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YIMBY sentiment on this forum has (I think) been mostly focused on increasing the density of existing residential zones. However, it may be worth noting that there is an alternative: converting existing agricultural or unused land to low-density residential use (i. e., continuing to "sprawl"). In this article, a former employee of the libertarian Cato Institute accuses that organization of focusing exclusively on high-density housing, and of smearing as racist people who are not interested in long-term high-density living and clamor for more single-family houses. (In his view, upzoning imposed from the top down is not libertarian, because the existing owners have a sort of property right in the zoning of their neighborhood as a substitute for deed restrictions that could or should have been used instead of zoning codes.)
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.
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).
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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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