Daniel sent us this one — he's asking what suburbs actually are, and why some walkability advocates seem to genuinely loathe them. Not just criticize, but loathe. There's a real intensity there, and he wants to know where it comes from. So where do we even start with this?
First — quick aside. DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today. So if anything comes out sounding unusually eloquent, you know who to thank.
Alright, so let's define the thing before we dissect why people hate it. A suburb, in the technical sense, is a residential district on the outskirts of a city. But that definition is almost useless because it tells you nothing about what actually makes something suburban. The key features are low-density housing, separation of uses — meaning residential here, commercial way over there, industrial somewhere else entirely — and a transportation system built almost entirely around the private automobile.
That separation of uses part is baked into law in most of North America, right? This isn't just how developers chose to build.
It's zoning. Euclidean zoning, named after the village of Euclid, Ohio, not the mathematician. In nineteen twenty-six, the Supreme Court case Village of Euclid versus Ambler Realty upheld the right of municipalities to separate land uses. That decision fundamentally shaped American development for the next century. You could no longer build an apartment above a shop. You could not have a corner store in a residential neighborhood. Everything had to be in its designated zone.
The suburbs we know today aren't an organic phenomenon. They're a legal artifact.
They're a legal artifact layered on top of technological changes and massive federal subsidies. The automobile, the interstate highway system starting in nineteen fifty-six, FHA loans that favored new construction over renovation of existing urban housing, and mortgage interest deductions that effectively subsidized single-family homes. It was a coordinated policy push.
Racially motivated, if I remember correctly.
Redlining, blockbusting, racially restrictive covenants. The FHA's underwriting manual literally stated that highways were useful for separating white neighborhoods from Black neighborhoods. Urban renewal programs demolished Black neighborhoods to build highways connecting white suburbs to downtown jobs. This isn't subtext — it's in the documents. And when you understand that history, some of the intensity from walkability advocates starts making more sense. They're not just critiquing building patterns. They're critiquing a system that was designed, in part, to enforce segregation.
The loathing has layers. There's the design critique, and then there's the moral weight of how we got here.
But let me separate those, because I think it's important to engage with the design critique on its own terms too. Even if the suburbs had been built with perfectly benevolent intentions, the physical pattern itself creates problems that aren't obvious until you start adding up the math.
Alright, walk me through the math.
Take a typical suburban subdivision. Curving streets, cul-de-sacs, big lots. The tax revenue from those properties has to pay for the infrastructure — the roads, the water pipes, the sewer lines, the electrical grid. But low density means fewer taxpayers per linear foot of pipe, per mile of road. The infrastructure cost per household is dramatically higher than in a dense urban neighborhood.
This is the Strong Towns argument, if I'm tracking you.
Strong Towns, the organization founded by Charles Marohn, has been making this case for years. They argue that the suburban development pattern is a Ponzi scheme. The initial infrastructure is paid for by developers or by federal grants, but maintenance costs hit the city twenty or thirty years later, and the tax base can't support it. You end up with municipalities that are technically insolvent but don't realize it yet because they're deferring maintenance.
The counter argument would be that people in suburbs pay higher property taxes, so the per-household contribution might balance out.
It doesn't though. That's what the data shows. Strong Towns has done these analyses city by city, mapping tax revenue per acre against infrastructure liability per acre. The dense, mixed-use downtown core almost always generates far more tax revenue per acre than it costs to service. The suburban fringe almost always runs a deficit. The downtown subsidizes the suburbs, not the other way around.
Which is the opposite of the political narrative in most places.
The political narrative is that suburbs are the responsible taxpayers and the urban core is a money pit. The accounting shows the reverse. But it's hidden because municipal budgets don't typically break things down geographically in a way that makes the cross-subsidy visible.
That's the fiscal case. What about the walkability piece specifically? Daniel asked about walkability advocates.
