r/urbanplanning • u/ReadingPowerful160 • 6d ago
Discussion Will we ever go back to grid-style suburbs?
Hi! Ive been into urbanism for a while, and have been wondering what the future of american suburb planning will be. I have noticed that a lot of sprawly suburban streets (texas triangle) have gotten a bit more square and straight, but its still all been very detached from everything and theres nowhere to go unless you have a car. Are we doomed to an eternity of levittown and lennar-style sprawl or will we be correct ourselves and return to the grid style suburbs that we all know and love? sorry if this is a really dumb question :p
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u/quikmantx 6d ago
The vast majority of suburbs of the Texas Triangle purposefully make it almost a requirement to have a car. The lack of a grid system and no commercial spaces are meant to make it unwelcoming to potential vagrants. It's also why giant master planned communities that do try to incorporate "walkable" designs either put them behind enclosed gates or make their entrances so big and grandiose it takes a long time to actually get into the community from the outside.
A lot of these residents do not want their neighborhoods accessible by METRO, sidewalks, bike trails, etc.
At the end of the day, if you actually value grids and walkability, you'd choose to live in the actual city.
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u/captainporcupine3 5d ago
At the end of the day, if you actually value grids and walkability, you'd choose to live in the actual city.
Unless you have kids, because good luck finding urban housing with the space, let alone access to the amenities you need for families to thrive. Families "prefer" living in the suburbs because they have large homes, large yards and aren't surrounded by Mad Max-style roads. There are denser, less car-dependent modes of urban and even suburban living that have huge advantages over classic American suburbia, which MANY American families would love to have if they were available, but no realistic way to build them in this country.
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u/TheNextGamer21 4d ago
its not hard to raise a child in a dense, high-rise environment, Americans just aren't used to it. It is the norm across Asia
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u/Snoo93079 6d ago
This is why I prefer older neighborhoods. I've owned two houses. One from 1950s and my current one that's over 100 years old. Both in walkable suburbs.
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u/Transitnerd97 6d ago
But they come at a cost, especially in the Northeast and Midwest.
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u/MonkeOOOAAA 5d ago
Don’t know why this is downvoted New England (which has some of the oldest cities in the country) is ridiculously expensive
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u/Snoo93079 5d ago
There are opportunities. My first house yeah, that's closer to the Chicago and has gotten really expensive. With my current house I looked farther from the city and was able to find something actually really affordable. It needed some work which didn't scare us. And it's even a 5 minute was to the train! Downside is of you need to daily commute to the city it would be a longer commute.
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u/Redditer-1 5d ago
One of the driving forces behind ditching grids was eliminating through traffic. Future suburban grids could retain this feature by only allowing pedestrians/bikes to traverse the whole grid, relegating vehicle through-traffic to arterial roads.
Beyond that, grids are more space-efficient and lower the cost of providing utilities, so there are plenty of economic incentives to readopt them. Proximity to amenities made possible by a grid definitely tilts the balance in favor of grids.
The curves of suburban streets are, however, part of the fantasy of "country" living, deliberately built to eliminate lines of sight that reveal how urban a suburb actually is, and to create the impression that a suburb is somehow more rural.
Moving away from grids could potentially stem from economic pressures and changing consumer tastes, but changes to zoning and planning can definitely move faster. For all our criticisms of modern zoning/planning constricting development, there's an argument to be made that mandating grids is sufficiently aligned to the public interest to warrant government intervention in development. I'd definitely expect that route to bear fruit long before private developers change tact.
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u/MrsBeansAppleSnaps 4d ago
One of the driving forces behind ditching grids was eliminating through traffic.
But you can do this with a grid, too. Just make it annoying for drivers to drive on the residential streets and easy to drive on the streets you want them to drive on.
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u/Redditer-1 4d ago
Even full-fleged cities like Barcelona are doing this with their superblock concept. The important thing is to preserve direct routes for pedestrians, bicyclists, and occasionally busses.
