How great could a neighborhood be?

Last year I wrote about my lifelong quest to find the best place to raise my kids. Our neighborhood in Denver is wonderful, but it still falls short in a few ways. While the streets are mostly safe, a few have high volumes of through traffic and are very dangerous. Our school situation is complicated. And, because neighborhoods like this are so rare, it’s very expensive.

That last point is worth emphasizing. Earlier this year I wrote about City Life, that ineffable quality that about half of Americans want, but less than 10% of Americans get to live in. The supply of City Life falls far below the demand.

I think about this constantly, and I keep coming back to the same conclusion. More Americans deserve to live in neighborhoods where they and their kids can truly flourish, and the only way we can make that happen is to build more of them.

The barriers are daunting — America stopped building organic, walkable city life because we made it illegal. But the barriers are also falling. There are jurisdictions today that are willing to cut the red tape. So I think it’s worth asking: what could we do if we really tried? What could we create if we looked past the obstacles and aimed to build neighborhoods that were radically better? Not just better than the commodity housing we build today, but even better than the historic neighborhoods we love?

Let me tell you about the neighborhood I want to live in, and the nine ideas that shape it.

A complete pedestrian network

To make this very simple: just put the cars in the back.

As a parent, I have to be constantly vigilant with my kids in any area where there’s traffic. Young kids don’t understand how fast cars move, how “suddenly” they can reach an intersection, or how difficult it is for drivers to see them (especially in an era of ever-increasing hood heights). In an environment that’s completely safe, parents can actually relax and let their kids roam.

Everyone in the suburbs wants to live on the cul-de-sac — and they’re right! But we can do even better. Limit through traffic to the perimeter, create a rear “alley” network for convenient car and utility access, and provide a continuous pedestrian network in front.

Now everyone gets the benefits of the cul-de-sac, but without being isolated by circuitous walking paths.

With the right design, we can connect large areas, anywhere from 12 to 24 blocks at a time, where kids can walk everywhere without crossing traffic.

Those single-purpose rights of way are actually more practical. Compared to typical wide suburban streets, low-speed alleys in the back are cheaper and safer, while the pedestrian streets in front feel nicer even though they require less land.

A beautiful school at the center

School is effectively a kid’s job. It’s where they spend most of their time during the week, and one of the most likely places for them to meet friends. It’s also an anchor for the social life of a community, as the parents and grandparents end up meeting and getting to know each other as well.

A family-friendly neighborhood should have a school at the center, connected to the homes by pedestrian streets, safe enough that even young children could walk or bike there on their own.

Now, there are many neighborhoods that have public schools in or adjacent to them, but, unfortunately, we live in an environment of slowly declining school enrollment and school closures. This means families can’t take the presence of current neighborhood schools for granted.

So a school in the neighborhood isn’t enough; the neighborhood needs a way to help keep the school open, even if the school flexes up and down in size over time. How to do this is an open question I’m still exploring. Perhaps something like a public charter, where the neighborhood has a stake in school governance, provides additional financial support, or both.

Lastly, the school should be beautiful because kids deserve to go to a beautiful school.

Actual backyards and garages

Two appealing things you mostly find in older neighborhoods: nice backyards and decent-sized garages. For families, these are both awesome!

Here’s something surprising. The biggest backyard I ever had was when I rented (half of) a Victorian row home in San Francisco. The home was on a mere 25′ wide lot, but the house sat very near the front (it had about an 8′ deep front yard) and was built all the way to the sides of the lot. The result was a 2,000-plus square-foot house with about a 25′ × 50′ backyard. We loved it.

More recently, our home in Denver has a 25′ × 25′ garage in the back. Our house is only a three-bedroom with under 1,400 square feet, but that garage is so big that it makes the house comfortable for our family of six. We have room to park both cars, our collection of eight bicycles (yes, I know), and everyone’s ski gear.

So let’s combine those two. Let houses be built close to the street, allow them to use the full width of the lot (allow, not require!), and create lots deep enough that you can fit a full-size garage. With this approach, even a smaller home on a smaller lot can still feel large and spacious.

A broad mix of housing types

So far I’ve emphasized kids and families, but the wonderful secret is that, when we design to make things great for kids, we’re making them better for everyone.

A safe, walkable environment benefits anyone who can’t drive. It benefits anyone who needs mobility scooters or other assistive devices. It benefits grandparents who reach a point that they need their grandchildren to come visit them.

And a positive social environment, where it’s lovely to stroll outside and easy to meet people, is especially great for teenagers and young adults.

A neighborhood that’s a win for all kinds of people should be open to all kinds of people, and that means providing homes for all ages and stages of life. That can range from small apartments and backyard cottages to walk-ups, courtyard buildings, roommate houses, and, of course, townhomes and detached homes. A great neighborhood would offer all of the above in a variety of sizes and price points.

A genuine town center

Many suburban developments call themselves “town centers,” but are actually destination retail developments with somewhat nice walkways through the parking lots. There’s nothing wrong with destination retail, but that’s not what a neighborhood needs.

The best neighborhoods have a civic, social anchor at the center. A park where friends hang out. The place everyone would know to meet for the community festival.

The development around the town center should include some retail, but skip the chain stores and offer small spaces for local businesses instead. Shop houses. Market halls. A real town center might include office, hospitality, apartments, civic buildings, and whatever else the community needs. Retail isn’t the point — serving the community’s social needs is the point.

And one of the most important needs is a place to start a business.

