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I've lived in many suburbs in a few states. This describes zero of them. My son's friends are right down our walkable suburban street. A really nice and large park is a few minutes walk away. It even has a large dogs-only section. It conveniently lacks a drug den/homeless encampment, so I can actually bring my young son there.
As a lifelong suburban dweller, I'm not suffering from childhood social and physical isolation. Suburbs are overrun with children who visit each other's houses and go to local parks. Most houses in my neighborhood have kids.
The bank and the Starbucks are indeed too far to practically walk to. The high school is much too far away for walking. I'll gladly bear that burden.
I grew up in a "suburb" that was less walkable than even the one @ResoluteRaven describes. Literally zero destinations in walking distance other than single-family homes. Maybe a few dozen of those in walking distance at most depending on how you count and exactly one of them had a child my age; only a handful of others had children at all. "Walkable suburb" is an oxymoron to me; I'd just call that a single-family zoned urban area, but I think I'm the one with the wrong definition here.
I think what's going on is (1) there's a lot of different densities of all single-family home zoning that get called suburbs, with newer ones or ones closer to the city center being a lot denser, and (2) new suburbs are pretty uniformly families with children because when there's a lot of new houses for sale at once, that's who's buying them. But as they age, they don't necessarily immediately move out and sell to another family with children, so over time, there's a lot more older families mixed in with the younger ones.
Since @wlxd mentioned the Seattle metro, I think there's also a bit of East Coast vs. West Coast difference here: the West Coast seems to pack things much more closely to the cities or go so spread out no one is going to come up with "suburb" instead of just calling the area rural. The East Coast is a lot more evenly spread out with suburbs just going on forever. Some of them happen to be close enough to a city to actually be somewhat walkable, but a lot of them aren't.
For what it's worth I mean West coast suburbs only. Outside of various major West coast cities I grew up walking and biking to schools, friends houses, jobs and college. What an independent and enabled free range childhood I was privileged to live in those various suburbs. And I'm not some old timer. I'm in my 30s. I may be so enormously biased in their favor because they were so great for me. There's some correct way of organizing walkable bike-able suburbs. A child with a cheap bike is empowered in them. I've never not lived in a "15 minute city"; and I've never lived in the city.
I have heard that people in certain Arizona suburbs had very different experiences. They got driven to yet another repetitive strip mall or they went nowhere. They couldn't walk or bike anywhere given the distances and temperatures involved. I don't have actionable solutions for them.
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N=1 of course, but the suburb I grew up in had precisely one thing within walking distance besides single-family homes: a gated community center with a pool and gym. There was one bike path that I could have theoretically taken to school if I wanted to cross a highway, but that was it. Any trip to the grocery store, cafe, restaurants, arcade, parks, doctor's office, dry cleaners, pharmacy, or shopping mall was done by car and children had to be chaperoned by their parents to any sort of activity outside of visiting their immediate neighbors.
I didn't mind this at the time, but from where I am now I envy those people who got to grow up traveling independently to hang out with their friends, explore their community, and learn the skills of life without adult supervision. I don’t feel like I have a hometown in the sense that those people do, just an endless sprawl of houses with no distinguishing characteristics, unique architecture, local culture, or collective memory.
I had all these enviable things. I had a cheap bicycle, so the entire suburban town was within my easy grasp starting around the end of elementary school. And that was true for more than one suburb growing up. My family moved around and I was an enabled little biker about town.
I suppose I grew up in a few good West coast suburbs, so my childhood memories are a series of independent free-range biking from one activity to the next. Maybe the anti-suburbanites grew up in horrible un-bikable suburbs and have miserable memories of sitting in cars.
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I also live somewhere where walking even to the nearest grocery store would be a real trek. Doesn't help that it gets unbearably hot in the Summer.
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I have lived in Seattle metro for a couple of years, and I am yet to encounter a location within it which is more than 15 minutes bicycle ride from a normal grocery store. I just tried to find one using Google Maps, and only places I can find are at the very edges of farthest exurbs.
