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Ironically the good business design philosophy has created the worst business case as suburbs fail to generate enough taxes while those ramshackle street front businesses do all the heavy lifting.

Yeah, I have to drive every morning 1 mile away from my house just to take my dog on a walk , which always feels so silly that I’m driving to go walk. 😭

Moved within my city simply so I could walk to coffee, pharmacy, grocery, and produce stores. The impact on my mental health has been nothing short of stunning. I’m a fan of cars, and depend on them more that I could ever appreciate (shipping, travel, emergency) but it’s the small daily dependencies on a vehicle that really wears me down.

One thing I will say - a lot of what can fix the suburbs is just allowing them to change, naturally, over time. One of the biggest things making it so hard for them to change is that, by law, most of these places simply can't. The car is here to stay, yes, but the suburbs don't have to stay frozen in time. Let the people who live in these places change them, as they see fit, shaping their communities in the way they want to see them. I think you'll be surprised just how urban these low density, more car dependent places can become, if we let them.

I'm a mechanic and racing fanatic, I love cars. But this is infuriating. Cars aren't really good at suburb and city commuting. They are big and annoying and expensive and often dangerous. Cars are better suited for remote and low population rural areas and for immediate response emergency or service vehicles. I live out in the Vermont hills and cars work alright, but the second I get to a town, or God forbid, traffic in Burlington, I just want to park and hop on a trolly or something.

Towns are good for families. People want to live in towns. Suburbs emulates some features of towns while leaving out the mixed use and productive centres. It's essentially the town without the money to keep everything funded. We don't need to tear down all the suburbs, we just need to convert them into towns. The people are there, so lets give them places to work, places to shop, and places to loiter around.

My #1 issue with suburbs are lack of connections between streets. There is a strip mall that is 1/4 mile from me by air. But because of the way the roads are laid out, I have to walk / drive over 2 miles to get there. Unless I cut through people's yards, and climb the 8 foot fence on the outside of the community. It's a problem with an easy solution.

Basically, they took into account the cost of building, but not of maintenance. Suburbia is much more expensive to maintain vs the taxes it produces than walkable spaces.

I wish someone would acknowledge that the land upon which suburbs were built wasn't empty waste land. People were there before people arrived from the city. Farmers, ranchers, their families, workers, their little townships with post offices, churches and rail stations. That land grew food. What motivated smaller farmers to stop farming and to sell? The centralization and monopolization of food production. That part never gets brought up in "suburb development" essays. Onto what preexisting space were suburbs built? Why was that land for sale? It wasn't empty nor unused.

Not gonna lie, I was skeptical when I saw the video title, I thought it was gonna be apologetic to auto manufacturers. I'm glad you didn't go down that route and actually did real research and highlighted how it was a systemic issue and not one singular person / group that led to this problem. Excellent video! Only part I disagree with is how you say this problem will probably never be fixed because it'd be too difficult to rebuild. Cars will never completely go away (nor should they, they have their uses), but difficult is not impossible, and cities continue to be developed and rebuilt every day. It's entirely possible, we just need to organize and build and maintain the pressure on the government until they comply. Like all progress, it will take work, a lot of work, but it's worth it.

I always appreciate the kind of context you provide. "Product of its time" isn't a dismissive term, it's the start of an explanation. When you do urbanist content, you ever collaborate with Climate Town?

As a European it feels weird seeing the car and walking icon without a commuter train icon, tram icon, metro icon, bus icon, light rail icon etc next to them

i think you highlighted why, as a european, much of the planning in America i’ve seen feels a little off (more parking and shops, strip malls, interstates etc); it’s because it’s all top-down ideas from the 1940s. it’s what a couple of people born in the 19th century thought the 20th century should be like.

i'm from germany and i feel so sad for you guys over in the states. i'm 36 years old and never owned a car cause i can walk or bike everywhere i need to.

I was recently visiting a house in a cul de sac and noticed it was near the trolley station. It was a long walk by the roads and commented on it a resident who told me there was a short walkway a few houses down between the houses. Adding a few walk-through easements might do wonders.

Urbanist content is always appreciated :)

God I hate those curving, no outlet suburban streets. A nightmare for emergency services too.

American suburbia looks super alienating to me, coming from a place where cities/towns are build around the roman decumanus and cardo and/or medieval little sprawling streets.

The influence of car and gas companies on those policies is very understated.

I think one step in fixing this is to change the zoning of suburban neighbourhoods, maybe some people would like to set up a little corner shop there, or a cafe, and the people living there wouldn't have to drive.

