Is It Time to Stop Building Suburbs? 

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This video is a great example of how suburban-style development doesn't have to suck. The sad thing about the US is that it equates suburbs with sprawl and anti-human car-centric design: This doesn't have to be the case! I actually like the suburbs (I just bought a home in one). But whenever I ask for more pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, so many Americans look at me like I want every city to be NYC with 20-story high-rises. Now I can show them this video to explain what I want, so thank you for making it.

I _need_ the "reimagining" chapter as a RU-vid short, I always try to explain what it would look like to friends

do not stop building suburbs,stop building car centric suburbs

I’ve probably left a comment before, but this is basically the ideal argument for zoning reform. It won’t force you to change your lifestyle, but it’ll open up new lifestyle opportunities for those looking for something different. This is something that I think is much more practical in America without going full Netherlands bike and train network

You didn't even mention public transit in this: traditional suburbs have basically no place to put a bus, but in the new layout presented, that town square would be a perfect place to have a bus stop. And if you have multiple neighborhoods like this right next to each other, you could eventually connect them with a tram quite easily as well; allowing people to visit places other than just their own little community, which makes room for even more diversity.

9:31 Ngl, this neighborhood looks like an absolute dream, although mindbogglingly rare (and as a result, expensive) in the US.

it's simple. delete all the zoning laws, throw HOAs in the garbage, and open businesses without parking lots directly inside the suburbs. vote me for US president 2036

I live in the suburbs. I can't go for long walks because there are very few sidewalks and there are too many bicycle -haters . Riding bicycle is scary in the suburbs because suburbanites thinks bicycles and cyclists are stupid. I plan on moving closer to city limits .

The real problem with car dependent suburbs is that they have the disadvantages of both urban and rural areas and the advantages of neither.

That cute little mixed-used neighborhood with multiple housing densities seems like an impossible dream gazing out on seemingly endless seas of tract homes :(

I don't think I've ever seen a video that so perfectly articulates what I want in a neighborhood. I like driving and want to own a car, but driving everywhere is expensive. I'd love to be able to live in a neighborhood that has small stores and restaurants nearby, while still preserving the ability to drive further when I want to. Great job, man.

Thank you for being one of the only urbanists on RU-vid you doesn’t ignore rural people. I know for some of our community, there is no sympathy for the latter because of politics or living style, but urbanism doesn’t just require thinking *about* cities. Rural and suburban areas are also affected and there is a huge untapped market of ideas about how those areas are also affected. If we do not think about those in those areas in urbanism, they will only come to loathe the ideology (and rightfully so if it doesn’t consider them). There are positives to thoughtful urbanism for rural lives, but we need to acknowledge them and advocate for them as well.

I don't own and can't afford a car. I currently live in Manhattan in NYC because I'm disabled and I need to have things like groceries and doctors nearby and walkable. I would never move to a stereotypical suburb, but I'd love to move to a suburb that has the type of things you need at a reasonable and safe walking distance.

"People like living in the suburbs" Well no, not exactly. People like living in their own home. Now where that home is or what form that home takes that varies a lot, yeah a good chunk of people like living in detached homes with yards, but not all of them. If there were also a lot of duplex, triplex, rowhomes, 2, 3 and 4 story multifamily homes and apartments built, then the people that don't feel like they NEED to live in a detached home with it's own separate yard, would choose to live in those homes instead, especially since those homes are cheaper. There isn't anything inherently wrong with single family homes, the issue arises when it essentially is the only choice for someone that wants a home.

I love these videos. As a civil engineer I have some influence on how the neighborhoods are designed, but not enough to completely make these pedestrian friendly. It takes more people, especially voters to know what they’re missing out on. In America, car is the only way they know how to get around, so it’s viewed as a symbol of freedom. What they don’t know is that they have a lack of freedom because they are restricted to cars, so when you mentioned public transportation It’s viewed as an attack on freedom. When I fully explain why alternatives are needed, they finally realize what they’re missing out on.

Another absolute banger from Streetcraft, this will be my new intro video to "orange-pill" my friends on why suburban development is so unsustainable. Your motion graphic design in the videos makes it SO CLEAR on alternative solutions to the land-use issues we face. Thank you for your work! Keep up the great content! PS - the "walkable & bikeable & liveable" sticker on your Etsy shop is straight 🔥

I can't get over how good your graphics are for explaining concepts. The two versions of a new development on empty land were fantastic. I also appreciated how you went to a real place in person and heard from people there. That goes a long way to making these concepts land.

