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People go on walks or bike in their neighborhood all the time. A suburban neighborhood could absolutely support a corner store with a handful of parking spots. We just don't allow for the experiment to even happen due to zoning regulations.

The zoning also is way too specific. Not far from my house is a busy intersection that has stuff like pawn shops and a run-down 7/11 at it. Very close to the intersection is a lot that's been empty for at least a decade now. A few years ago my wife and I thought we should look up what it costs and see if we can just pave it and put a food cart pot down. Turns out you can't do it. You must build a two-unit building with a specific number of rooms and square footage. WTF?! It's like a planned economy for housing. Needles to say, the lot is still empty because nobody wants to build a home like that in that location.

The magic word is "variance" - the problem is it takes time (not even money, usually just time) to popularize an idea and get it publicly accepted and then pushed through the city council.

I've seen it done; sometimes it takes a few months because it's simple and nobody cares, other times it takes years.

And often the city council is itself playing the long game; waiting for the pawn shop and 7/11 to go out of business or sell, and then they snap it up, bulldoze it, and sell it to a developer who will build what they envision for the plot.

Something that turned me on to these issues in the first place was reading through the P&Z committee minutes for my rural New England hometown, where simply opening a hair salon in an existing, vacant commercial space in the village center has been a multi-year affair because their variance for not having off-street parking expired when the previous business closed.

It's in a 150 year old commercial building and has had a variety of even higher-traffic businesses in it for decades, but now the town has created this artificial barrier to filling the existing space, which clearly functioned just fine before (the town has plenty of parking), and is dragging the process out through meeting after meeting. It's frustrating to watch.

It's surprising how little effort is needed to move the needle on those kinds of things. If you started showing up at meetings and complaining about wanting the hair salon, it could be the difference between tabling for another month and letting it through.

Especially if the number of people complaining keeps growing.

I've seen it happen. The vast majority of these things go so far under the radar that it's no wonder the decision is often the "conservative" one (by which I mean status quo, the activity that requires no activity).

So, as an ignorant foreigner... surely someone already _has_ tried this, right? Like, I gather US zoning is pretty localised; there has to be _some_ local authority who has tried it.

Sure, to greater and lesser degrees! Prominent master-planned examples include Seaside, FL [0]; Celebration, the Disney-designed suburb near Orlando with its “town center”; and, in a less ambitious variant, The Villages, a collection of retirement communities notionally premised on “village”-scale lifestyle (and accessibility by golf cart) [1].

My impression is that people like them just fine when they get built, it’s just not The Way Things Are Done at the (rather local) planning level. Maybe more about inertia than malice—and, like so much of the built environment, planning today is accountable to the accumulated political weight of all the individual families’ and developers’ decisions that led up to this point.

[0] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-urbanist-paradis...

[1] https://www.thevillages.com/shopping-dining/

US zoning is complex. While final control is local, the state and federal government puts rules in place. The feds mostly if you do X you get some subsidy (loans for single family houses for example). States often set the rules that locals abide by - the local says some area is R1 (single family), R5 (apartments I think), C1 (retail but I'm not sure what type).... but state law says what those codes mean. The local can choose which of the zones an area is but probably cannot create new ones. The local can give a variance for you to do something not allowed, but everyone who wants it needs to follow state rules.

Remember zoning has been around for around 100 years. The rules change all the time. What I gave as examples were true at some point in history when I looked this up but may not be today. There are 50 states with their own rules. Some states have things like counties that sit between the state and the local. Generally states look at what others are doing and follow that with tweaks, but not always (New York and California are most likely to do their own thing - and they are the most populas states so they matter even if a minority of the total.)

Suburbs used to be built with convenient access to businesses until 1946. They aren't mutually exclusive features of a pleasant neighborhood. Most American's have never experienced a well functioning old suburb and don't realize the scale of the hellscapes they are really living in.

Just because you prefer to live somewhere else doesn't make it a "hellscape." How would you react if someone called a city block like people on this thread are romanticizing a "hellscape?"

