Caveat Emptor: There Are Some Downsides
‘Cause on the surface the city lights shine
They’re calling at me, come and find your kind
Sometimes I wonder if the World’s so small
That we can never get away from the sprawl
Living in the sprawl
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond
mountains
And there’s no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights
— Arcade Fire lyrics “Sprawl II: Mountains Beyond Mountains”
Eliza Harris
I bike to work nearly every day. I also bike nearly everywhere else. I always get the best parking spot, and it’s always free. Sometimes a few of us just ride around the grid all evening from a restaurant to a bar to a park and then maybe to a friend’s house to sit around the fire pit or watch a movie.
It’s even a lovely walk to work. It takes about forty minutes. I’ve done this a few times when my bike was in the shop or I was carpooling somewhere after work. I can also walk to my bike shop and my auto mechanic, so I don’t have to contend with rides, taxis or shuttles when it’s time for an oil change or an overhaul. When my car is in the shop, I usually tell them to take their time; I don’t have to drive anywhere until next week anyway. Whether I walk, bike or drive, I can take quiet, tree-lined streets. The interstate seems rather harrowing by comparison; I swear I can feel my blood pressure go up with the stop-go, stop-go.
People often ask me if I own a car because they don’t know what it looks like. Sometimes I have to drive it just to make sure it still works. I’m constantly surprised by gas prices. I only fill up every month or two, and that’s usually because I’m making the six-hour drive to my hometown or heading out to a state park to go hiking or biking. So every time I do show up at the pump, the change seems rather dramatic. I’m not the proverbial frog in boiling water anymore. I finally lost that freshman fifteen, too (better late than never!). In fact, I think I might fit into my prom dress if I bothered to get it out of the plastic.
Last Thursday, my book club showed up for our weekly meeting at a member’s house with no chapter assigned. So we decided to find a place for dinner. Most of us decided to walk. Along the way, we talked and laughed and shuffled partners and conversations. One person had to drive because he was meeting a friend afterwards, so a few of the guys piled into his car. We saw them walk in about a minute before us. We poked fun because the guys were the ones complaining about the “cold” Florida weather. After dinner, the driver went to meet his friend, and the rest of us (including the carpoolers) all walked back together. One of the women said, “This is so different. I never really walk to places. This was actually kind of nice.”
— Eliza Harris
Orlando, FL
I’m not saying that once you lace up your walking shoes and head out the door, it’s all roses and puppies. Choosing to live in a walkable place does present some difficulties and obstacles, as do all choices. I’ve outlined the benefits as I see them. But to be fair, here are a few of the problematic issues that you may encounter if you to choose to live a walking lifestyle.
There aren’t enough walkable places.
This is unfortunate, but true. We have far too few places where someone can get around primarily by walking and biking and live a full and complete life. This limited supply problem not only makes choosing a walkable place more difficult, it also creates a supply/demand imbalance that makes housing more expensive than it should be. In today’s market, housing is generally more expensive in the quality walkable places than it is elsewhere. Only time and a whole lot more supply will ultimately tip this imbalance to the consumer’s favor.
Our workplaces are scattered far and wide.
As a consequence, many people have to drive long distances to get to their jobs. As long as our cities and suburbs are so spread out, we will continue to have this problem. While more of us are working from home or have a flexible work arrangement that allows us to work from home at least part of the time, most people still have to commute to work. We need better planning in our cities so that workplaces aren’t as spread out and so people have options when it comes to transportation, such as taking an efficient train or bus.
Too many of the best shopping options are located in far-away areas that require a car to get there.
Shopping malls, while not as ubiquitous as they used to be, still contain a lot of our stores and often are nowhere near an easy walking or transit trip. The same is true for the popular, inexpensive big-box stores. Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Kohl’s, you name it — they are not easy to get to without a car, and it’s certainly not easy to take home all that cheap stuff if you don’t have a car to put it in. Online shopping and services like car sharing can be useful work-arounds for this situation, but the far-flung locations of our stores is still an inconvenience of daily life.
Schools in many walkable places aren’t good.
The problem of school quality isn’t due to neighborhood design, but stems from our legacy of racial and social issues. Even worse, schools are sometimes nonexistent in walkable places because they’ve either been closed or consolidated. This needs to change. The lack of good schools keeps many families with young kids from living in walkable places. In addition, the ability to walk to school should be a given for any kid.
Crime and safety are real issues.
