I live in as suburban of an area as you can imagine with master planned communities and what not. I can still walk to 3 grocery stores, multiple bars, fast food restaurants, fast casual restaurants, coffee shops, medical offices, convenience stores, and loads of other services in under 15 minutes. The suburbs built in the 90s and 2000s are not the dystopia people make them out to be.
My neighborhood was built in the late 90s. Single family home small town suburbia. I can walk to just about anything I need in daily life. Within 10 minutes walk there are 2 supermarkets, movies, many restaurants, variety of services, library, parks, theaters, doctors, and more.
If we count cycling, I can bike to 99% of what I could need in life. (Problem in practice is lack of safe bike parking but that's not a distance problem.)
Most places I've lived in the US in my adult life have been similar. The exception was once when I lived in a very rural area and had to drive 10 minutes to the nearest supermarket.
I don't understand these threads that talk about suburbs where you have to drive an hour to the nearest convenience store. I'm skeptical that such places exist. Where are they?
They're kind of all over the place. It seems to me non-walkable suburbs are the default from the places I've lived and visited. Unless you're either living near the town square of a small town or adjacent to the downtown area of a big city it's probably not really walkable.
An hour to a store is probably hyperbole for most places, but I definitely have friends where it's like 5+ minutes to drive from the middle to the edge of the neighborhood of only single family houses, and then you're just on a street in nearly the middle of nowhere with no shops right outside just other neighborhoods full of houses.
The claim at the top of the thread was "essentials being a 30-45m drive away".
I clicked on each of those links and asked for directions to food shops and in every case google maps gave me a route less than 10 minutes drive.
So I remain unconvinced that suburbs with "essentials being a 30-45m drive away" are somehow a common thing. You need to go pretty far off into the boonies for that to be the case but then it is no longer a suburb.
Ah, 30-45m drive, yeah. A lot of these places will still be within 15min or so to a lot of amenities, probably 20min most to most things. There are still some that are pretty way out there, easily 20+ minutes to most real amenities. A couple I can think of close by:
But a 10 minute walk to most of those amenities is also pretty uncommon. You look up walking directions for most of those places? I'll be amazed if there's a real grocery store within a 10 minute walk.
Two trains of thought; I was reacting to the OP line of "People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away", which I maintain is a nearly impossible scenario.
(Because everyone needs food and other essentials, so if you have "an endless desert of houses" somewhere, that's a lot of people, so inevitably very soon there will be stores nearby.)
The other point is whether you can walk to them in 10min (or 15min as lotsoweiners above said). I don't claim you can always walk to shops in 10min from suburban houses, it is easy to find cases where it's further away (but far far far closer than "30-45m drive away").
But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them. The idea (which often comes up in these topics on HN) that it is impossible to walk to stores/restaurants in the US outside of Manhattan & SF, is nonsense. If you like to walk (I do) just pick a suitable spot.
A few examples where I've lived: next to Pruneyard in Campbell, a bit further south in San Jose around Cambrian, and in Cupertino not far from DeAnza College. In all of these it was easy to walk to a supermarket in 10min. All of these are in Silicon Valley, where the story goes you can't walk anywhere but I was easily walking to stores.
I agree, I totally missed your comment was related to the 30+min concept.
> But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them
I agree, you can find some housing stock like that in most housing markets. It's less rare than finding a unicorn, I agree. But they're also often not a large chunk of the overall housing market.
It sounds like all those experiences are in Southern California. That's pretty dense compared to a lot of the places I've lived, even though I wouldn't call it extremely dense. It's also a place that while still having a lot of notable NIMBY stuff going on it tends to be way more amenable to pedestrian and bike infrastructure and city design. Weather also leads to more and more people willing to be outside. You should expand your study to other areas, not every place in the US is Southern California.
Look around the rest of North Texas for a good example. You can find pockets where it's decently walkable. Plano and Richardson and some parts of Dallas can be pretty bikeable. But Frisco? Little Elm? Arlington (outside the college campus)? Aledo? You can live at the edge of a large neighborhood and still have it be walkable/bikeable. But then there's still the rest of the neighborhood where it's going to take a while to walk to the edge.