My experience with suburbs is exactly the same as /u/TIRM . Ability to form social relationship with your neighbors, and for your kids to play outside with other kids is one of the things that’s attracting people to suburbs, not repelling them!
As token_progressive mentioned, there are wildly different "suburbs." Urbanist youtube channel NotJustBikes has a video praising a suburb of Toronto known as Riverdale: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
It differentiates between "streetcar suburbs" or similar, and "car-dependent suburbs" and explicitly states that suburbs are not inherently bad.
What about most normal suburbs, which were built way after streetcars left the living memory, and still allow kids to bike to a store?
This conversation is revolving around some archetypes, but why don’t we focus on a specific example? For example, let’s focus on DC metro mentioned by /u/ResoluteRaven. How far do we have to go from the White House to find a place that’s more than 15 minute bicycle ride to closest supermarket?
Why would anyone take a 15 minute bike ride to the closest supermarket? Walkable means there's a shop within 500 meters. Maybe it doesn't have everything, but a convenience store like the one Dante worked in in Clerks should work.
Using Manhattan distance means each shop covers a 500x500m square. With small plots of 200sqm this is at most 1250 single family homes. More realistically, it's 1000, with the rest occupied by roads, other public spaces and commerce.
According to this report on Statista, a C-store needs about 5000 transactions per week. I don't think this is achievable at this density if everyone walks, but a five-minute bike ride should make each C-store reachable by 4000 homes. Even if each domicile shops there only twice a week, this should already be 8000 transactions.
The context of the discussion was kids living allegedly isolated lives in the suburbs. We don't expect kids to drive, but they very much can and should bike. Adults will, of course, just drive.
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The actual definition is 1/2 mile (0.8 km).
Oh, thanks. That's more like 2500 SFHs (if the lots are small enough) in vicinity.
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It definitely does not match my experience that most American suburbs allow kids to bike 15 minutes to a store. Like, it might be possible but it's not particularly safe, there's not usually infrastructure for it, etc.
DC is one of the least car-dependent places in the US. According to this, it has the lowest car ownership rate outside of the NYC metro area. The White House and immediately surrounding area is very bikeable, in my experience--it's right in the middle of the city! It seems like a weird choice to focus on. What about a city like Houston, LA, or Miami?
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The neighborhood around Walt Whitman High School in Maryland (which has been in the news lately for other culture war related reasons) is around 8 miles from the White House and looks to be about a 15 minute bike ride from the nearest grocery store, maybe longer if you lived to the north or west.
I'd say from looking at the intersections that need to be traversed and knowing the poor quality of the local drivers that the helicopter parents in such a wealthy neighborhood would never let their kids make that particular journey, but that of course has no direct bearing on your question.
If you're looking for the closest places to the White House without nearby grocery stores (as opposed to convenience stores), you want to go the other way down Pennsylvania Ave.
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The place I described is in the DC metro area and could plausibly be called a "far exurb." I make no claims as to whether this is a typical suburban experience because I have no idea, only that the type of place that YIMBY's complain so vociferously about does in fact exist somewhere.
Sure, I don’t dispute that places like that exist, but if the argument is “some far exurbs are too remote for kids to even bike to the store”, then it is much different than claiming that this is a typical suburban experience, that it is hell for kids, and we need to change zoning rules across the board to fix it.
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People have different preferences, and that's fine. By and large, rich parts of the suburbs and rich parts of cities are nice; poor parts of the suburbs and poor parts of the cities are horrific. What would be nice is if it were cheaper and there were fewer regulations around building, because that might make the poor parts a bit more like middle class parts and middle class parts a bit more like rich parts.
The point of view of the reviled NIMBY is at least in part motivated by the recognition that the cost of construction isn't the sole determinant of how terrible an area is; the people who are your neighbors also play a role. My last trip to Whole Foods was marked by two fights breaking out in the 15 minutes I was there, one over an attempt to steal a bottle of wine and the other over an attempt to steal a cake. It's still probably net positive to loosen rules, but it's also a transfer of value from the people living in a place currently to the people who'd move there.
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