The Suburbs Are Still Alive
5th August 2013
Antiplanner pushes back against the latest Crustian jawboning.
“All the studies show” that the millenials “want to live where they can walk, whether that’s the city or an urban suburb,” she tells Washington Post reporter Paul Windle. Gallaher herself lives in New York City’s West Village, while Windle lives in inner Washington, DC, so their own personal anecdotal evidence easily confirms what “all the studies show.”
All the studies are done by academics who live in cities and know little about places where kids ride bicycles on the sidewalk.
Suburbs need to re-invent themselves, says Gallagher, by providing “A place people want to walk around. Organic, village-type environments that are how the suburbs started to begin with. Public transit also. People want out of their cars, especially millennials.” Again, the verdict is still out about whether millennials “want” out of their cars; somehow, I suspect US DOT researcher Don Pickrell is correct (as previously noted here) that high unemployment rates have more to do with the reduced amount of driving they do at the moment.
Let’s say Gallagher is right and young people will prefer to live in mixed-use developments and use transit over driving. Gallagher’s solution is to turn the suburbs into West Villages (or, going back to the real founder of the New Urbanist movement, Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Villages). That’s an invitation for urban planners to do all sorts of expensive and intrusive meddling into people’s lives.
And that’s what they’re really after — people living their lives according to Crustian prescriptions rather than their own preferences.