Walkability isn't just about whether there's a sidewalk. It's about whether you can accomplish daily tasks without getting in a car. Can you walk to get groceries? To a café? To your kid's school? To a park? In most suburbs, the answer is no to all of those. The distances are too large, and even if they weren't, the street network is designed to make walking unpleasant or dangerous.
This is a term coined by Strong Towns — a stroad is a street-road hybrid. A street is a place where you want to be, with buildings close to the sidewalk, narrow lanes, trees, destinations. A road is a high-speed connection between places. A stroad tries to be both and fails at both. It has the width and speed of a road but it's lined with strip malls and drive-throughs, so you have cars entering and exiting constantly, pedestrians trying to cross six lanes of traffic, and nobody is safe or comfortable.
The stroad is the default arterial in most American suburbs.
It's the defining feature. And here's where the loathing really crystallizes. Walkability advocates look at a stroad and see a machine for producing pedestrian deaths. The numbers are alarming. In the United States, pedestrian fatalities have been rising sharply. In twenty twenty-two, more than seventy-five hundred pedestrians were killed — the highest number in over forty years.
That's not evenly distributed.
Not at all. It's concentrated on these arterial roads in suburban areas. Poor neighborhoods, neighborhoods with older residents, neighborhoods with more people of color — these are disproportionately affected. The design is not neutral. It's lethal.
The advocate's position is that this isn't a matter of personal preference — some people like driving, some people like walking — it's that the suburban built environment imposes real harms.
And those harms cascade. If you can't walk anywhere, you must drive. That means every trip requires a car. That means households need multiple cars. That's a huge financial burden. AAA estimates the average annual cost of owning a new car is over twelve thousand dollars. For a household with two cars, that's twenty-four thousand dollars a year just to participate in society.
Which is regressive. It hits lower-income households hardest.
It's deeply regressive. And it's not a choice — it's a requirement imposed by the built environment. Walkability advocates see this as a form of compelled consumption. You are forced to buy a car, insure it, fuel it, maintain it, because the physical layout gives you no alternative.
There's also the health dimension.
Massive health dimension. Sedentary lifestyles are linked to obesity, heart disease, diabetes. When every trip is a car trip, you're sitting. When walking is built into your daily routine — to the store, to transit, to work — you're getting incidental physical activity that adds up. Studies consistently show lower obesity rates in walkable neighborhoods, even controlling for income and education.
Though there's a selection effect there, right? People who like walking might choose to live in walkable places.
There is some self-selection, but longitudinal studies that follow people who move from unwalkable to walkable neighborhoods do show increases in physical activity and reductions in body weight. The environment shapes behavior. It's not purely preference.
Alright, let me push back on behalf of the suburbs for a moment. Not because I'm a fan, but because I think the critique sometimes misses what people actually value. People like space. They like a yard. They like not sharing walls with neighbors. They like having a garage, a driveway, quiet streets where their kids can play. Those aren't trivial preferences.
They're not trivial at all. And I think the more thoughtful walkability advocates acknowledge this. The critique isn't that nobody should have a yard or that everyone must live in an apartment tower. It's that we've made it illegal to build anything else in most of the country.
In the vast majority of American residential land, zoning codes permit only single-family detached homes on large lots. Not small apartment buildings. Not courtyard cottages. Not live-work units. Just one building type. And that building type is the most expensive, most land-intensive, most infrastructure-intensive option.
The argument is that the market is constrained.
The market is completely constrained. There's enormous unmet demand for walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. We know this because the few that exist — the old streetcar suburbs, the historic downtowns that survived urban renewal — are incredibly expensive. The price signal is screaming that people want this, but it's illegal to build more of it.
That's the supply-side critique that's gained traction even in some conservative circles.
There's a growing YIMBY movement — Yes In My Backyard — that frames zoning reform as a property rights issue. If I own a piece of land, why can't I build a duplex on it? Why can't I open a small café on the corner? These restrictions are a taking of development rights, and they artificially inflate housing costs.
Which connects to the affordability crisis in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York.
