Americans Drive Less, Creating a Problem

[Alferd Packer]

The reason our cities sprawl is social, not economic or technological. People want to have their own plot of land, and their own green lawn. Do you honestly not understand why it is more efficient to have five hundred people in a single apartment building than to have five hundred suburban houses, each with its own separate utility hookups and its own plot of land?

I would also like to point out that desiring peace and quiet is another reason people leave cities. This is, of course, personal preference, but just one month ago I was living in an high-density residential apartment, surrounded by neighbors. Now I'm in my own detached single-family house, and I could not be happier. You know why? It's quiet. I can't hear my neighbors at all. All I hear at night is the furnace clicking on and off and the occasional car or distant freight train rolling by. I cannot overstate how nice it is to be able to get an uninterrupted night of sleep on a regular basis, and on my schedule.

No more waiting for the asshole next door to stop doing his dishes, or for his braying cunts of guests to go home or go to sleep for the night, because now, if I can hear the asshole next door, he's being loud enough to warrant calling the cops. No, no amount of incentive or cajoling would ever get me back into an apartment; I would actually have to be staring down the barrel of the gun.

Now, it just so happens that North America has enough available land and a pleasant enough climate over the bulk of it that such an arrangement is possible. As has been pointed out, this really isn't the optimum use of land, but I place my own personal happiness and sanity above living the most efficient life possible. I would imagine that a lot of others do, as well, else the suburbs wouldn't be popular.

Finally, I would also point out that not all suburbs are created equal. It is possible to have a suburb of fairly high population density; the town in which I live boasts an average population density of nearly 7,000 per square mile, or 2,500 per square kilometer. Most of that is single-family housing, with a few garden-style apartment complexes. A typical lot size, like mine, is between .13 and .18 acres. At densities like this, commuter rail and bus networks are commercially viable, and downtown is reachable via foot or bike. Of course, these are old suburbs, built up back in the twenties and thirties. Modern suburbs make it almost impossible to do anything in a reasonable amount of time without driving. But, it is at least possible to strike a balance between ultra-high density urban life and hideously wasteful suburban sprawl.

[Stormbringer]

You seem to be blissfully unaware that this makes you guilty of precisely what I accused you of: generalizing about highly built-up urban areas when in fact your argument only pertains to a very specific kind of construction that is not universal or necessary to them.

Except Ray was blathering on about "sky cities" and making comparisons to the extremely densely packed city of Singapore. Do you even realize that the historical proposals for so called "sky cities" involved small, on the order of a half dozen or so, clusters of extremely large (100+ stories) skyscrapers? Or that the cities Ray is using as his model still have far more high rise buildings than most cities in North America would ever find desirable or economical? You seem to equate high rise with the extremes of skyscraper engineering when that's not at all the case.

You seem to have missed the point that the tallest buildings are therefore irrelevant to this discussion, which is about concentration of residential population, not super-expensive vanity buildings which, more often than not, are actually for businesses or civic/national pride rather than residence.

I'm not talking about the "tallest buildings" but that the very fact that the size of the buildings is dictated by what is actually economically and socially viable for a given city. The cities Ray is talking about, and seemingly arguing for as the model, actually have a great deal of buildings that would be excessively large for say Detroit or Indianapolis. What I've been trying to point out is that the environmental, economic, and social benefits all start accruing well before that point. It doesn't take that level of urbanization to have a significant benefit. And that the corollary to that is that over urbanization will in fact impose negatives in terms of excessive cost of living on the population.

At no point does this argument rely on every city being exactly like Singapore in every way; it only requires that they incorporate a much higher population concentration, which can be easily done using apartment buildings that are nowhere near as tall as the gargantuan vanity penis compensators that you're talking about.

And, as I will again point out, I've been arguing that while urban populations are a desirable thing but the model Ray is apparently using is flawed for being overly concerned with achieving population densities like that of Singapore or Hong Kong. But apparently you wish to avoid that point in favor of ranting about what ever red herring you find more convenient.

[Stormbringer]

Nitpick: I'm not sure Chicago, with 5 of the world's 10 tallest buildings, is the best example for your argument.

You make a pretty good point and you're probably right that it isn't the best example to use as it's downtown is very built up. I was thinking more of the Chicago metro area rather than just the city proper, which probably didn't help for clarity or for making a good example.

[matus1976]

You honestly have no clue how ridiculous it is to use one of the most built-up areas in the world as an example of a place where restrictive zoning laws prevent built-up urban construction, do you?