As a Brit, it's baffling to me how a country has become so fixated on the idea that suburbs = large single family homes ... we have plenty of suburbs in the UK, but the most common type of property in them is semi-detached (duplex), and pretty much everyone will have a local grocery store and a school and a few other facilities within 15 minutes walk (and often much less!). The model of development that you sketched out with a mix of low-rise apartments, town houses, small detached homes and large detached homes, a few shops, a school and a park is basically the standard pattern for any large development. Even smaller developments that aren't big enough to warrant shops and a school will have a mix of housing types. It makes life so much more convenient!

This is normal in 🇬🇧. I find it weird here in 🇺🇸 i cant walk to a corner shop to go buy milk eggs etc. Instead i have to get in a car n drive 10 mins.

I've seen so many suburban homes that are run down and poorly maintained by the overworked people who bought them. Most of us don't need that space, and in fact cannot take care of a big yard and an expensive car. Why should we all have to live like that?

7:00 "just because you might want to live in a single family suburban home, doesn't mean that building other housing types is gonna take away your single family suburban home. Instead it opens up more options for more people." Ugh, so obvious. So perfectly said.

streetcraft has to be my favorite urbanism channel right now. Channels like not just bikes seems to just complain, but this channel actually talks about real solutions. Good work guys!

You've earned a sub, these are some of the best videos I've ever seen exploring this topic. I get tired of the snarky, self-righeous tone of a lot of the RU-vid urbanists, so your very balanced, sensible, easy to understand explanation of these things is a real breath of fresh air. The animations and presentations are really helpful to, you've done a great job making urban planning and zoning reform understandable, and I love how your whole vibe is wanting to suggest solutions to make improvements to our towns and cities instead of just criticizing how they've been built or the lifestyles of people living in them. Keep up the great work!

This is an incredible video. The balance you strike between educational infographics, storytelling, and actionable advice is fantastic. Keep doing what you’re doing, Streetcraft. If you’re a viewer like me, write to your local governments about these issues, it’s better for everyone!

There are already countless urbanist channels that pretty much preach the same thing (Allan Fisher, City Nerd, Not Just Bikes, etc.). However, this is the only channel that is not entirely condescending towards the concept of suburban living. The fact of the matter is that suburban living (regrettably) is the most practical and financially attainable mode of decent living for the American middle class whether we like it or not. This channel seems genuine in its attempt to educate its viewers that we can at least make suburban living more enriching through design, but all the while not alienating the people (suburban dwellers) that probably need to hear it the most. Thank you Streetcraft for making these videos. Can't wait for the next one!

It’s also worth noting that many Americans have been propagandized to hate apartments. So the desire for single family housing may be somewhat artificial

Maaaaaaannnn I absolutely LOVE your content & your editing!! I relate to your content as a Mexican who migrated to the US and continues to be annoyed and shocked by how anti-pedestrian the infrastructure and culture is here :( I've followed you on Instagram for a while and only just clicked on your RU-vid channel for the first time! Gold mine. Hope you continue to grow and create awesome things!

The only thing I wonder as a non-American when I see those video: why are people who call themselves "conservatives" in America sometimes against this kind of development? Having strong, walkable and human-sized communities ist the most traditional kind of development structure I could think of. People have built like this for hundreds of years, being for this kind of structure is the most conservative/traditionalist I could think of. Why are some American conservatives against this? 😅