I think one of the things often missed is how much industry was located in areas we consider "downtown" or core areas today. Originally, many of these industries (in the northern hemisphere) were in the East Ends of the town-- or village. In them thar days, industries were noisy and dirty, often having their own coal fired power plants-- for steam or electric. So, city planners, noticing that the wind came most frequently from the west, thought it a good idea to locate industry in the east. As cities grew around them, many industries were encouraged to leave core areas for the east. Check out your rush hour traffic flow. I bet it's still clogged east bound in the morning, clogged west bound in the afternoon. Shifting industry from core areas to what we might call the industrial suburbs did as much to kill mass transit as the advent of the car-- or maybe it was collateral damage in the switch to the car society. Workers coming into core areas brought with them lunch money, picked up a few things before heading home, etc. Remove those workers and the surrounding residential neighbourhoods just weren't enough to support local business entirely on it's own. And of course we no longer needed street cars or mass transit to those areas. Today, industry is cleaner-- power comes from generating stations far, far away, and we've off loaded most of our stinky noisy industry off shore. Given the wasteland that is common in so many of our core areas, I think it's time city planners dusted of their 19th century guide books on where to locate industry. I think it needs updating.

What if... you wanted a safe affordable form of interurban travel But General Motors and the Highway department said "nah drive lol"

Just bought a 1938 cottage in town. 5 minute walk to downtown, grocery store, library, Post Office. LOVE it. ❤

It's interesting to compare to the UK - Birmingham and Coventry, two of the largest car building cities in the country, were rebuilt to be much more car friendly after being heavily bombed during the Second World War. However, as congestion increased and there was better understanding of pollution, both city centres are being made more pedestrian friendly. Hell, Birmingham even has trams again for the first time since the '50s!

And now people are literally losing the homes they bought because they have gotten too old to drive and literally can't feed themselves.

When you say the FHA rejected any city-like development, you need to consider who lives in cities - working class people, especially working class POC. These suburbs were always built for a certain kind of person.

Yes, there is a place for cars. But that doesn't mean it has to be all about the car. Sidewalks are a good thing and I'm glad they're coming back.

"Grapple the souls of future generations" is a pretty evil sentiment imo. Like, man that's weird! Anyway, I moved out the suburbs a few years ago into my local downtown area and it's been fantastic. I ditched the car for an ebike and got a work from home job. I rarely have to leave the downtown area and if I do, Uber is 12 to 25 bucks round trip. I honestly don't know how I used to maintain a car and drive to work everyday. I'm never going back! ✌️

I believe one question missing from many Urbanist videos is the “Why?” question for Americans choosing Cars/suburbs vs. walkability/urbanism. One of the attempted answers I read was actually from Railroad Historian Christian Wolmar (“The Great Railroad Revolution”), where he argued that Americans’ (and probably other Western countries) love of individualism naturally led to more infatuation with car culture, helping spawn the suburb-bias as we know it. Americans just embraced the car rapidly and whole-heartedly, while rail transport, which is by nature more collective, was always suspect. I am not sure this argument could ever be empirically “proven”, but it does seem convincing to me at least at a base level.

i'm australian and this infrastructure seems like a nightmare to me

Here's my suggestion to a solution. I grew up in a suburb, have lived in Chicago, now i live in a small town outside Kansas City (thanks for the mention, the Plaza is still beloved). This small town boomed in the 1880s then declined (thanks to KC) so it missed the big suburbanization phase and now has quiet communities with schools and shops in a walkable grid. It might be time to reconsider the small towns on the edge of the big cities that existed before suburbs. A little spit and polish would make these great little communities, especially for those who can work remotely.

In all fairness Baltimore still has a light rail/ streetcar system and it works somewhat ok

You have left out one of the primary reasons behind the flight to the suburbs: the perceived need by American planners and officials to make the country more resistant to atomic warfare (see Tobin’s “Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defense” as a start). This was a “white flight” because government planners viewed African Americans as expendable in the case of such a conflict and thus allowed to live in inner cities. Yes, it is true the movement to suburbs began in the 1930s, but it was relatively modest compared to what occurred in the post-war period.

Do think that moving away from the car centric cities is very cultural too at this point. It's so ingrained that planing for more walkable mixed areas oft get some mix of car owners and lobbyists to push back on such ideas. It's a uphill battle to get meaningful change and not half measures like many bikelanes I've seen being incredibly dangerous or walking paths being drawn in a convoluted manor.

I’ve listened to suburb bashing my entire life. The reality is that a lot of people don’t want to live in crowded situations where public transit is the only way to get around, and you have to tip toe around in your own home so as not to disturb your neighbors on the other side of your wall. I’ve lived both ways and I prefer life in a suburb. So do many others.