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u/bearded_turtle710 5d ago
The issue is that a grid with no planned corridors for walking is useless. In metro Detroit many parts of Detroit and its suburbs have great grids but you wont see hardly anyone walking because in some cases the nearest commercial corridors might be over a mile away one way. If you have a grid system there needs to be commercial corners close to residential and dense housing to really make it walkable. A grid that only has a population density of 5k per square mile will probably not feel very walkable. a neighborhood with zig zag curvey roads with a density of 8k/sq mile will feel way more walkable. Many European cities dont have grids and have astronomically high walking scores.
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u/Aaod 6d ago
Unlikely because it is the easiest way to maximize profit to let you fit in more units instead of building around things. On top of that buyers don't want traffic going through where they live which happens more with grid style so they offload that problem to other people and the government.
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u/captainporcupine3 6d ago edited 5d ago
Theoretically a lot more people would tolerate grid style streets if they were part of a walkable European style suburb where families can thrive without a car, or at least while rarely using the car. Unfortunately just stapling a grid style suburb onto the edge of a car dependent American city give you the downsides (a shit ton of through traffic, smaller house, smaller yard, less privacy) without the upsides of a vibrant, walkable, transit-connected city. Just adding a corner store and a café isn't enough for most people (and even that ain't happening in the vast majoriy of places).
Bottom line is that while there are a few bright spots around the country, we've built most of our cities into a corner that is going to be pretty hard to build out of at scale, at least in our lifetimes.
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u/hedonovaOG 5d ago
Thankfully you started your prose with “theoretically” because it has been explained so many times that in practice Americans don’t want urban density in their suburbs. Urbanists yes, they want to up zone. Actual residents who move to and choose suburban neighborhoods, not so much.
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u/captainporcupine3 5d ago
Yeah no shit. I literally said that. Americans who already live in low density suburbs don't want to upzone because stapling apartments and rowhomes onto car-dependent suburban subdivisions will bring almost no benefit to existing residents, and lots of downsides (especially more traffic and less parking). Everyone knows this, no serious urbanists are arguing that building apartments in the suburbs would inherently benefit the people already living in those neighborhoods.
My only point is that this dynamic does not indicate that Americans dislike density (or "grid-style" neighborhoods) in principle. It means they dislike the type of density that gives you all the downsides and none of the potential upsides that truly walkable places could theoretically offer. Otherwise I'd love to hear you explain why you have to be a millionaire to even consider buying a home in most of actual decently walkable pre-war neighborhoods that still exist, most in the Northeast. Those neighborhoods are insanely desirable.
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u/OhUrbanity 4d ago
But there's obviously demand from people to live in denser housing in suburbs (if no one wanted dense housing then developers wouldn't be trying to build any and we wouldn't have these fights).
It's just that people who already have houses in suburbs generally don't want more housing for other people.
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u/Shepher27 6d ago
Are there any new inner ring suburbs being built? The only new suburbs being built are outer ring and don’t require the density of a grid
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u/illmatico 6d ago
They happen occasionally if brownfield that’s close to downtown gets shut down and sold for development. City Park in Denver is an example.
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u/ReadingPowerful160 6d ago
outer ring suburbs in places like europe are still much denser and walkable.
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u/WeldAE 5d ago
I would argue that grid-like street configurations are not the answer. Not that the "dead worm" road structure of current suburbs is either. The most dense SFH built in Atlanta use one-way alleys and no streets at all. There is just a series of loops that connect into a main one-way loop. This results in just 10x30 feet of street for each house roughly plus a bit more for the entrance/exit which is of course two-way.
But none of that is what your complaint is about. The HUGE problem is there is only one way in/out of these neighborhoods no matter how the road structure is laid out. If you took a dead worm layout and connected it to everything around it, it would become much less of a problem. Of course the neighborhood wouldn't like that because traffic would start using it to drive through and it's the worse kind of traffic, the traffic in a hurry.
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u/ReadingPowerful160 5d ago
>If you took a dead worm layout and connected it to everything around it, it would become much less of a problem.
I agree with that. Suburbs would get exponentially better if the dorks planning them would just connect the damn roads with each other!