As someone in Florida we are terrible at saving land

I'm a housing designer, and the common thing that really drives the entire design of new developments is car storage. People don't necessarily want long driveways and sprawling parking, but for a family of 4-5, that typically entails at least 1 car, often 2, which really screws up the lot for livable space at grade, unless you begin making these homes even larger to accommodate more vehicles. A 1600 sq. ft home built in the 1960s was considered palatial, but now, homes on average range between 2200-2600 sq. ft for a single family dwelling. And purchasers don't seem to be willing to give that up, even as the average household size has been decreasing over the decades. I am a big proponent of the architectural movement for selective urban infill, where a single family dwelling in an urban or suburban setting gets remodeled into a semi-detached or duplex, or larger lots add a secondary dwelling unit to them or even a standalone private business. Imagine living in the 'burbs, and you want to get a haircut, or you need to pick up a loaf of bread for breakfast. Normally you get in your car and drive at least 10 minutes away to the nearest grocery store or strip mall to get the goods and services you need. But imagine instead that there's a house on the corner that just converted their ground floor into a bakery, and 2 blocks away, someone opened a barber shop in their basement to cater to the neighborhood. Instead of moving an elderly person out of their home and away from familiar settings, they can downsize to a flat on the same property where they can live comfortably and still be close to family and friends. The entirety of North America is designed around car movements and placement, designing whole cities around roads, highways and parking lots. Instead of forcing people to rely on purchasing a vehicle, our cities and suburbs should be designed around the movement of people, and the facilitation of healthy living habits and comfortable environs that encourage people to engage with nature, not build over top of it. We vastly waste the land we already have in use, and it has not only exacerbated inequality and economic instability, it has damaged our ecosystems and natural resources too. It's also reinforced antiquated notions of "districts" that not only divide up cities according to building occupancy, but by age, income, and race as well. I love the concepts of intentional urban planning, designing spaces and interiors that support people where they live and work and play, because it fosters connection between community members, and contributes to better psychological health. There's a better balance to be struck between urban development and humane design, and I'm glad to see more places and forums discussing what that could look like for their communities.

A lot of us are really getting screwed by housing restrictions. There's a little building outside the baseball diamond at the school across the street. It used to just have a couple washrooms, a counter where they served hotdogs, and a little storage area, I would assume. It's probably like 12ft wide by 20ft long. a couple years ago, they added an upper level to it. I look at that little building and think "I could live in something like that". I'm just one guy. All I need is a kitchen, washroom, and an open space upstairs. I'm a musician, I make noise, so being detached from others is important. I don't need a backyard, I don't need a front yard, just gimme the little house and a place to park my car (that I may not need if the neighborhood is diverse enough), and I'd be happy. small homes like that aren't in the cards around here though.

Put a hold on sprawl, force developers to densify what we have. Economic output would increase.

Videos like this are the reason why I subscribed to him when he had less than 1k subscribers. A lot of channels just love to assume that everyone will live in an apartment and cars are the worst thing ever invented. This channel takes into account how real people wanna live and knows that people don't wanna just give up their cars for nothing.

I live in a new urbanist neighborhood that is very similar to the reimagining you beautifully demonstrated with your great graphics. It's mostly single family homes but they don't have a front yard and a front facing garage. Instead the homes have garages in the back facing alleys which cut through the blocks. There are also town homes, cottage courts, apartments, mixed use development, a school, a church, and some public parks. The neighborhood also has a much more walkable street layout with better connectivity and no cul-des-acs and it even has direct access to lovely open space with walking and biking trails that can take you pretty far. In a not so large piece of land they've managed to fit so much more and create an overall way more pleasant place to live and walk around. Unfortunately it all ends abruptly once you leave the neighborhood and it devolves into the typical suburban nonsense we're all too familiar with. It's a shame that my neighborhood isn't the standard because despite the design differences it still has the suburban feel that many people like while also being free of many of the typical flaws in standard American suburban development. If all neighborhoods were designed more like that, we abandoned the strip mall for a more main street style of commercial development, and if we had way better transit everywhere American surburbs wouldn't be so bad, in fact they would be pretty great places to live.

In retirement we moved from a house to a condo. We can walk to a large grocery store, 2 banks, a hardware store, an Amtrak station, a Chicago commuter train station, a pizza place, a Subway, a ice cream place, a hair salon, an accountant, a pet hospital, a bowling alley, a Dollar General, and some other business. We moved 2 miles from our original house where we could walk to a lot less stores. Our house was in a town, but there are miles of subdivisions south of this town with much fewer businesses in the mix.

Something that absolutely shocked me watching the section on your hypothetical suburb for 1,000 people was just how much parking you were able to include. One of the things that I hear from so many people who are against this type of development is that it will force people to walk, bike, and use transit because it will be impossible to use a car... and yet, you just demonstrated a community where walking, biking, and presumably if it were scaled, transit are all completely viable options while still providing ample room for people who want to drive. If anything, I can predict a lot of urbanists being outraged at just how much parking you included.

Instead of creating denser communities where people actually want to live they just make more soulless corporate housing.

Seeing nature be destroyed by suburban subdivisions saddens me greatly.

