My hope is that if not Gen Z then the following generation will push for American cities to get their act together and become better for people to live in. It is going to take a lot of political will to make it work as the entrenched older generations want things to stay the same as always and/or cannot envision a different way of living. A walkable city with car free zones seems like a fantasy and that is a real shame.
It is truly shocking how much damage the car has done to our cities and lives. Here in the Twin Cities, we have three enormous concrete canyons completely dividing up the city[1], destroying any chance at walkability or density for miles. All for the sake of people who don't even live in the cities to drive 30 minutes in their personal luxury steel cages from their suburban mansions to spend 30 hours a week here and then buzz off again. We lose so much to cater to the surburbanites and gain so little.
We have a real opportunity to fix this by removing one of them[2], but we're too terrified of change to improve our own lives. So the concrete canyon called I-94 will remain, poisoning the heart of our cities, for at least another four generations. Sigh.
Not to mention the opposition of public transportation here. People are already up in arms about the light rail expansion cost, plus the people angry about losing parking on Hennepin Ave for the proposed 24 hr bus lane.
I grew up there. The public transit was always worthless for anyone who wanted to do something more than go to work downtown. It is no wonder most people oppose anything: so many years of bad service makes even good ideas look like throwing more good money after bad (and like most cities they have plenty of bad ideas they are funding as well)
It’s difficult on a few levels I suspect, because genz will be fighting the previous generation and maybe the one before it too, all the homeowners that will fight tooth and nail for their investments to remain (plus any genz that benefits from the status quo, the inheritors of landlords)
A lot of what we consider "elite" US cities were losing population well into the 1990s. While I don't think the WFH trend is as widespread as people in some bubbles think it is, it's probably an open question whether the latest young college-educated cohort will move into cities for a while like some of their predecessors did.
Young people want things to do. I'm right on the divide between Millenials and Gen Z (the MillenialZ generation, if you'll forgive my poor portmanteau skills) and many college students I knew during covid have done one of the following:
- secured a remote job and settled down in their college city
- as a remote worker, followed a significant other or close friend to a city where they have to work in person
- found a hybrid role that allows some in-person work in a city
I think the "work remotely, from
your college city" trend is a positive one. I attended college in a small city with a serious brain drain problem (aside from medical folks) and it's nice to see more and more classmates move back to that city as the brain drain reverses.
Certainly the fact that I would have needed to commute to a job that was an hour outside the nearest major city (where I went undergrad) influenced the fact that I just went to live near my office when I graduated grad school. It was mostly the same with my classmates who also worked way out in the burbs/exurbs.
If the commute weren't a factor, I'd probably have at least considered living in the city--at least while I was still renting. (Of course, urban prices weren't nearly as relatively high as they are today.)
>Still, I'd guess you'd be right that it would be enormously expensive and difficult to bring this back.
I've moved into and out of downtown Boston over the past 20+ years, and it's been interesting to see this trend actually happen. In the neighborhoods I've lived in, there are usually 1-2 smaller markets that offer convenience at a price, and then a more "traditional" grocery store within 5-10 minutes of walking.
Over the years, a few new grocery stores have been built in the urban core, and they've actually been of the "larger traditional" variety. In most cases, they're part and parcel of new development, so the space, loading, and (reduced) parking requirements can be accommodated as part of the build.
The key is that the stores are being built concurrently with more housing being developed as well, so the stores are effectively meeting new demand. In my most recent "city phase", I actually had 3 "large format" grocery stores, 2-3 smaller markets, plus the assortment of convenience stores within a 15 minute walk.
Politically difficult, yes. Enormously expensive, I'd imagine not. Retrofitting a house to be a cafe/shop isn't that difficult or expensive. And it needn't be done all at once, it could be done gradually over time.
I think it is plausible to work towards, much of it. Some of it is fairly low hanging fruit. If you get several of the check boxes but not a coffee shop, high school, restaurant .... that's pretty good, you got a lot of bases covered.
I suppose it's all a personal preference thing to some extent -- at least if you have a car to get you further away for whatever it is.
But true, different people at different points in their lives, income levels, social positions, and preferences will prioritize different things.
