Walk With Me
About a week after 9/11, I went abroad for the first time. I was a junior in college, on exchange for the year. Now, Leicester, England isn’t the first place most people would visit in Europe, much less England, but I really enjoyed my time there, and it turned out to be a pivotal moment in my life.
The first thing that struck me when I got to Europe (maybe apart from being able to legally buy a beer in a pub at 19) was the density and walkability of it. Most areas in Leicester had both businesses and housing on any given street. There was also a city center, where the majority of shops, bars, and restaurants were located. Even if you didn’t live in the city center, it was easily reachable on foot or, in extreme cases, by bus or bike. This pattern recurred in every town and city I went to in Europe, and bigger cities had even more density, along with subways and streetcars. History explains it – a typical European town grew organically from a community that predated cars by hundreds or thousands of years, so the distances had to be walkable.
That density and walkability couldn’t have been more different than the environment I grew up in, in the suburban South, where a car was essentially a requirement to go most places, and where walking was frowned on, indeed where you couldn’t even assume that a street would have sidewalks.
I came to learn that much of America used to be more like Europe in its density. After all, even our young country was founded before cars existed. Anyone who walks around the old part of their town, assuming it’s older than a hundred years or so, can see this. What’s more, from about the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, many American cities, including small to mid-sized ones, like Lake Charles, Louisiana and Amarillo, Texas, had streetcar lines. Incidentally, GM had a role to play in the death of the American streetcar, although it isn’t solely to blame.
The birth of the car and the death of the streetcar, along with the baby boom and desegregation, coincided with white flight and the birth of the suburbs. And there was something to be said for the suburbs. For many, life in the city was crowded, noisy, and unhygienic. Suburban design, with its neighborhoods composed entirely of single-family homes on large lots, promised space, privacy, and tranquility. People were having larger families and earning more disposable income, so the move had good reason behind it. Of course, there was racism involved too, and the resulting extreme segregation in urban cores has proven to be a calamity.
As the cities emptied of inhabitants, they began to cater more to cars than to people. I live in Newark, which is actually a pretty walkable city. But it used to be much more so. Today, walking around certain areas of downtown is not a very pleasant experience, because cars rule. A few decades ago, large highways were built in Newark, cutting through what used to be more intimate neighborhoods. You can also see elevated, post hoc breezeways connecting office buildings here, as if the top priority of designers became keeping pedestrians off the streets.
All of this is to say that, historically speaking, the car-oriented suburb is a brand-new development, a brief deviation in human history. For thousands of years until only a few decades ago, people lived in dense, walkable, multi-use communities. And our recent switch to a whole new mode of living comes with a lot of drawbacks.
First of all, as both an ethical and an economic principle, it’s unfair to require that everyone in a society purchase an expensive machine, usually by going into debt, in order to survive. It’s basically a regressive tax that fills the coffers of car and oil companies. And the easier it is for people to travel, the more job possibilities are open to them.
Then there are the health considerations. Walking is of course a much healthier activity than driving. And while disputes and stress can happen on foot, only with driving is there a particular phrase for getting angry while doing it: road rage. Road rage injuries and deaths have been increasing over the past few years – this says nothing about car accidents, which kill about 40,000 Americans a year. And when bars aren’t within walking distance of housing, the likelihood of drunk driving increases. For most Americans then, driving is the most dangerous thing they do.
We also know that gas-powered cars, in emitting pollutants, do great damage both to our own health and the health of the planet. Four million children a year globally get asthma due to car and truck emissions. In the US, cars and trucks account for nearly a fifth of our total emissions – about 24 pounds of greenhouse gases released for every gallon of gas consumed, and about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per car each year. And predictably, larger homes produce more emissions than smaller ones.
In deeper ways, the ability to live life day-to-day on foot can facilitate well-being, both at the individual and community levels. Not only do you get a hit of endorphins when you step outside and snoop around, there’s also the possibility of interacting with your neighbors. As we’ve seen after two years of pandemic, a chance for social exchange can be a mental boon to otherwise isolated people. And for loners who are susceptible to echo chambers of disinformation online, it’s an opportunity for intervention, so that wacky views can be exposed and nipped in the bud. Covid demonstrated the potential danger nursing homes pose to the elderly, but the prospect of more daily proximity to friends and caregivers is a salubrious one. As sharpness and mobility decline with age, a home on a large lot accessible only by car can become a something of a prison. Seniors shouldn’t have to live in nursing homes in order to easily interact with others.