An entrepreneurial incubator

A neighborhood without jobs isn’t a neighborhood; it’s just a dormitory of varying size and shape. The best neighborhoods contain a lot of jobs and, more than that, make it easy to start a business.

Partly that means there should be small spaces available for rent. The bottom of the ladder might be a kiosk at the town square, a stall in a market hall, a converted garage at an alley corner, or the front room of a shop house. The community could have a makerspace near the center and maker-oriented houses with room for (even) bigger garages or small workshops or greenhouses in the back. And, if possible, there should be some office and light industrial space around the edges.

Rectangular blocks with a navigational naming scheme

The street grid is one of the best, most distinctive things about American cities. It works for places of any size, from tiny farm towns to our largest megacities. The Main Street neighborhoods America loves the most are gridded.

We got away from grids in large part because through traffic sucks and nobody wants to deal with it. But if our neighborhood has a dedicated pedestrian network and a rear + perimeter car network, then through traffic isn’t a problem.

Curvilinear streets create lots of extra wedges of land that aren’t buildable. Some people get extra big backyards, some people get extra tiny backyards, and everything has to be a little more spread out. By comparison, when you subdivide land into simple, rectangular blocks, you end up with more lots. Not smaller lots, more lots of the same size. That makes the neighborhood more economical.

The only thing better than a grid is a navigational grid. Those of us lucky enough to live in old cities that follow this pattern can hear any address and know, with hardly any effort, how near or far that location is. If you live at the corner of First and Ash, and someone tells you they live at Seventh and Beech, you can just know that’s six blocks over and one block up.

The navigational element may seem irrelevant in an age where everyone has GPS, but kids on bikes don’t have GPS! And, even if you’re an adult with a phone, it’s still incredibly handy to be able to hear the cross streets for any location and immediately know where that is relative to you.

So, grids are great, and we should build them again.

The ability to extend in any direction

Modern development is typically designed as closed-off islands. There’s usually one way in and out from some arterial or circulator road, and then all the circulation is private, internal to the subdivision. Even if a neighborhood isn’t officially “gated,” the street pattern effectively closes it off. That means that when the subdivision is fully developed, the party is over. Other projects can be built nearby, but they’ll also be islands, and together they’ll form a sort of archipelago of disconnected places that you have to commute between.

Not so with our beloved historic neighborhoods. Our older cities were built one parcel at a time, the grid from one neighborhood connecting directly (if imperfectly) into the next neighborhood. Over time, as communities grew, the boundaries between subdivisions became fuzzy. One of the joys of living in an older city is walking down a street and watching the pieces around you subtly change, even as it’s all part of a greater connected whole.

This is how it should be. A great neighborhood will draw people in. The response should be to grow, not to lock the gates.

A neighborhood’s development code should allow it to incrementally infill and grow upover time. But a great neighborhood should also be designed so that it could seamlessly extend into adjacent land, which opens the door to many more people.

A culture of dynamism and growth

Neighborhoods aren’t meant to be static, but built up incrementally and allowed — encouraged! — to mature and grow over time. What starts as one neighborhood becomes a connected series of neighborhoods, and eventually a recognizable new city. That’s how this country was built — but it’s not how we think of things today.

The prevailing culture in post-war America assumes that everything is built all at once to a finished state. A great new neighborhood would work against that, and re-establish a culture of dynamism and growth.

Just to give a small illustration, a development company could cultivate this by setting and celebrating community milestones around growth. When we reach a hundred residents, we’ll open the cafe! When we hit two hundred homes, we’ll open the pre-school. When we hit five hundred residents, we’ll build the market hall, etc.

If you traveled back to 1900 and described all this to a person on the street, they might look at you funny and say, “Isn’t that how things work already?” This is what we used to do. We should do it again, just without the through-traffic.

I recently wrapped up my sabbatical and am starting my next project. This is it. My goal is to build the next great American neighborhood, to learn as much as I can in the process, and, hopefully, to create a company that can repeatably build wonderful, prosperous, dynamic neighborhoods until there’s room for every American who wants to live in one.

I’m just getting started, and I’m going to need a lot of help. I’ll need to find investors, to find a supportive jurisdiction that will permit something different, to find a suitable site, and to build a great team that can actually do this work. If you’d like to be part of this effort, or if you know someone I should talk to, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach me via email (andrew at freerange dot city), here on Substack, or via LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to support my work, the best way is to share it.

Studies show that parents’ perceived traffic risk changes family behavior, resulting in lower levels of children’s active travel, play, and exercise. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/11/7/e047062

A complaint I have about the typical New Urbanist, or “Traditional Neighborhood Development,” projects is that they whiff on this so hard. Most of these projects put in substantial alleyways to provide rear car access, but then still build out an entire “normal” car-oriented street network in front. Building this way is more expensive (the developer has to pay for two road networks), and the resulting houses are worse off — they need front yards to buffer them from traffic, and end up with tiny backyards… Much like the stroad is the futon of transportation, I think this “street in front and in back” design is the worst of both worlds.

Every kid is different, and there’s no magic age at which point every kid can safely navigate (and stay on task!), but in my experience, most kids could get to and from school on their own by first or second grade IF the route to school did not require crossing traffic.

This assumes there’s some vacant land adjacent to the neighborhood, and that the developer, or the community, could either acquire that land or partner with them to extend the neighborhood over time. If a new neighborhood started out “landlocked,” then I think the best approach would be to thoughtfully connect to and integrate with the surroundings as well as possible.