Unfortunately, anyone proposing these new urbanism suburb subdivisions haven’t solved the affordability problem for the people who work in the shops that are allowed to exist (no six-figure salaries are moving in without office buildings with parking lots-exceptions apply). Even the apartments are built for people who typically get paid at least twice what the shop workers do!

I honestly don’t mind living in the suburbs, but I live in DC where the suburbs are easily connected to the city via transit if you don’t want to drive. I currently live in a more urban area, but I wouldn’t mind living further out if I could get a single family home with some land. The suburban areas should be a bit more diverse so everyone could live how they like. Every suburb doesn’t need to be densely built/populated, but some should be.

Would we see neighborhoods like this become more affordable as they build more? They tend to be very expensive because of the demand.

Another thing, housing prices in the suburbs make it impossible for lower-income residents to buy a house, even residents who have lived in a community like Old Miakka for generations. They end up being squeezed out by more affluent newcomers who, because they are more affluent, are catered to by local governments. This is happening where I live in Michigan. Recently voters in my town were asked to approve a bond issue for the school as well as a millage increase for the library. I went to one public meeting over the bond issue and all I heard was homeowners, homeowners, homeowners. I stood up and said, Not all of us are homeowners, we have a sizable rental population here in town, what about us? Do we not exist? You want us to vote YES on YOUR projects that will primarily benefit homeowners in the new subdivisions because even though they pay property taxes, the reason we need all these new things and a larger school is because all these new families are moving in with their children, so yes, you are catering to them in a very real sense and encouraging them to move here. That is where most of the new students are coming from. Meanwhile, if you are not a homeowner, if you do not have children in school, if you are a senior, this community increasingly is not for you. The sad thing is that many corporate investors like Blackrock are well aware of this situation. There are websites that advise if you want to get into owning a mobile home park as an "easy" source of passive income, look for a community like mine where average house prices run way beyond what many lower-income folks are able to pay, and which has very little actual low-income housing available. As long as what you charge for lot rent is less than the going rate for apartments of similar size and certainly far less than a mortgage payment, you are guaranteed a more or less "trapped" population who cannot move anywhere else at least not very easily. Now throw in a natural disaster or two, like a hurricane or tornado, and there are going to be a lot of folks in a world of hurt whose only crime is they weren't lucky enough to afford one of those nice suburban houses. But nobody cares what happens to them.

"Gentle" density for infill within existing single family home neighborhoods may be fine, but new development and infill that's not fully within a single family neighborhood needs to be much denser. It's not about whether or not something is or isn't suburban. It's more about how car dependent a place is. We have to reduce our dependency on cars. It's unrealistic for most places to completely toss the car, but we can do a lot to enable more people to be less dependent on them for literally everything.

In the rest of the world we build wall-to-wall houses with a patio and 5 people families live perfectly fine. You could use the English high density house layouts.

Such a good channel. Love how all the logic in this video is presented, the way the visuals flow makes it so much easier to understand to the untrained eye. I've been looking at quite a bit of similar content for the past few months; the portion about tax revenue wasn't even something I heard or considered when thinking about the downsides of current suburban design, along with the partial solution of cottage developments. Currently a civil engineer undergrad, but this is definitely convincing me to go for the urban design minor I've been thinking about recently. Will definitely be sharing this with friends in order to get them hooked on city planning like I am (in a healthy way of course)!

Man as a European, I gotta say those overly clean suburbs with hundreds of identical homes look like the most horrible place on earth..

This is how suburbs tend to be built in the uk. Tbh, they still sprawl. I think were're at a point where we need to focus on increasing density in already urbanised areas. There's lots of places where density could increase but the same detatched or semi-detached houses keep being built. I'm a big fan of row homes as you can fit alot more houses into the same space. Developers don't like building them though as they can't charge as much for them

We need zoning that allows shops and houses on the same street yet leaves skyscrapers, factories, and large supermarkets away. Thank you for showing us examples of what’s good rather than what’s wrong

I literally grew up in Myakka and moved to the Netherlands for a walkable suburban life because it’s just available in America. The suburban sprawl in manatee county and Florida is just the worst.

Heart of the problems: Stroads/traffic flow, large scale single use developments and building/parking layouts

This is one of the best balanced how to improve suburbs video I’ve seen.