There's nothing ridiculous about it, your implication was that cities do not have zoning laws that effectively restrict building height, which consequently drives people out of cities. New York has essentially been divided up into 'height districts' since the 40's, and coupled with the FAR laws buildings on smaller plots find themselves in entirely uneconomical position to build taller buildings, since they can only use about 1/4 of their lots. A large portion of the buildings in NYC are at or near their FAR allowable heights.

from http://www.greatgridlock.net/NYC/nycadd.html

As a comparison between the two zoning resolutions, the 1916 zoning would have given, if utilized fully, New York City accommodation for a population of 55 million (with a residential FAR of over 20 and a commercial FAR of over 30), whereas the new resolution (1940's - on) cut that figure by 80 percent.

Yeah, artificially reducing the supportable population from 55 million to 11 million I'm sure has absolute NO consequences on urban sprawl!

Of course NYC has zoning laws; I never said it was anarchy. But the zoning laws in urban areas obviously allow a lot of built-up construction

"obvious allow a lot" yeah a 40ft building in Brooklyn is "alot"

[matus1976]

Efficient agriculture - necessary to feed cities - is not compatible with high-density populations.

This is not true. Agricultural output from a standard ground farm compared to a hydroponic farm can be double to quadruple depending on the crop. Aeroponics, which feeds water and nutrients to plants via a fine mist sprayed onto it's roots can quadruple agricultural output yet again. Stacking aeroponic gardens vertically can increase agricultural yeild per land area by orders of magnitude, and the nutrients and waste products from an aeroponic farm can be integrated with other indoor farming like fisheries, which can again produce far more food than ancient fishing techniques. Many people have proposed designs for these 'vertical farms' or skyscraper farms. Utilizing other techniques like intense lighting, day night cycles, higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (which plants like) and genetic crop engineering could increase crop yields still more. Hydroponic lettuce farms produce about 4 times as much lettuce as a typical lettuce farm yet use about 5% of the water.
http://i.treehugger.com/images/2007/10/ ... ection.jpg
http://www.impactlab.com/wp-content/upl ... farm-1.jpg
http://www.verticalfarm.com/images/desi ... 3small.jpg

Of course, in NYC, you can't even put a garden on your roof without special exemptions and bribing a few city officials.

I wish I could park your ass in an airplane and take you flying over the Great Plains of the US so you could see just how much fucking land area is required to feed the US, much less the entire world. I don't think you understand just how much space is required for the food that winds up on your table.

I love flying over the midwest, I take pictures of it every time I do. Those beautiful circular farms as far as the eye can see. Those farms though make about 1/2 of the WORLDS grain supply, and about a 1/3rd of the worlds food supply.

[Alferd Packer]

from http://www.greatgridlock.net/NYC/nycadd.html

As a comparison between the two zoning resolutions, the 1916 zoning would have given, if utilized fully, New York City accommodation for a population of 55 million (with a residential FAR of over 20 and a commercial FAR of over 30), whereas the new resolution (1940's - on) cut that figure by 80 percent.

Yeah, artificially reducing the supportable population from 55 million to 11 million I'm sure has absolute NO consequences on urban sprawl!

Um, the population of New York proper is about 8.3 million, with an average population density of 27,200 persons per square mile. At 55 million people, the population density, on average, would be over 180,000 people per square mile, or 63,000 people per square kilometer. OK, that's a huge logistical challenge with regards to water, food, and sewer, but it's probably doable. But what about in event of some sort of disaster? What happens if there's a break in the supply chain? How long will it take 55 million people to eat every scrap of food in the city? Drink all the stored water? Hell, what happens if the garbage collectors go on strike? Or hey, what about a good ol'-fashioned outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of the flu?

OK, so maybe the last one isn't as likely, but the point would be this: why is cramming 1/6th of the present US population into a few hundred square miles better than "only" cramming 8.3 million people into that same space?

[cosmicalstorm]

I would also like to point out that desiring peace and quiet is another reason people leave cities. This is, of course, personal preference, but just one month ago I was living in an high-density residential apartment, surrounded by neighbors. Now I'm in my own detached single-family house, and I could not be happier. You know why? It's quiet. I can't hear my neighbors at all. All I hear at night is the furnace clicking on and off and the occasional car or distant freight train rolling by. I cannot overstate how nice it is to be able to get an uninterrupted night of sleep on a regular basis, and on my schedule.

