous amount of space for no real gain. In particular, stores are often required to have a minimum amount of parking, and many stores have parking lots so large that most of the spaces go unused unless it's Christmas shopping season. This waste of space would be easily solved by encouraging business to share parking lots and promoting the construction of parking garages. In addition, shifting parking lots so that they are behind the businesses using them would creating a more pleasing street view and encourage people to shop more since it would be much easier to walk to several stores in one area.

The strict segregation of residential, commercial, and industrial areas forces people to drive cars everywhere(and creates the walkabilty problems mentioned earlier), causes even more space to be wasted on new roads, and creates crime problems as entire sections of a town are deserted depending on the time of day. Mixed development means that less space has to be used for wide roads and huge parking lots, and crime is deterred as all areas of a town would have "eyes on the street", so to speak, at any given time. Mixed development would also encourage the development of a true town center, which would spur commerce(in particular, it would encourage the growth of small businesses instead of every suburb having the same pattern of fast food joints and big box retailers) provide a good starting point for mass transit, and make the places people live feel more "real."

As a starting point for making American growth healthy again, these steps, along with the general theme of encouraging mixed growth and more efficient transportation structures, would go a long way towards making American cities and suburbs places where people truly want to live.

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