When you can't build up or build denser, you can only build out. So you get sprawl. And the jobs stay in the urban core, so you get these brutal commutes where people are spending two, three hours a day in their cars.
That's the time poverty argument.
Time poverty is a huge piece of this. Commuting is consistently ranked as one of the least enjoyable human activities. Long commutes are associated with higher stress, lower life satisfaction, higher divorce rates. And it's not just the commuter who suffers — it's the family that sees less of them, the community they're not participating in because they're stuck in traffic.
Walkability advocates are arguing that the suburban pattern doesn't just waste money and damage health — it wastes life. Actual lived time.
That's the core of it. And I think that's where the intensity comes from. This isn't an aesthetic preference. It's a recognition that we've built a landscape that makes life worse in measurable, cumulative ways, and we've locked ourselves into it through zoning and infrastructure commitments that are incredibly hard to unwind.
Let's talk about the unwinding problem. If suburbs are as problematic as the critics say, why don't we just fix them?
Because the infrastructure is already in the ground. The pipes are already laid. The roads are already paved. The houses are already built. You can't easily retrofit a low-density suburb into a walkable neighborhood. The street network is wrong, the lot sizes are wrong, the building types are wrong, and the whole thing is locked in by zoning and homeowner opposition.
Homeowner opposition being the political third rail.
It's the core political dynamic. Homeowners are the most reliable voters in local elections. They show up to planning board meetings. And they have a legitimate financial interest — their home is often their largest asset, and they fear anything that might reduce its value. Whether those fears are well-founded is another question, but the political reality is that incumbent homeowners wield enormous power to block change.
Even beyond the financial interest, there's a cultural attachment. The suburbs represent a certain vision of the good life for millions of people. The yard, the barbecue, the two-car garage. It's woven into the American identity.
And I think effective advocacy has to engage with that, not just dismiss it. The New Urbanism movement, which emerged in the nineteen eighties and nineties, tried to offer a positive vision — walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods that still felt like places people would want to live. Seaside, Florida, is the famous early example. Celebration, Florida, the Disney-built town. These were attempts to demonstrate that you could have walkability without the things people fear about density — noise, crime, lack of privacy.
How did those age?
Seaside is beautiful but it's basically a resort town for wealthy people. Celebration has had its share of issues. The broader critique of New Urbanism is that it created nice places but didn't solve the affordability problem and didn't scale. You can't fix the housing crisis with a few master-planned communities.
What's the alternative? The Strong Towns approach?
Strong Towns is more incremental. The idea is to make small, low-risk investments that improve walkability and fiscal resilience over time. Plant street trees. Allow accessory dwelling units. Relax parking minimums. Convert one-way streets to two-way. These aren't mega projects — they're adjustments that make places incrementally better.
Parking minimums are a big deal, I gather.
Parking minimums are regulations that require every building to provide a certain number of off-street parking spaces. They sound boring but they have enormous consequences. They force developers to build parking whether there's demand for it or not. That drives up construction costs, consumes land, and creates dead zones of asphalt that make walking unpleasant. And they're everywhere — almost every American city has them.
The reform movement is gaining steam?
It's one of the few areas of genuine bipartisan progress in land use policy. Hundreds of cities have eliminated or reduced parking minimums in the last decade. Buffalo, Minneapolis, San Jose, Austin, and many others. Even California eliminated parking minimums near transit statewide. It's a rare example of the walkability agenda actually winning.
Because the logic is hard to argue with once you see it. Why should the government mandate that a business provide free storage for private vehicles?
It's a subsidy for driving, hidden in the building code. And when you remove it, you get more housing, more businesses, lower costs, and better urban form. It's one of the highest-leverage policy changes available.
Let's circle back to the loathing. Daniel asked why some advocates seem to really loathe suburbs. We've covered the fiscal, health, time poverty, and equity arguments. Is there something else? An ideological dimension?