No more waiting for the asshole next door to stop doing his dishes, or for his braying cunts of guests to go home or go to sleep for the night, because now, if I can hear the asshole next door, he's being loud enough to warrant calling the cops. No, no amount of incentive or cajoling would ever get me back into an apartment; I would actually have to be staring down the barrel of the gun.

Wow, what kind of apartmentbuilding did you live in?

I've spent my entire life in the big city and I only exceedingly rarely overhear my neighbours, on the rare occasion that it happens it's usually because they are either screaming at the top of their lungs or blasting their music at top volume, and even then it's only a faint sound.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Well, there's always the spoke/hub model, where you have dense clusters of housing around railroad stops on electrified commuter railroads which feed into a tightly concentrated urban area. I favour this with the development of arcologies, actually. A totally centralized and self-contained urban downtown area including all offices and even heavy industry as well as the urban dwelling population, clubs and shops and so on, with little "planned villages" for wealthier people to have more space and privacy arrayed out on the spokes radiating out from the hub that follow the rail lines, designed so that anyone can get to the downtown from their house in 10 minutes of walking and 1 hour on the train at maximum.

[matus1976]

Um, the population of New York proper is about 8.3 million, with an average population density of 27,200 persons per square mile. At 55 million people, the population density, on average, would be over 180,000 people per square mile, or 63,000 people per square kilometer. OK, that's a huge logistical challenge with regards to water, food, and sewer, but it's probably doable. But what about in event of some sort of disaster? What happens if there's a break in the supply chain? How long will it take 55 million people to eat every scrap of food in the city? Drink all the stored water? Hell, what happens if the garbage collectors go on strike? Or hey, what about a good ol'-fashioned outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of the flu?

OK, so maybe the last one isn't as likely, but the point would be this: why is cramming 1/6th of the present US population into a few hundred square miles better than "only" cramming 8.3 million people into that same space?

I doubt the population of NYC would have gone up that high, but even if it did it could sustain it absent the stiflying and dizzying array of regulations. Like I wrote above, I can't even put a garden plot on my roof without a zoning exception. But the point is because of zoning restrictions it is not as high as it should be based on the demand (which is why it is so expensive to live there, it's real estate that is primarily expensive) Your objections about a disaster are applicable to any setting, urban or suburban. In fact those 'sustainable' villages people love to extol the virtues of would be one of the WORST places to live in a disaster. When everyone makes just enough for themselves, the next tornado, hurricane, or flood will sentence everyone living on that sustainable plot to death, since no one else is making more than what is necessary to sustain themselves. I live in rural CT, if some terrible disaster befell us, I would run out of food and water pretty quickly as well. Disasters are overcome with redundancy, not sustainability. The 'vertical' farms I posted about above would be a large step in that direction.

[Alferd Packer]

Wow, what kind of apartmentbuilding did you live in?

I've spent my entire life in the big city and I only exceedingly rarely overhear my neighbours, on the rare occasion that it happens it's usually because they are either screaming at the top of their lungs or blasting their music at top volume, and even then it's only a faint sound.

I dunno, a regular apartment building, I guess. The walls were pretty thin, but that's old construction for you. Newer construction probably has excellent soundproofing, but it's also more expensive. I'd rather pay the extra money towards something that I'll eventually own, a tiny yard for my dog to run around in, the occasional fairweather barbecue, and for the wonderful quiet. These things I cannot obtain living in the city, so I will live in the urban suburbs, happily taking the train to work each day.

[Alferd Packer]

I doubt the population of NYC would have gone up that high, but even if it did it could sustain it absent the stiflying and dizzying array of regulations. Like I wrote above, I can't even put a garden plot on my roof without a zoning exception. But the point is because of zoning restrictions it is not as high as it should be based on the demand (which is why it is so expensive to live there, it's real estate that is primarily expensive) Your objections about a disaster are applicable to any setting, urban or suburban. In fact those 'sustainable' villages people love to extol the virtues of would be one of the WORST places to live in a disaster. When everyone makes just enough for themselves, the next tornado, hurricane, or flood will sentence everyone living on that sustainable plot to death, since no one else is making more than what is necessary to sustain themselves. I live in rural CT, if some terrible disaster befell us, I would run out of food and water pretty quickly as well. Disasters are overcome with redundancy, not sustainability. The 'vertical' farms I posted about above would be a large step in that direction.

