> I don't even think there's anything wrong with 2-3 car households being the norm in suburbs.
I don’t either. I think the suburbs themselves are what is wrong. Having 2-3 cars is just the adaptation for a moronic building style.
I don’t either. I think the suburbs themselves are what is wrong. Having 2-3 cars is just the adaptation for a moronic building style.
From where I live now it’s hard to fathom why any family would need two, or even three cars. Those suburbs that made that a necessity must be considering utter failures.
Can you name a few examples of suburbs where that is the case? Nothing but houses for 3-5 miles?
I've lived in the US east coast and west coast, always in suburban areas, and I've never seen that. It would take an immense neighborhood of houses to cover 5 miles. Do such ones exist? Let alone common enough to be called "typical"?
In every suburb I've lived, there has been at least a supermarket less than 3 miles away. In my current suburban house, there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance.
> there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance
That’s very nice and quite rare, especially for newer suburbs. Some of the older ones had a little Main Street or some grandfathered in stores and shops. Prices are extremely high accordingly compared with other suburbs.
I'm still curious where all these suburbs are that have nothing but houses for 3 miles or more?
Was trying to find some examples and looks like Mesa,AZ is the worst in this sense in the USA:
https://www.planetizen.com/node/92835/americas-largest-subur...
Looking at it in google maps it is indeed sprawling with houses. But I couldn't find a spot in the various neighborhoods where one would be more than 3 miles walk away from a supermarket. The worst I came up with was 2 miles to a supermarket. But then I zoomed in and saw a restaurant only 1 mile away.
Not a thorough research for sure, just spent a handful of minutes on it.
But assuming the article is correct and Mesa is the worst of the sprawl and given I didn't find it easy to find houses more than 3 miles away from (food) businesses, I'm thinking the OP statement that "In American suburbs it's typical for there to be nothing but houses within a 3 to 5 mile area" is quite an exageration.
Am I wrong? Can anyone name a handful of these neighborhoods?
That doesn't look like suburbs, although there are a handful of housing developments. But these are not in the outskirts of an urban area like a suburb, these are more rural and not attached to any city.
Yes, sure, once you go outside cities into semi-rural or rural regions, it's easy to be way more than 5 miles from shopping.
In a truly entrepreneurial society, anyone can operate a small business open to the public right out of their house. Not so in the US states/counties I've ever been to.
Letting "the market" do whatever it wants will only lead to one thing, and that is greedy people scalp up the cheapest land they can find (usually, in quarters where poor people live) and build extremely polluting stuff there. Zoning laws exist to guarantee even the poorest of the poor at least a basic standard of protection - although I do admit that there exist a lot of cases where zoning laws are abused to protect the interest of the elites primarily.
Fun fact: Back in early Roman times and for a long time until the 18th century, that also had a public health aspect - burial sites, slaughterhouses and similar businesses were banned from the inner city and, if there was a river, placed on the downstream end so that the risk of pollution was reduced.