There’s a development in Utah called Daybreak that attempted this kind of development and failed dramatically. They basically just managed to cram more people into a smaller space. No extra places to shop or work really. So it’s not too walkable either. They got the “put more houses in” part right, but completely flopped on the “make it easy for residents” part by not putting businesses or offices in. As a result, everyone needed multiple cara and the skinny roadways could not handle that kind of street parking.

You know it is a suburban American hellscape when you see every house having a larger garage than it has living space.

Some of this is starting to change. Most developments around Houston now require schools to be built by the developers, parks and retention-pond usage areas are becoming more popular, and in larger developments sets of apartment buildings, duplexes, townhomes, and occasionally cottages are appearing. They're still very bad at including commercial and mixed-use spaces, and most middle-scale or small-scale developments don't do any of this. (An example is the massive, ridiculously-sized development south of I-10 between the Katy Love's and eastward. There's probably still too many single-family homes, but other kinds of development are sprinkled throughout.) Personally, I want to live in the countryside and for it to remain rural for the rest of my time there, but the current urban sprawl is removing those spaces. Hopefully, developers see that this way of building a whole community, instead of just houses, will pay off for them in the long run. If they do, they'll start emphasizing this kind of development, and our rural areas can remain rural. I really don't want what's left of the piney-woods and prairies of Texas to disappear. It's beautiful as is, and something entirely different when "developed" into cookie-cutter homes.

I really appreciate your takes on how surburbs can be done right. I really dislike how many other of these kinds of channels seem to not understand why people decide to live in either rural or suburban areas, but your focus on fixing suburbs instead, trying to keep the positives that should exist in that system is great. The way you lay out examples really helps.

What I love about this channel is that the solutions shown are attainable. The graphics are also great and the interview at the beginning adds a nice personal touch!

This is a fantastic video! I'll be sharing it far and wide!

Growing up in the Suburbs is the worst. I wish my parents never moved us from NYC.

I love living in older, walkable urban neighborhoods (even if it's in a small town of less than 10,000 people), where I can walk or bike to restaurants, parks, churches, stores, car repair shops, or the post office. I love being able to get outside and enjoy being outdoors while doing my daily tasks, without having to drive everywhere. But the downside is that my yard is pretty small, and I'm closer to neighbors than I would prefer. And maybe I feel a little bit closed in and away from nature, or maybe the neighborhood has some run-down houses that are an eyesore. Crime would also be a problem in some places. I also love living in a rural area, where I have at least one or two acres of my own land and good separation from my neighbors, and I feel like I'm living out in the natural world. But the downside is that I have to drive to go pretty much anywhere. I feel like the suburbs are the worst of both worlds. You don't get a lot of land or good separation from your neighbors. You don't feel like you're living amongst nature. But you also have to drive everywhere. There's nothing to walk to other than more houses. And that's basically why I've never lived in the suburbs. I've always chosen to live in a walkable urban neighborhood or in a rural area, and my parents chose the same (so those were the only two options I knew growing up).

The biggest problem seems to be that any time something forward thinking and well designed like this comes up, it’s too prohibitively expensive to live in and ends up failing due to no one wanting to pay the prices

I love those colorful houses at 3:42! They’re so cute and you’re telling me they have minimal yards too? Sign me up!

5:16 I would just walk through the trees. IDC if its against the rules or whatever, I'm not walking all the way around.

That was a brilliant animation and clear description when you reworked the single zoning suburb into a more dense, mixed use neighbourhood. That needs to be made into a short to be shared! I think that would reach a very wide audience!

This is really just brilliant stuff. Love the visualizations and I was crushed to learn that they scrapped the whole plan haha. Even the sponsor segment is good!

I LOVE that icecream shop analogy, I'm definitely stealing that one for any NIMBY encounters 😅😅

Great video! The part on local elections is especially important. The media will cover the presidential election 24/7, but for most of us, the races that have the greatest impact on our day-to-day lives are our local and county races

Just stumbled upon your videos and decided to sub here. I think you’re one of the few channels that gives a fair and balanced view while actually giving realistic solutions

Top notch. Thank you for continuing to lean into the storytelling that makes your videos stand out (and the graphics of course)