The scale of the disaster is drastically reduced, however. If a bad hurricane is bearing down on an area sprinkled with these sustainable villages, it's pretty easy to evacuate the population, because it's (relatively) low--say, on the order of a few hundred thousand.

Compare that to the rogue hurricane bearing down on this Super New York. OK, so 55 million's too much for you. Let's meet in middle of that and the actual figure and say it's 31 million people. That's still 10% of the country's population living in a few hundred square miles. How can you reasonably expect to evacuate 31 million people within the few days' warning you'll get with a hurricane? Now, of course, the odds of major hurricane hitting directly New York are extremely low, but it's certainly not impossible. Even if it only happens once every three hundred years, that's still quite a chance to take with such an enormous population.

You might argue that 8.3 million people is a huge population too, and is not much safer than 31 or 55 million. As you correctly pointed out, redundancy is what is needed to see populations through disasters without high loss of life. And here's the rub: the sprawl is a redundancy. It can absorb, even if only for a few days, the displaced urban population. In the case of New York, there exist massive rail and bus networks that can quickly move the urban population inland and away from the storms, to say nothing of military-led evacuation efforts. The scale of potential loss of human life greatly reduced by 1) the reduced urban population (though still extremely dense!) and 2) the availability of the sprawl and the vast transportation networks, both public and private, that support it. You cram 30-55 million people into the same area, and you more or less have to provide some kind of means to effectively evacuate, feed, and house all of them. The potential for loss of life is simply too great.

[Coyote]

Why should I directly pay for roads and especially highways? I personally do not own a vehicle, yet the taxes being taken off of my meagre pay are supporting the highways...

You do live in a society that benefits from roads and highways; any goods that you buy undoubtedly came from a distant supply point and had to be trucked to your location.

It's the same reason why people who don't have kids still pay taxes for schools: you live in a society where you interact with people who benefit from public education.

[Coyote]

Arguably he will be paying much the same in taxes but instead of simply handing his money over to the government, .... The corporation will have to have an beauracratic infrastructure to deal with paying the required taxes from collected monies to the government.

And of course the cost of shipping things will go up, meaning that "shipping & mail" will be something that the poorest people will be locked out of.

[Coyote]

I would also like to point out that desiring peace and quiet is another reason people leave cities. ...

No more waiting for the asshole next door to stop doing his dishes, or for his braying cunts of guests to go home or go to sleep for the night, because now, if I can hear the asshole next door, he's being loud enough to warrant calling the cops. No, no amount of incentive or cajoling would ever get me back into an apartment...

Of course, that's piss-poor building standards, really. Most "apartment complexes" in the West (I don't know where you are) are built more or less to the same standards of housing; some two-by fours with a bit of insulation and some drywall. There's more load-bearing capacity built in for the second floor, but really, apartments are flimsy, IMO.

Brick or even mould-poured concrete like I lived in in Israel tends to provide a sterner barrier against ambient noise.

[Ekiqa]

I said I did not want to DIRECTLY pay for roads.

As I pointed out with examples, I do not mind paying the cost indirectly, through something I use, such as transit, or a taxi, or the food I eat.

Except that you are not paying part of the cost when you buy those things; you are benefiting from the road system when you buy those things, because those things are effectively subsidized by the road system.

How am I not paying part of the cost? There is always a shipping cost built in to things. As it is, the only thing subsidized right now, is the road system. How would you like it if the 407 was de-tolled, and the maintainence costs added to your income taxes? It costs $100 million a year for each of its first seven years.
Hell, the only portion of the transportation industry that is NOT subsidized is the railways, which have to support the trucking industry through gas taxes.

The delivery companies can and always have passed on the costs to the consumer. I have no problem with that, because I am USING the road system that way. I do NOT want to pay for roads through income taxes, property taxes, and any other tax, other than gas taxes.

I can't believe I have to explain this, but the development of transportation infrastructure has influenced society in incalculable ways. You have never tried living in the sort of society that never developed a modern transportation infrastructure.

Of course it has influenced society. Where the fuck did that come from?

[Stark]

Out of interest, does anyone know where to find population-density maps of American cities? I often hear Americans talk about 'cities' and 'towns' and 'suburbs', but I'm not sure they use these words in the same way I would, coming from much less urbanised countries. For example, the 'city' part of Brisbane is barely a few kilometers wide, surrounded on all sides by 40-60km of suburbs arranged in waves of density and aligned around a rail and highway system, some of which is in nearby shires. I'm curious to see how these types of space are arranged in American cities, but you can't really tell from looking at regular maps or satellite images.

