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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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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.