What you say is likely true. I've seen even crazier developments though. Not super far from me is a giant development of 3-4 story apartment buildings. It's easily a mile long and 1000ft wide. Just identical mid-rise buildings but not a single store, cafe or restaurant. It's truly the worst of both worlds. No privacy and space and zero walkability. Even by car the next decent grocery store is 5 minutes away.

Entirety of Irvine, California

If suburbs are truly people's preference then we shouldn't need laws to mandate their existence

Right. Given what the laws allow a suburb is often your best compromise. However the laws often force things that make your other options even worse.

That is laws mandating suburbs are not the only evil. There are also laws that mandate bad cities.

> The density of single family houses doesn't support a corner store. It did before the automobile/streetcar, but now that those are common people will prefer to travel to to the much cheaper big-box store (which also has more selection) for most purchases and that doesn't leave enough "I just ran out of one thing" to support a corner store.

Yet somehow, I've seen the exact same kind of suburban structure in a lot of Middle Eastern, car heavy cultures. Lots of single family villas packed together, often around a common area with a park, a medical center, an elementary school and a small shopping area adjacent to the park for small retailers and food outlets. The outlets and retailers often have a loyal customer base of people living nearby, the people enjoy the convenience of not having to take their car through a busy road just to buy groceries, and the food outlets enjoy the guaranteed patronage of visitors to the park. And these are households with multiple cars, not just 1 or 2.

For bigger purchases sure there are bigbox stores, but very few go there and buy - it's all done online with a few clicks and delivered to your home for free.

I can think of multiple “corner stores” that are the only business within a single-family home residential area within a few minutes drive of the house I grew up in in suburban NY. I’m pretty sure they all got grandfathered in and would not be permitted as new construction with the zoning, but they’ve all been in business since before I was born and are still going. These are mostly neighborhoods without sidewalks, and the stores have parking for only a handful of cars.

You’re right that “most” houses can’t be within walking distance of a corner store outside cities, but my anecdata experience is those residential communities can definitely support those businesses. They might require a short drive, but they’re still a lot closer than the shopping center, and a mix of “ran out of one thing”, deli/breakfast sandwiches, and beer keeps them in business.

I suspect many of them are grandfathered in economically too - they are not generating enough income to support starting a new one, but the family has had it for years and never ran the numbers to see just how badly they are doing. (or maybe they only work so long as the equipment doesn't break)

They can only afford to live in those single family houses in the suburbs because they don't have to pay the full cost of the infrastructure to run miles and miles all the way out to their house. It's being subsidized by the taxes paid by folks in the inner cities.

Then why do cities keep annexing suburbs? If they are such a resource sink you would think the opposite would be true - cities would shrink their borders.

The people doing the annexing gain power and influence by extending their reach and base of constituents, but they don't (as individuals) pay the price of supporting those neighborhoods.

In our cities history, it was EXPLICITLY to maintain republican control of local government. The city, it's like 200 years history, has REPEATEDLY split and consumed neighboring locals full of rich white guys to maintain a rich white republican control.

The is a strong towns talking point, but it is completely wrong. The first suburbs were built in the 1880s, 140 years latter they have built and rebuilt all their infrastructure.

Most of a city budget isn't even the infrastructure costs you claim they are not paying. If you expand out to the state where the highways are paid for the cost of infrastructure is even smaller as a percentage of the budget.

Densities have changed quite a bit across American suburbs over time—Brooklyn Heights, considered to be one of the first commuter "suburbs" in the 1800s is like 75k/people per square mile, Levittown, perhaps the first real planned cul-de-sac community in the late 40s: 7.5k, whereas a modern single family subdivision suburb is more like 2.5k.

That is mostly about birthrates. The number of houses is similear.

Either that or your are cherry-picking your examples. Where I live the suburbs from the 1920s are slightly less dense than the developments they are building right now.

This is standard in Australia. Suburb with a block of shops... small block - choose from convenience store, cafe, hairdresser, bakery.. large block will have a supermarket of some sort

usually with parking spots because people drive.

The reality of many countries show that people are not averse to local shopping. They only become so if there are no really good options to use a car and drive a few miles to buy a single toothpaste.