My question is just, why do people WANT this? They wouldn't build it if there were no demand, but to me living somewhere so heavily controlled and isolated from everything, where you are shut out from both human life and nature if your car breaks down, is unthinkable. I love the idea of suburban towns and villages like your demo (I'm situated near Pinecraft now, which has been pretty nice), but not single-family wastelands. ...Though, I question your choice of putting your notional family houses' backyards right in alligator territory. The gators might thank you, but little Billy's parents and Mr. Fluffins' owner definitely will not :P

This is the perfect all in one video explaining the problem with suburbia and had a solution too

I like how your channel also provides solutions to the problems we have 👏

As a resident of Pasco County, Florida, I am appalled at the paving over of this county; countless bland housing developments that look exactly alike, the widening of streets and roads, and the utter destruction of forests and wildlife habitat. It's not the bucolic place that I moved to 13 years ago. When will it end?

this video is great because I live in Sarasota.

The animations and explanations in this video make it so good. Ive been following urbanism for a while but have struggled to comprehend how a walkable suburb might look. Your video has helped me understand. I will definitely be showing this to whoever I can❤❤

I live in a "rural suburban" area. The issue is that they've ignored the mixed use aspect. You can tell they've already decided this is the "low income" area by the nearest retail options and the fact that we're virtually a food desert while also lacking the convenience of a bank or pharmacy or even a carwash adjacent to the nearby 5 gas station in a 4 mile radius. While it's somewhat walkable with minimal effort input into the planning of making it so, we're 100% isolated from the city we're adjacent to. Public transportation is non-existent. It took a megacorp moving practically into our backyard to get our roads expanded and modernized for the explosive traffic we'd been experiencing for years before. I visited a more upscale rural suburban neighborhood a few towns over, still on the outskirts of the city limits, and noticed even if their more expensive housing, golf court, community centers, etc., that they still have the same isolation issue & no mixed use planning at all. While it is extremely walkable, a vehicle is required for any type of retail or food needs as the nearest shopping area is, depending on where you live in the community, a good 10-15 min drive with most of it being through/getting out of the neighborhood. I've noticed in the city that the newer apts are incredibly good at being mixed use, in a walkable (& bike able!) area, close to public transportation & meeting all of the sweet spots of urban planning. Great for those who want to live in the hustle and bustle of city dwelling. Envious for the rest of us.

I love walkable suburbs, but I also don't want to deal with amazon packages and car tires being stolen. Not an easy balance. I really love seeing the modern neighborhoods that have farm land mixed into them too. Adds a fun flair.

This video completely fails to mention transit connectivity as well, especially at 4:39. Sure, having a walkable suburban neighborhood is nice and you can get amenities that are close together in a walkable suburban neighborhood, but what if someone wants to go to another part of the city/metropolitan area? In the example at 10:01 there is no transit connection at all, the example assumes that if you want to go to another part of a city/metropolitan area, you have to drive there. I like the idea of this but walkable suburban neighborhoods absolutely NEED reliable transit such as bus rapid transit, light rail, and regional rail.

Thank you for another really good video. The whole Sarasota-Bradenton developments are completely destroying all the agricultural land. Also traffic around the whole Lakewood Ranch is way worse despite being like 80 lanes wide.

Here’s an observation I noticed today, but have thought about before: The construction on I-75 over the Manatee River. The government is performing construction to combat traffic that builds in the area, but instead of fixing the issue itself, they are just moving it to the other side of the river! The same thing happened on the Apollo Beach exit just north of that. They were having traffic build up onto Big Bend Road, so instead of addressing the issue and redirecting or lowering traffic, they just made the on-ramp literally more than a half-mile long.

What about converting rail trails back into railway lines for better connectivity?

Suburbs NEED commercial and economic zoning, too- they NEED to have jobs and generate money to pay for their upkeep.

I absolutely love your videos! Could you try interviewing someone who was involved in the planning of these suburban projects too? After watching videos like this I feel way too often that these types of projects were decided on without sufficiently researching alternatives and speaking to locals. It would be nice to hear the other side and why they don't take your points into consideration! Thank you for the work you do, it's truly inspiring!!!

This is happening on a devastating scale in Colorado and Florida from what I’ve seen. In Florida the Flatwoods ecosystems that host increasingly rare, endangered species are disappearing at an alarming rate, and in Colorado the homes are built over prairie dog and antelope ecosystem which creates a ton of coexistence issues. Massachusetts is the only state I’ve been to that seems to have sufficient protections in place to prevent such blatant destruction of ecosystems since they recognized the value of their wetlands and forests a long time ago.

