I currently live in New Orleans, which is very mixed-use if you're in the city proper. It's really, really nice. I bike everywhere. Groceries, bookstores, head shops, cafes, bars, hardware store (with a super nice housewares department on the second floor), plumbers, auto shops, restaurants, snoball stands, parks, schools[1], dentists, optometrists, lawyers, there's pretty much everything I need in a 20min cycling radius. A lot of these businesses are in buildings that are pretty much indistinguishable from the houses next to them; there's signs and various adaptations for whatever they're selling but so many of them started out as a house rather than something built from the ground up to be A Store.

Leave the actual city and it starts turning into suburbs, where every distance is designed for a car and all business is concentrated on one big road that's got giant parking lots and big boxy buildings all along it. I go out there when I absolutely must. There really aren't many reasons to do that.

1: sadly the city's schools have gone to hell in many ways since I was a kid, but hey, I ain't got kids so I only get to worry about that in the abstract...