Look at Kansas City, KS [0]. You'll find tons of neighborhoods like this. Not exactly walkable, like much of the metro area. Once again, sure, pick a house at the edge of this neighborhood and it's okay, but that's not the majority of the housing stock. Once again, sure, you'll find some neighborhood around that is relatively bikeable, but percentage of hosing stock it's pretty rare. Not unicorn rare, but still pretty limiting on the housing market. Can you find houses that are walkable? Sure. Is it in your budget? Does it meet your other needs? Is it close to your work? Are the schools still pretty OK?
Can you find some place walkable and bikeable in practically any decently sized metro area in the US? Sure. It's it even a quarter of the overall suburban housing stock in that metro? Probably not!
> You should expand your study to other areas, not every place in the US is Southern California.
(Silicon Valley is NorCal but still)
I've also lived in Pittsburgh, did not own a car or a bike just walked everywhere. And northern New Jersey, was also walking distance to shops and restaurants.
The one and only place I've lived in the US where walking to shops was not practical was out in the countryside in northwestern NJ. That's a pretty rural area so needed the car, closest supermarket was a 5 minute drive.
Also have family in Phoenix, have lived there for decades and never had a drivers license. Supermarket is 1.5 blocks away. The heat can be rough, but in distance it is very near.
Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
Pittsburgh (especially the actual city proper) is well above average in walkabiliy compared to the rest of the country. Also a good bit of New England, especially the older towns.
> Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
I mean yeah, that goes along with what I'm saying. If you just ignore 85+% of the housing stock in a lot of metros it's all walkable! Just limit yourself to just the most walkable places in the country and you'll only find it walkable. Look up the walk scores of the areas I'm talking about.
You even acknowledged a lot of the areas I shared earlier would be a 10 minute drive to get to a grocery store. How fast do you walk? 40+mph?
It shouldn't be so hard to find affordable homes without massive tradeoffs that are walkable/bikeable. And by find I don't mean see it on Google Maps, I mean actually afford it and have it be available when you're ready to move and not have other massive tradeoffs.
If you actually want walkable, big metro areas are overrated. Look for small towns, that's where walkability rules. The town is small, so everything is near.
Where I live now, most of the town is in a 1 mile radius. And the bulk of it is in a 0.3 mile radius. When everything is small and near, everything is walkable.
As I mentioned, in a 10 minute walk I can reach two supermarkets, one big box store, countless restaurants, several pharmacies, a few bars, stores of all kinds (hardware, clothing, etc), post office, library, theater, movie theater, soccer, tennis and basketball courts and plenty more.
I say if you live in a place where you can't walk anywhere, that's by choice. Tons of walkable places exist all over the US.
Where in suburbs are you a 10 minute walk of all that? Even living in a major metro city center it's a push to get to all that in 10 minutes. A 10 minute walk is like 1/3 mile at most. An hour drive is unlikely but 20-30 minutes is no exaggeration with traffic. 90% of suburbs in Atlanta are like this, with zero traffic it could be a 5-10 minute drive to the closest shopping center.
Not all are but most are. I too live in a single family zone surrounded by commercial zones in walking distance and it’s fantastic! But most of my city and its surroundings are not like this and you would need to drive to get anywhere. It’s really an almost perfect spot that I’ve found.
It really depends what region of the USA you are in. The south? Ya, things are hard, walkability was never emphasized because of harsh weather. The west coast or northeast will be more reasonable, the intermountain west is more hit or miss.
In Washington, a half million dollar home is generally becoming a demo lot for property builders, if you don't you just bought a half mil crack house... What state are you in?
A lot of the country has houses for less than $200k. I'm not the person you are replying to, but in my home state of Wisconsin it's very common.
I myself live in a fairly high COL city (Denver), and even here things aren't as dire as what you are describing. I think your area (Seattle I'm guessing?) is rather an outlier.
Even Spokane is expensive these days, but you could get a house for $150k in 2010 at least. The west in general has higher housing costs, it applies to Idaho and Utah as well, and especially western Montana. Things don’t get cheap until you hit eastern Montana or New Mexico.
Lots of places in the US have walkable neighborhods. You just have to live in a place that was developed before WW2 and car ownership wasn't assumed.