One can distinguish between the different classes of Developers to understand their incentives. Monopolized developers are state-wide or nation-wide conglomerations of housing portfolios and construction companies. Their incentive is to rely on economies of scale to produce housing in repeatable designs that are pre-approved by municipalities, known quantities for financiers, and reduced in complexity for materials sourcing and construction. Contrast that to Local developers, who rely on the financial institutions of their communities to build based on demand first. They can tailor their projects to customer or community needs, and they're not given the luxury of amortizing the construction and permitting capital expenditures over decades. Their costs need to be covered on the scale of years. All this means that local developers build incrementally, and monopolistic developers build massively.

Banger video.

I love your channel so much. And your graphics are TOP TIER! The graphic at 9:10 is what I see in my brain all day long, and now it's on a video for me to enjoy

The TikTok comments on this video were absolutely infuriating. Glad to see RU-vid has more sense.

This is super smart

Beautiful graphics! They complemented the provided information without seeming cluttered. Really well done 😊

The problem isn't suburbs, it's the lack of public transport. In our great grandparents' time there were streetcars in the middle of the road that linked suburban neighborhoods with the city center. And train stations in every small town so people could easily commute to work

Believe it or not, not everyone needs to own their own vehicle for transport. This is a very recent development in human timeline and its obviously a very flawed and wrong system.

I was just down in Olympia yesterday, and took a bus to a portion of Lacey called Hawkes Prairie. 30 years ago, it was just a restaurant that catered to people traveling along I-5 between Portland and Puget Sound. Today the restaurant is gone, and it’s sprawling big box stores and other stores, and fast food joints. Went by There to see Washington’s first Diverging Diamond Interchange.

There's a development a little like this being built near me, on what was previously a cattle farm. I think it's very exciting. I do have to chuckle a little though: It's being advertised as a "20 minute city", but every house has a 2-car or 3-car garage, and the parking lots will be huge. Until the commercial space is built in 5-10 years, people will have to drive 20+ minutes to work (plus people around here seem to fill up their garages with junk instead of parking their cars inside.)

I love the idea of denser houses. The main problem I have is bad neighbors. When I lived in apartments, all of my neighbors were psycho, loud, or rude. No one followed the community rules and I got cussed out more than once simply asking them to stop partying past 2am or to keep their dogs from barking for 8 hours straight while they were gone. That said, I want what this video proposes to be reality in the US!

Loved this buttttt get rid of the parking lots, that’s useful real estate for other stuff!

People don't want "low density" though. They just want the illusion of it, the calm of not having cars everywhere making noise, the option of having a private space where you won't be brothered by anyone... But that's also possible in a denser environment if it's designed to meet those requirements. You don't need a driveway, garage and 2 way street if the only time you take your car is to go out of town for the weekend or for some vacation so people us their car less often and thus reduce noise. You don't need a 2 acres lawn to have privacy (not that it even works) you can do with a terrace, a balcony or a small-ish garden with trees and plants to cut sight lines. You can provide more amenities for cheaper if not everyone has to walk/drive for kilometers on end to do anything outside of their home. The example shown at the end is a huge improvement in regards to what was shown before it, but it's still far from ideal and there's lots of ways to improve it : - reserving space for a few bus stops so people don't have to walk for 15minutes to get on the bus - making the center town square pedestrian only (with acces for deliveries) because there's no use for cars to go there - having more commercial spaces (offices mostly) along the road to cut off the sound of fast moving cars ...

Being slowly turned into exurbia in large parts of the country, especially the majority of the eastern third of the US, -often far beyond official metropolitan area bounderies. Most of these areas are predominately working to lower middle class and full of people from urban/suburban as well as rural backgrounds.

I'd like to challenge your assertion that interurbans wouldn't exist if people didn't want to live there. We don't really know where people want to live because for many decades in North America we've almost completely limited ourselves to building only either low-density, single-detached, car-dependent suburbs or hothead tower blocks. (There's a reason why it's called the "missing" middle.) Surveys ask people "what type of housing do you plan to buy", and if their only options are single-detached or condo towers they aren't going to say a 1,000sqft two-bedroom unit in a 4 storey walk-up. That type of survey only tells us which of two current options is more popular and gives us a false picture of what people supposedly want.

14:50 A year ago, few abonded warehouses were demolished and a park and shops were built in my town.