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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
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.)