[Kanastrous]

This is by county rather than city, but I think you can get the idea...



...and one of the Los Angeles area.

[Stark]

Coloured graphs without keys or scales are.... useful? Just tell me where you got them so I can do actual research.

[Shinova]

Of course, that's piss-poor building standards, really. Most "apartment complexes" in the West (I don't know where you are) are built more or less to the same standards of housing; some two-by fours with a bit of insulation and some drywall. There's more load-bearing capacity built in for the second floor, but really, apartments are flimsy, IMO.

Brick or even mould-poured concrete like I lived in in Israel tends to provide a sterner barrier against ambient noise.

I've been in a high-rise apartment at New York City for a while and while I don't know how many or where my neighbors were, I could barely hear the city noise outside. So construction standards definetly plays into the quality of the apartment as a sanctuary.

[Broomstick]

Efficient agriculture - necessary to feed cities - is not compatible with high-density populations.

This is not true. Agricultural output from a standard ground farm compared to a hydroponic farm can be double to quadruple depending on the crop. Aeroponics, which feeds water and nutrients to plants via a fine mist sprayed onto it's roots can quadruple agricultural output yet again. Stacking aeroponic gardens vertically can increase agricultural yeild per land area by orders of magnitude, and the nutrients and waste products from an aeroponic farm can be integrated with other indoor farming like fisheries, which can again produce far more food than ancient fishing techniques. Many people have proposed designs for these 'vertical farms' or skyscraper farms. Utilizing other techniques like intense lighting, day night cycles, higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (which plants like) and genetic crop engineering could increase crop yields still more.

I'd have a little more confidence in that technology if the world had more experience in it. While what you propose is more efficient in one sense - production of food per unit of area or volume - there are other serious issues involved. Vertical farms with environmental controls cost more in building and energy resources than ground farms do, especially on initial construction/start up. After all, ground farmers do not have to pay for lighting, heating, cooling, waste removal for crops (animals being a different matter), and in many areas do not routinely irrigate (my area, northern Indiana, relies on natural precipitation for crops, irrigation is largely absent). The resource and energy costs of vertical/indoor farms such as you suggest must be taken into account.

There are also issues with fish farming, such as pollution, contamination, and alteration of final product. For example, farmed salmon is not the same as wild salmon, it looks different, tastes different, and is nutritionally different. There are problems with food contamination of any food animal, but with fish you can also get environmental contamination due to chemicals leaching into the water supply And, again, since fish farms are artificial environments there is a resource and energy cost to setting up and maintaining them.

Hydroponic lettuce farms produce about 4 times as much lettuce as a typical lettuce farm yet use about 5% of the water.

And hydroponic carrots tend to look like orange spaghetti - yes, lettuce does well as a hydroponic crop but not all crops do so. I am entirely in favor of utilizing such technologies where is makes sense but I don't think the world is going to be getting a large percentage of food from hyro/aeroponics or "vertical farms" any time soon.

If you're farming in a marginal water area then yes, raising four times the lettuce on 5% of the water becomes important. If you live in Indiana where most years nature supplies more than enough water for your crops it doesn't matter nearly as much. Water doesn't cost the farmer anything around here (although there are genuine concerns about contaminating water run off). We also have long summer days, so lighting isn't an issue, either, and farmers needn't pay for that, or for pumps/fans to circulate fresh air, nor for the materials and labor to support all that.

Of course, in NYC, you can't even put a garden on your roof without special exemptions and bribing a few city officials.

Some of that has to due with the fact that older buildings were never designed to hold gardens on their roofs. There is genuine concern about the load imposed on the roof structure by such gardens. If people were allowed to plant miniature forests on their roofs and those roofs subsequently collapsed there would be hell to pay.

Not all regulation is by "social tyrants" or the like. Another example is in Chicago, that city of skyscrapers - there IS a height limit downtown. You can get an exception (and I can think of a couple dozen buildings where exceptions were obtained) but the regulation isn't a matter of "social tyrants", busy-bodies, or even a deliberate plan to reduce the population density. It's because if you want to build a 100 story building the city wants assurance that you will actually finish building it because half-finished skyscraper is an eyesore, potentially unsafe, and an expensive pain in the ass to tear down.