I think there is, and I think it's worth naming carefully. For some advocates, the suburbs represent a kind of atomized individualism that they see as spiritually corrosive. The private yard instead of the public park. The private car instead of the public bus. The gated community instead of the open street. There's a critique that the suburbs were designed to let people retreat from the obligations of shared civic life.
That's a more philosophical critique. And it's one that I think rubs a lot of people the wrong way because it can sound like telling people how to live.
And I think it often backfires politically. Telling someone that their chosen way of life is morally deficient is not a great persuasion strategy. The stronger arguments are the practical ones — the fiscal math, the safety data, the affordability crisis. Those don't require you to pass judgment on anyone's values.
Though I'll say, as someone who appreciates a good nap in a quiet setting, I understand the appeal of space and privacy. The suburbs aren't solely a product of policy manipulation. They also reflect genuine human preferences.
And I think the honest position is that there's a spectrum. Some people want a large lot and a quiet street and don't mind driving everywhere. Others want to walk to a corner café and live above a bookstore. The problem is that our regulatory system has made the first option mandatory across huge swaths of the country and made the second option illegal to build. That's not letting people choose. That's imposing a single vision.
The walkability advocate's position, at its most reasonable, is not "ban suburbs" but "legalize other things.
That's the strong form of the argument. Legalize missing middle housing. Legalize corner stores in residential neighborhoods. Legalize mixed-use development. End single-family zoning. Let people build what the market demands, and let people live where they want. If suburbs are superior, they'll survive in a free market. If they're only viable because we've outlawed the alternatives, that tells you something.
The counterpoint from the suburban defender would be that there are negative externalities to density too. Noise, congestion, strain on infrastructure.
Those are real. But they're manageable with good design and adequate infrastructure investment. And the externalities of sprawl — the carbon emissions, the traffic fatalities, the fiscal insolvency — are arguably much larger and harder to manage. Density done badly is unpleasant. Density done well is Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo — some of the most desirable places on earth.
Tokyo is an interesting case because it's a city that actually solved affordability through deregulation.
Tokyo is the gold standard example. Japan has a national zoning code that allows much more by-right development. Housing supply has kept pace with demand. As a result, Tokyo's housing costs have remained remarkably stable while cities like San Francisco and London have seen explosive price growth. And Tokyo is dense but also full of quiet residential streets, small parks, neighborhood shops. It's not a dystopian concrete jungle.
The binary between "soulless suburb" and "soulless tower block" is false.
It's a completely false binary. The most beloved neighborhoods in the world tend to be mid-rise, mixed-use, with narrow streets and good public spaces. The Parisian arrondissements. The brownstone neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The Georgian terraces of London. These aren't suburbs, but they're not high-rise towers either. They're the missing middle.
We've made them illegal.
We've made them illegal across most of North America. That's the tragedy. We know how to build beautiful, walkable, financially resilient neighborhoods. We did it for centuries. And then in the span of about thirty years, we outlawed it and replaced it with a pattern that doesn't work financially, environmentally, or socially.
Let's talk about the environmental dimension, because we haven't really dug into that.
Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. And the suburban development pattern locks in high transportation emissions. When you spread everything out and make driving the only option, every trip generates carbon. Electric vehicles help with tailpipe emissions but they don't solve the land use problem — you still have the parking lots, the stroads, the stormwater runoff from all that impermeable surface.
Stormwater is actually a huge issue that doesn't get enough attention.
It's enormous. When you pave over natural landscapes with roads, parking lots, and rooftops, rainwater can't soak into the ground. It runs off, picking up oil, heavy metals, and other pollutants, and flows into streams and rivers. Suburban development dramatically increases impervious surface coverage, which degrades water quality and increases flood risk. It's another hidden cost.
When a walkability advocate says they loathe suburbs, they're seeing this whole interconnected web of problems. The fiscal insolvency, the pedestrian deaths, the time poverty, the carbon emissions, the water quality degradation, the racial segregation legacy, the compelled car ownership. It's not one thing. It's the system.