The OP list seems pretty good for improving quality of life for a big round population of people at different stages of their lives and social positions. (After all, generational and income diversity in a neighborhood is probably also a plus?)
I wish I could make a personal preference to have all of those things in a 15 minute walk from me! It would require moving to a different city probably, and paying much much much more than I do now for living expenses.
I think 15 minute walkability actually has would have a much larger impact on quality of life than many people realize. I think if most people could get it without having to trade off between different personal preferences (like being able to afford the rent!), we'd be doing a lot better.
Like... nobody needs a coffee shop or everyday restaurant within a 15 minute walk. And if it requires trade-offs, including to affordability, not everyone is going to choose it. But when everyone has one (or ideally several), I think it's going to make neighborhood relationships and connections stronger in general, the people that run into each other at such establishments, or while one (and not necessarily the other) of them are walking to such establishments, the relationships between workers and customers, etc.
While you don't need those things, the more that is within a 15 minute walk, the more likely you are to walk there.
I've seen people who have drove to a neighbors house even though the walk from where they parked on the street was longer than just from their door to door (cutting across the lawn). They did it because that is their habit: they have so few places where they can reasonably walk that it never in occurs to them to walk the few times they could. (the above case was an extreme that they laughed about when they realized it, most people wouldn't drive that trip, but the thinking makes perverse sense)
Grocery, pharmacy, schools, and a public transit stop, only after those would I rate restaurants or coffee shops. This isn't some moral statement about making your own food, outsourifood preparation to a professional makes sense from a specialization standpoint if you can afford it, but if you can't and for daily life, being able to get food and medicine seems a bit higher.
I include public transit time in my 15 minute city. However you have to always include the worst case: just as your arrive at the stop the vehicle closes its doors and leaves.
Imho it was pre-war when it peaked. You look at rust-belt cities that were designed to be suburban but transit-oriented and you see a good balance; 3-bedroom houses where everybody has a back-yard but not necessarily a driveway, and the cities were irrigated with street-cars. Minor arteries would have corner stores and there were local shopping districts.
While many modern suburbs have embraced townhomes and other denser form-factors, they have other strategies that result in taking up a lot of space - parking lots, massive wide right-of-way, Euclidean zoning blocking local shops, and heavily redundant road-ways, like arteries that have no development around them at all, just a sidewalk then a fence then some trees and a ditch and then the local road. Every person trying to walk to the artery to catch transit has to cross that.
In an old streetcar suburb, the only road wider than 3 cars were the arteries, and those arteries would still be lined with homes if not shops.
I live within 30 seconds walk of 2 cafes, 2 grocery shops, and a pub (I can see them down the street from my window as I type this). And you literally can't hear them from my house. There's also a primary school nearby which occasionally gets noisy, but there's no noise from the shops.
It takes a lot longer to walk across a street when you have to wait for a walk signal. City streets can be 1.5-2 lane residential streets which you can cross basically on demand, making them equivalent in time to walking on the sidewalk. Based on an average walking pace of 1.33 m/s (3.0 mph), you can cover 40m in 30 seconds.
The blocks in this section of Seattle are ~80m long, so one block takes 60s to walk. The "Mercer on Summit" apartments on this map are within 1/2 block (30s) from 3 restaurants, 2 bars, and 1 small grocery.
I also have to walk along the street a little, and cross a small road that intersects my road. It's still probably less than 30 seconds, but it's close enough. It's 30 seconds if you include walking down the stairs inside my house, slipping my shoes on, etc.
Most of the noise I hear from my apartment in a medium-density neighborhood, like 95% of it, is just car traffic. Big noisy trucks and people on Harleys, people honking at each other as they try to leave a parking lot, all that. Building spread out unwalkable areas creates way more noise than the opposite. What is true, however, is that this design was mostly created for the benefit of suburbanites who live in isolated communities with no readily accessible amenities besides a road into the city. Their peace and quiet comes at the expense of mine, and especially at the expense of lower income communities which often exist in the noisiest, most car-heavy parts of the city.
Still, I'd guess you'd be right that it would be enormously expensive and difficult to bring this back.
But it was once this way, and it was human decisions that made it not this way. If we want it to be this way again and start, it can be eventually.