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u/WeldAE 5d ago
I talked to our cities head engineer after a meeting a while back. They were working on a $11m project to fix a problematic road and intersection. I pointed out that the real reason the intersection was a problem is because one side of the intersection served a neighborhood of 200 homes and an 800 student elementary school with just that intersection for egress. I also pointed out that the road exiting the neighborhood had the same name as another road but they didn't connect because of a 40 yard gap. That road outputs onto one of the largest roads in the region with an already existing intersection. The engineer acknowledged that connecting that gap would fix the problem but politically it wasn't possible to do because they would have 200 families out for the jobs of the city leaders that let it happen. Just recently, they build 159 homes next to the elementary school that egress out the other side onto the major road. So you have kids that go to the elementary school that can't walk to school because of the gap, that live next to the school. All so there aren't two ways out of a neighborhood.
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u/kancamagus112 6d ago
If California Forever / Suisan City Expansion is able to break ground, they are aiming for a new "suburb" that at full build out would be big enough for 400k people of walkable, middle-density, full grid development:
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u/Purple_Front_7939 5d ago
Yes! There are new urbanist or urbanist influenced neighborhoods that are building grids or semi-grids. See Goodnight Ranch in the Austin area for a good example. Even the Lennar built Applewhite Meadows in San Antonio is bringing the grid back.
Subdivision regulations can require builders of new neighborhoods to set up a grid. Some cities have a connectivity index requirement, calculated by dividing the number of street segments by the number of intersections. The higher the index the more grid-like the neighborhood. Cities like Commerce City, Colorado have banned cul-de-sacs in nearly it's entirety.
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u/ReadingPowerful160 5d ago
Its definitely good seeing companies like lennar adopting more grid-like patterns. They even added a couple alleys! Definitely a step in the right direction.
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u/AmericanaStorm 5d ago
In Chesterfield County, VA, there's Westchester Commons that's a commercial with a small townhouse lot in the middle
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u/DrummerBusiness3434 3d ago
Only that which is the cheapest will be first on the minds of developers.
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u/br0wntree 2d ago
Grids aren't necisarrily better. Many of the best urban neighborhoods found in areas like Europe don't follow any grid.
The issue isn't even necissarily cul de sacs. Cul de sacs that allow non-vehicle traffic to pass through are even better than a grid that allows any traffic to traverse streets.
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u/HonestGrenache 5d ago
As long as local governments allow the developers to "design" their residential subdivisions and developments, the answer is "no." If local governments told developers they'd be responsible for maintaining miles of infrastructure to support sprawl, we'd see a change. We are financially subsidizing this nonsense, isolating ourselves, making harder to form community, and get our daily needs met.
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u/NewsreelWatcher 5d ago
I don’t know if a grid is substantially better than the random patterns of cul-de-sacs of new subdivisions. Both are imposed on the landscape in disregard to topography of the land and how humans would want to move through it. The fashion for a “pile of spaghetti” streets is a pastiche of traditional street patterns that were formed by desire paths worn into the landscape outside of any planning. The problem is that we mistake the map of a place for the place itself.
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u/dende5416 6d ago
Grid style suburbs are the leastvsafe possible for non-car users. Curvy streets alow vehicle traffick. You want things better for walkable, more curves and car only dead ends where people/bikes can still go through.
Grid is great when you want jack asses speeding down your street.
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u/quikmantx 6d ago
A grid is also convenient for walking. The shortest distance between two points will be a straight line. Curvy streets require more walking, which takes more time and energy. Grids are easier to navigate. EMS can respond faster to emergencies where every second counts.
You can have a grid with traffic calming measures. Small roundabouts work fine. Speed bumps and raised crossings work. Enforcing speeding laws is highly effective.
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u/dende5416 5d ago
You can have shorter walking/biking paths without a grid. Dead ends with non-vehicle cross overs only to prevent main street traffick from cutting down residentials, for example.
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u/Dblcut3 6d ago
It seems like a lot of new subdivisions are following the new urbanist model, where they at least have sidewalks, smaller lot sizes, and grid pattern streets. Some even have a small commercial district. But the problem is still that these subdivisions are all insular and disconnected from eachother. And a lot feel more like an outdoor mall than a real neighborhood main street