At the community level, there are convincing theories that people who live in walkable neighborhoods have more social capital than those in car-centered ones. In other words, those in walkable communities are “more likely to know their neighbors, participate politically, trust others, and be socially engaged.” This makes intuitive sense – the closer physically that you and your neighbors are to each other, and the more that you’re on foot in your neighborhood, the better chance you’ll get to know each other and therefore form bonds with each other.
Even interactions with random strangers – more likely on foot – can increase social flourishing. In her landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs proposes that a high volume of random pedestrians on a sidewalk can help to ensure public safety, since people are less likely to commit violent crimes in the presence of witnesses. In this way, paradoxically, strangers can be a source of security rather than danger.
Taking the idea a step further, strangers are a source of democracy. When you walk around a dense neighborhood, you aren’t in total control of what you encounter. You might see or interact with people who shock you, make you chuckle, or give you pause. Whatever novelty you experience though, bears the potential to expand your mental horizons. This phenomenon is vital for the health of a free society – a legal scholar named Cass Sunstein has written about the internet version of the idea in an interesting little book called Republic.com. Chance encounters, meaningful exposures to people of different views and backgrounds – these are becoming rare events for many Americans, as we increasingly sort our physical environments according to race and class, and even our online environments (where we spend more and more time) according to political preferences.
The more distance you put between yourself and something, the more two-dimensional that thing looks. We’re reaching a point where those on each side of the political divide view the other side not as three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood fellow humans, but as cartoons. This is very dangerous territory. If we become unable to see any complexity in our political adversaries, any semblance of ourselves in them, communication and compromise will be perceived as pointless, even harmful, and all will be lost. The alternative to politics isn’t harmony; it’s violence. January 6th is our warning.
Now, I love having a car, and I’ve enjoyed living in houses throughout my life. And there’s something to be said for more space, more privacy, more peace and quiet. But there are downsides to suburbia. And the freedom to live as one wants isn’t really a freedom if there is only one option. I believe that if presented with other options – denser communities, less reliance on cars – many Americans would choose a change. And it’s happening already. Downtowns are being revived, density and mass transit are being added, empty-nesters are downsizing to apartments. The market is speaking.
Maybe one of the most important things we can do to accelerate this trend is allow for rezoning from single- to multi-use, and single-family to multi-family. People of course should still be free to live in and build single-family, single-use buildings. But there should be more alternatives available. For those property owners understandably worried about values, it’s not a given that they will go down with rezoning if, as we see, there is growing demand for density. For example, a recent Brookings Institution study found a 40%-100% price per square foot premium in for-sale housing near walkable urban areas. Another recent study made similar findings, with experts noting, “The question, then, is not whether homeowners will receive windfalls. It is whether those windfalls will come from maintaining housing scarcity or enabling housing abundance.” A more walkable neighborhood, with more sidewalk life, more shops and restaurants, could very likely be an asset. And this really isn’t a liberal versus a conservative debate. NIMBYs are fighting rezoning efforts in New York and California just as much as anywhere else.
Another thing that I noticed on my first trip abroad was that when I’d go to visit friends in their hometowns, what they were most eager to show me was usually the city center, where more of the people, the amusements, and the impressive buildings were. My friends were proud of their communities, proud of their lifestyles. The city center for them was the physical manifestation of that pride – the most pleasant, interesting aspect of their hometown, which everyone built and enjoyed together. My friends weren’t as eager to show me their houses, however impressive those might have been.
There are certain things that individuals alone can’t accomplish – infrastructure, mass transit, public works, community events, a lively street life. Those things create a sense of civic pride that knits a place together socially. Civic pride is different than individual pride, which is also great, but doesn’t connect people.
I’m one of the more introverted, private people that I know. Sometimes I’d much rather stay at home than venture out – the pandemic has been a blessing and a curse. But I know that humans are social creatures. We need connection with others like we need food and water. And we’re at our best when we do big things together. We can choose to configure our surroundings however we like, in order to make our lives safer, healthier, happier, more enriching. And, in a way, adding density to our built environment would be a conservative act, a return to an older, slower (but more efficient), human-centered way of living. It’s already been proven through thousands of years of human history. The status quo is not the norm but an aberration.