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Something like this is possible, or even likely. Another point, often made by urbanists, is that having more regular people in spaces makes them safer, and feel safer, because of safety in numbers. However, mainly what I was trying to get at is that the policies that allow lawlessness to continue and spread are orthogonal to policies that favor driving/other modes of transportation, and so it is entirely possible (easy, even, aside from the political constraints that seem to be unique to America) to make walkable places that are nothing like what firmamenti describes.
Streetcar suburbs are the opposite of a car-dependent development and are not a problem.
I think you should re-check your history. Homicide rates declined from the mid 30s until the mid 60s, which is exactly when American governments started demolishing urban neighborhoods to build highways, subsidizing homeownership, etc.
If you're just going to drop a thinly veiled claim that being near black people is a public safety hazard, you should have some evidence for it. "Controversial claims require evidence" etc.
I'll nitpick a bit because why not. Even if streetcar suburbs still existed and functioned, their popularity would still mean White flight, or middle-class flight, from the urban core, resulting in the long-term decay of the latter.
This is obviously hypothetical, but I disagree. Taking a streetcar (or tram, bus, light rail, whatever) into the city, and walking to your final destination, is very different from living in a far-flung exurb that, at best, involves commuting for work (and by the 80s, often didn't even involve that much). And building such places is far less destructive to the city itself. One could argue this just subjects the middle class to the awful conditions of the cities in the 70s without any alternative; on the other hand, maybe if they stay, they vote for better crime policies, provide stabilizing social forces, don't displace lots of inner-city residents, and improve the tax base in the city. (My inner libertarian is outraged at that last one, but usually whenever the urban/suburban arguments start to happen on TheMotte, someone tells me that it's ok that car-dependent suburbs are subsidized because one function of government is to provide public goods for the benefit of all, so I figure what's good for the goose is good for the gander).
As far as I can tell, this "long-term decay" lasted a few decades and has generally been on the reverse since the 90s (in general; obviously some cities continued to decline, but e.g. NYC has had increasing population over the past few decades.)
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They may be car-dependent now if there street cars are gone. In the one near me it does keep the homeless and adjacent criminal elements from the nearby city from riding public transit out to the suburbs.
If the street cars are gone (and not replaced with some other transit) it's not really a streetcar suburb anymore.
Perhaps. And many such suburbs were annexed by the city anyways. Point is that the strong impulse to live near the city but not in it predates cars. It was not cars that created the impulse to move to suburbs, or was the desire to move to suburbs that caused people to demand cars.
Suburbs are very old, but the cities they surrounded were never rebuilt to allow the suburbanites easier access to the detriment of the city's inhabitants. Certainly the streetcar suburbs we just discussed did not do that and did not require that. Cars' mere existence are not the problem; it's enforced car dependence: Knocking down urban neighborhoods to build highways to the suburbs (which already couldn't handle all the traffic even back in the 50s), building suburbs that can literally only be accessed or traversed in a car, preventing the building of any housing other than sprawling and expensive single family homes, etc.
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