Regardless of statistics, the cocoon of a car provides a tremendous psychological sense of protection for people concerned about their safety. We sometimes feel safer just knowing that our car is parked out there somewhere. When we’re walking, especially late at night when it’s dark, our vulnerability meter goes way up. For women especially, this is a real concern. As a man, I rarely feel worried about my safety when walking. But there are times that it can feel creepy, for lack of a better word, even to me. There’s no question our cities need better and more effective policing. We need to get our policemen and -women who work in walkable places to step out of their cars and patrol on foot, bike, horse or whatever. We know this kind of patrolling is more effective, and it can become the important security blanket to help get people out and about more often. In the case of walkable areas and safety, more people are definitely better.
Getting Cops Out of Their Cars
Peter Moskos wrote about his year as a police officer in Baltimore in the book Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District. Here’s what he wrote in the Afterword about the virtues of patrolling on foot instead of in cars:
Foot patrol used to define policing, and even today a certain romantic stereotype of the espantoon-twirling beat cop persists. But by and large when police start driving, they never walk on foot again. That’s a shame. Foot patrol officers know the neighborhood and see more than officers in cars do. The key to foot patrol’s success, especially in maintaining order and seeing and stopping potential crimes before they start, is long-term presence and building knowledge of the community. The beat cop watched people grow up, get jobs, or get in trouble. It’s much better to see and understand a small area well than a large area not at all. Think of the difference between a group of residents enjoying themselves on a stoop and the same group of people causing trouble; it’s subtle but immediately apparent to anybody walking by. In a car, you simply can’t see.
Our walking and biking infrastructure needs a lot of improvement.
Obviously, I love walking and biking to get around. But I also put up with a lot of obstacles that I shouldn’t have to put up with. Our neighborhoods have far too many incomplete sidewalks, streets without shade and little or no thought given to pedestrians. Our planning for bikes is even worse. We need much better bike lanes that truly protect riders from moving cars and more bike parking and bike sharing programs. As we fell in love with the car culture, we retrofitted our cities far too much for cars, in the form of wide roads, one-way streets, freeways barreling through neighborhoods and buildings torn down for parking. It’s time to correct those mistakes and stitch our places back together.
Noise can be an issue.
People generally worry too much about how noisy life can be in a compact place. In fact, the streets are often far quieter, especially at night, than most people assume. Even living in close proximity to others, noise is not an issue the majority of the time. I have found that I even have become immune to a certain amount of background noise. But there are times when it does get noisy. Housing in a compact place often means living in apartments or attached buildings. Sharing walls and/or floors puts you into close contact with people — and their noise. Additionally, the narrow streets found in walkable places causes sound to reverberate more. This isn’t always a bad thing, but if you’re sensitive to noise, it may be a problem for you.
Some people can be really obnoxious.
Whether it’s bad manners, drunken parties, or aggressive behavior, you get to deal with all kinds of people when you live in a walkable, compact place. Of course this isn’t all bad. Most people are generally good people, and you get to form relationships with them. And, you also learn street smarts pretty quickly. But some people can be real assholes, and it’s harder to escape them when you live in close proximity to lots of people. It’s a potential downside to this way of life, and one you have to learn how to deal with.
Sidewalks and bike lanes that aren’t useful.
I have to relearn how to dress for the weather.
Now admittedly, this is not too big of a deal for me. Being out and about means I have to remember to bundle up when it’s cold and wear the right clothing when it’s hot and humid. But for women, dressing for the weather is more of an issue. Anyone who is concerned about how they look when they leave their home as well as how they might look after walking for fifteen minutes in rainy/cold/humid weather has to put more thought and effort into choosing the right clothes. While our predecessors used to dress for the weather as a matter of course, we have gotten out of the habit, growing up in a time when cars have made it easy for us to ignore the weather. You can’t ignore the weather if you walk and bike a lot.
Our city zoning rules are too restrictive.
I know more about zoning issues than most people, since I work with cities on zoning codes. But you don’t have to be an expert in zoning codes to understand what I mean. All you need is to spend some time living in one of these places. Almost every good walkable place was built before we had much in the way of rules for building and zoning. As a result, walkable places have a much wider mixture of types of buildings and uses of buildings than what we typically allow today. As cities have updated their rules, they’ve done so in ways that are now too tough on the good things that make places work well. Too many codes don’t allow for carriage houses, corner stores, home occupations, or apartments or residences over shops. In a walkable place, it’s all about the mix. And more of the mix is generally good.
Even in good places, we have too many bad buildings.
As an architect, I can’t resist including this pet peeve. The buildings I refer to are “bad” for varied reasons: they may have been built poorly, with little design thought, or set back behind a parking lot, or be out of character with the neighborhood, or just generally not feel “local.” The noted twentieth-century architect and town planner Trystan Edwards would call this “bad manners in architecture.” Our cities have endured a lot of wrong-headed “improvements” and “renewals” over the last few decades. I’m a big fan of removing the eyesores that hurt our places and healing them with good buildings. After all, good buildings make for good walks.
