I keep saying people want walkable communities, but apparently I am wrong

A Pew survey finds that only young lefties want to walk to restaurants and schools.

This is fine.

Some longtime readers complain that I am always pushing multifamily living in 15-minute walkable and bikeable cities and dumping on suburbia. This is not a new trope in discussions about cities; I still remember Joe Mysak writing in Bloomberg back in 2008:

Lots of thinking people see the U.S. undergoing a vast demographic shift, with millions of people moving back to cities. The suburbs, and those places beyond the suburbs, the exurbs, will dry up and blow away. The notion appeals especially to people who like to think they'll be in charge after the revolution. They would apparently love nothing more than for the population to be confined to Soviet-style concrete-block high-rises and be forced to take state-run streetcars to their little jobs at the mill.

All these years later, it appears that the suburbs and exurbs are as popular as ever. A new study from Pew Research finds that the majority of Americans don’t care about walkability; 57% would rather live where “houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away.” This is up from 53% four years ago.

We are also seeing more of what journalist Bill Bishop called “the big sort” where “Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into homogeneous communities.” Pew’s survey finds that older white Republicans prefer suburbia, whereas younger Democrats prefer walkability and a bit more density.

“About three-quarters of conservative Republicans (77%) say they would prefer more spread-out communities with larger houses, as do 63% of moderate and liberal Republicans. In contrast, 65% of liberal Democrats express a preference for smaller houses in more walkable places.”

The change from pre-pandemic 2019 to 2013 is interesting; there seems to have been a big bump in people wanting more space in 2021, with it settling back down in 2023. But we still have the majority of Americans preferring driveable to walkable communities.

The houses are changing too. According to the Wall Street Journal, houses are shrinking. “For many Americans, homeownership may be attainable only if they give up a dining room.” The average size of a new home has shrunk 10% to 2420 square feet.

Most builders and architects follow the same basic playbook to produce tighter, more efficient living spaces. They are axing dining areas, bathtubs and separate living rooms. Secondary bedrooms and loft spaces are shrinking and sometimes disappearing.  At the same time, they are increasing the size of multiuse rooms like kitchens and great rooms. Shared spaces like bunk rooms and jack-and-jill bathrooms, which are located between and shared by two bedrooms, are on the rise. In some cases, the kitchen island has become the only eating area in the home.

Contradicting this, Bloomberg notes another trend, with 48% of new houses having four or more bedrooms.

This might seem a little perverse in a country where almost two-thirds of households now consist of one or two people, and only 21% of four or more. But there are explanations. One is that apartments in the US have headed in the opposite direction, with 52% of multifamily units completed in 2022 consisting of one-bedrooms or studios, the highest percentage since that data series started in 1978. Another is that a lot of those extra bedrooms in new single-family houses aren’t really intended for people to sleep in.

Many of those extra rooms are for home offices or gyms. So whether we are working or working out, we are withdrawing to our little private worlds in our driveable communities.

In Azure Magazine this month, I write about a different world, where there is no single-family zoning, 80% of the population rents instead of owning their home, there are transit and bike lanes everywhere, and people happily raise families in apartments, often living in buildings that are a mix of subsidized and market rents. The Economist magazine calls it the most liveable city in the world, scoring a perfect 100 for stability, healthcare, education and infrastructure — that last metric encompassing the high quality of its housing and public transport. I quoted Seattle architect Michael Eliason:

“ Vienna is constantly working to improve itself - and to prioritize equity, sustainability, and the environment. It has built some of the best new urban districts globally, numerous Passivhaus buildings, a broad array of decarbonized buildings, and social housing with amenities and community spaces rarely found elsewhere. Vienna is all in on these issues and doing so many things right.”

It seems in North America, we are doing so many things wrong, becoming less stable, more divided, and sorting ourselves into walkable vs. drivable, with the majority preferring the latter. It makes it much harder to build carbon-efficient houses or get people out of their cars, and don’t even mention the idea of 15-minute cities!

I have been struggling for an hour to figure out how to end this post because I always try to be positive and keep saying that we know what to do to solve our climate problems. But it is hard to be positive when you just see more division and polarization every day, and it feels like we are just going to watch everything go up in flames through the windshield of our pickup truck.