I love flying over the midwest, I take pictures of it every time I do. Those beautiful circular farms as far as the eye can see. Those farms though make about 1/2 of the WORLDS grain supply, and about a 1/3rd of the worlds food supply.

The circular farms are where irrigation is used - out in my area the farms are squares because natural rainfall is usually sufficient. The thing is, even with those massive areas of farmland we are NOT utilizing all potential cropland to the fullest (which is another reason why I question the need for "vertical farms" - the current food supply problems are usually more of transportation than production origin.)

[Broomstick]

Coloured graphs without keys or scales are.... useful? Just tell me where you got them so I can do actual research.

I would suggest starting with the United States Census Bureau. The page indicated does have link to various maps, among other things. There's an awful lot there, much more than you probably want, but that would be the authority for information on US population.

[ray245]

Except Ray was blathering on about "sky cities" and making comparisons to the extremely densely packed city of Singapore. Do you even realize that the historical proposals for so called "sky cities" involved small, on the order of a half dozen or so, clusters of extremely large (100+ stories) skyscrapers? Or that the cities Ray is using as his model still have far more high rise buildings than most cities in North America would ever find desirable or economical? You seem to equate high rise with the extremes of skyscraper engineering when that's not at all the case.

I did not compare Singapore to the sky cities.

[Ekiqa]

Arguably he will be paying much the same in taxes but instead of simply handing his money over to the government, .... The corporation will have to have an beauracratic infrastructure to deal with paying the required taxes from collected monies to the government.

And of course the cost of shipping things will go up, meaning that "shipping & mail" will be something that the poorest people will be locked out of.

Are the people in Europe screaming because costs of shipping and mail is so high that none but the richest can afford?

They have gas taxes 20 TIMES the averages US gas tax. Yet they seem to get along fine.

[Coyote]

Are the people in Europe screaming because costs of shipping and mail is so high that none but the richest can afford?

They have gas taxes 20 TIMES the averages US gas tax. Yet they seem to get along fine.

Europe has higher taxes all over, but they seem to get more from it-- ie, Americans have to split their money into things like health care, etc.

Although my assertion is a bit of a reach.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

The circular farms are where irrigation is used - out in my area the farms are squares because natural rainfall is usually sufficient. The thing is, even with those massive areas of farmland we are NOT utilizing all potential cropland to the fullest (which is another reason why I question the need for "vertical farms" - the current food supply problems are usually more of transportation than production origin.)

I had understood that mentioning vertical farms was in direct response to your statement that efficient agriculture was incompatible with high population densities. As you pointed out, the main issue is transportation/distribution issues. Current low to mid density development does allow in principal for people to grow a decent proportion of their own food on their land (at least it would if the McMansions popular here over the last few years didn't waste most of the lot space), but in practice few people use it. My wife and I grow a number of veggies on a portion of our little 3600 square foot lot, but it represents only a tiny fraction of our overall food expenditure (though we have plans to expand). I suspect most here grow less.

So most of the food is trucked into relatively centralized locations (major and minor grocery stores), and then redistributed back through the 80+ square miles of the city and 250-300 square miles of undeveloped land served by the city. Simply compacting the population of the nominally "urban" zoned areas (here defined as over 2 dwelling units per acre) into higher concentrations along the major circulation paths would significantly decrease the amount of driving needed to get food to all of those suburban homes. It would also reduce the population on the remaining portions of the city's land, increasing available arable land adjacent to the urban core.

Beyond simply increasing population density, the other zoning issue that needs to be addressed is the tendency towards extreme separation of uses. While I suppose it makes sense to cluster most of the industrial development along certain of the city's peripheries, away from homes, it also isn't convenient to have a square mile of nothing but suburban homes, with only a school or park allowed within, and a shopping center at the corner of the square mile. The current layout makes driving mandatory, since buses don't weave through enough of the shopping areas on a regular enough schedule to make it convenient for most residents. Walking isn't too appealing either, since there's not much to see but lawns and dull houses, with a guaranteed minimum mile walk between potential sites of interest, and most of those sites not developed enough to support any sort of social life.

Just in the last few years it has occurred to the city planners to encourage multi-use pedestrian friendly development, at least in the city core and certain other nodes. Unfortunately, go ahead for most of the development, aside from senior housing, has waited until the economic downturn has driven construction to a standstill, while in the interim thousands of acres of McMansions have been built and abandoned, because the existing laws favored that sort of development, and land on the fringe of the city is relatively cheap.