It's the system. And I think that systemic critique is what separates the serious advocates from the people who just don't like lawns. The lawn thing is aesthetic. The systemic critique is about whether this pattern is sustainable, equitable, or even financially viable in the long run.
Alright, let me play suburban defender one more time. The suburbs have evolved. The suburbs of nineteen fifty-five are not the suburbs of today. You have edge cities, you have suburban office parks, you have diverse suburban communities that don't fit the white-picket-fence stereotype. Is the critique keeping up with the reality?
That's a fair point. Suburbs have diversified economically, racially, and in terms of built form. There are suburbs with light rail, with walkable downtowns, with mixed-use developments. The old streetcar suburbs — places like Brookline, Massachusetts, or Shaker Heights, Ohio — are quite walkable and dense by modern standards. The critique needs to distinguish between different types of suburbs.
Some of the most innovative urbanism is happening in suburban contexts. The retrofitting of dead shopping malls into mixed-use town centers, for example.
That's actually one of the most hopeful trends. Dead malls are being converted into walkable neighborhoods with housing, offices, retail, and public space. It's a way to reuse the infrastructure that's already there — the roads, the utilities — but reorganize the land use into something more productive and less car-dependent. It's not starting from scratch.
The future might not be "abolish suburbs" but "repair suburbs.
I think repair is a much better frame than abolish. The suburbs exist. Hundreds of millions of people live in them. We're not going to demolish them and start over. The question is how to incrementally make them better — more walkable, more financially resilient, more inclusive. That's the Strong Towns approach. Make the next project a little better than the last one.
There's a generational shift happening too. Younger people are driving less, delaying car purchases, and expressing stronger preferences for walkable urban living.
The data on millennials and Gen Z is striking. Driver's license rates among teenagers have dropped significantly. Vehicle miles traveled per capita peaked in the United States around two thousand four and has been declining or flat since. The preferences are shifting. The question is whether the housing supply will shift to meet them.
That brings us back to zoning. The bottleneck is regulatory.
It's almost entirely regulatory. The financing exists. The demand exists. The architectural knowledge exists. What doesn't exist is the legal permission to build anything other than detached single-family homes on most residential land.
If someone listening wants to understand the walkability advocate's position, the elevator pitch is something like: we've made it illegal to build the kinds of neighborhoods that are financially solvent, environmentally sustainable, and physically healthy, and we've imposed a car-dependent pattern that subsidizes sprawl at the expense of everything else.
That's a solid summary. And the intensity — the loathing — comes from the recognition that this isn't an accident. It was engineered. Through zoning codes, highway construction, redlining, and federal mortgage policy, we deliberately created the suburban pattern and deliberately destroyed the walkable urban pattern. And now we're living with the consequences.
Which are measured in lives lost on stroads, hours lost in traffic, dollars lost to car dependency, and communities fractured by design.
The hopeful part — because I don't want to end on pure gloom — is that these are policy choices. They can be unmade. Parking minimums can be eliminated. Zoning codes can be reformed. Streets can be redesigned. It's slow work, but it's happening. The direction of travel, if you'll forgive the pun, is toward walkability.
I think we've given Daniel a thorough answer. Suburbs are low-density, use-separated, car-dependent residential districts shaped by a century of deliberate policy. Walkability advocates loathe them because that pattern produces fiscal insolvency, pedestrian fatalities, time poverty, environmental degradation, and compelled consumption, all while being propped up by regulations that make better alternatives illegal.
The path forward is incremental reform, not abolition. Legalize the missing middle. Remove parking minimums. Design streets for people, not just cars. Let people choose how they want to live.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: Buzkashi, the Central Asian equestrian sport, can be understood as an optical system in which the goat carcass functions as a phase object whose visibility depends on the refractive index mismatch between decomposing tissue and the surrounding air — a principle first formally described in the high medieval period by scholars who had no connection whatsoever to Papua New Guinea.
...right.
That was a journey. This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps people find the show.
See you next time.