There's nothing more boring than taking a stroll in a suburban neighborhood and just seeing houses and more houses. Even jogging was boring to me. I couldn't figure out why then I realized there were no people on the streets. There was no energy, just a bunch of houses around me like tombstones in a cemetery.

I’m a resident of Morgantown. I love to see our city randomly on KZfaq

Morgantown has a funny little train that I think every small city should have

I think it helped a lot that Americans were very early adapters of the car in mass. Most American families had at least one car before World War II. It took many of our pier countries until the 1960s or 70s for this to be the case.

Suburbs, especially those so eagerly carved off from the larger metro area as their own cities, are either going to become wealthy enclaves, or reinvent themselves through more diverse zoning and coherent redevelopment, or descend into squalor as their infrastructure fails and they can't afford to fix it. It seems likely that shifting climate will accelerate this process and have a significant impact on which communities survive.

American suburbs are boring and the isolation they create is undoubtedly a factor behind the polarisation that is tearing the nation apart.

American Midwesterners: We don't actually want to interact with other people; especially if those people aren't like us. American Corporations: We can create a society where everyone has to pay for something just to interact with people. We can create a society where all of the communal spaces are profit-making spaces for us. Americans in the 2020s: Why am I so lonely and broke? I don't think this society was designed with human flourishing in mind.

I hate that the US has gone down this path. I hate how unwalkable the US has become

Quick question: did J.C. Nichols have any stock in Ford Motors, Chevrolet, Chrysler, or GMC? Just asking, no real reason. Just kinda curious if the guy who made America so car-centric would have profited off of America becoming car-centric.

Rip Phil's mustache 2022-2024

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood!” is a quote from Daniel Burnham from the Plan of Chicago (Burnham, Daniel H., and Edward H. Bennett. Plan of Chicago. 1909, 40-42.). J.C. Nichols is probably a fan.

Growing up in Kansas City, we always thought of the Plaza as the "nice part of town," you could make a day trip out of going there and walking around, seeing the sights, shopping, etc. It's funny to see it used as the first example of suburban design - it's probably the most walkable part of that whole city today.

Thanks for making me feel more hopeless in a very hopeless era. Just what I needed.

This was a very interesting watch! As someone not from the U.S., car-centric urban planning is one ot the most baffling things about American culture to me, and it's nice to learn about the context that led to it.

You talked about the suburbs and mentioned "covenants" without one mention of race, redlining, and the black communities destroyed to facilitate building these spaces.

The Los Angeles streetcar(redcar) stopped running to my city(Glendora) around 1950. The Metro Goldline is set to open new stations in 2025. It only took 75 years to get public transportation to the city back. Yeah

I live in Utah and in Utah we're slowly trying to connect the suburbs to the rail network. It makes more sense in Utah since we've pretty much built on all buildable land. We're in mountain valleys, so there's no where else to build new.

Yay, acknowledging the nuances. Content that conveys a similar point but in an angry tone often alienates people and does nothing but further divide people. There are people in the urbanist space who have unfortunately fallen into the trap of realizing they make more money if they are more reactionary, and hateful.

Drive to Target then Starbucks then Target again. Funny, because a lot of Targets have Starbucks located in them.

Don’t call those word decorations millennial! They are actually for the GenXer suburban home owners. Millennials like Mid Century and/Industrial.

My question during all of this is WHY was the FHA so obsessed with cars. You don't cover that.

I'm living in Poland. If you live here in suburbs a car is pretty much necessary. But I grow up in the part of city that met the "15-minute city" criteria and I must say it was awful! I'll never willingly go back to living in such place! Suburbs are way better, especially for children. But also for pet owners, craftsman and basicaly everyone who wants to have an agency over their lives. Dense cities work under a paradigm that you have to delegate the choice of your lifestyle to external entities. While here in the suburbs we have true diversity and everybody has their own autonomy so there's no tention. Even though everybody has a car, it's mostly silent. It's safe here. It's pretty. Almost no issues with allergies. It's great!

Parking min and not having paths that can cut through neighborhoods is a huge reason. Simple path system doesn't cost a lot and can have a huge impact. Reducing or elimination or parking min allowes for more an cheaper house, but you will loose "free" parking. Again simple policy change that can have a huge impact

The real reason is because people moved to the suburbs to get away from the people they hate.

Funniest thing I've heard recently - a RE agent called a suburban neighborhood "drivable" as if that were the the exception and a positive.

Excellent video showing us that it's never as simple as government good or government bad.

Great video! As an aspiring urbanist, this is the first time I've seen the role of the FHA explained as a motivating force in the DESIGN of 20th century development. Really interesting perspective.

Urbanists tent to feel suburbs are wholly soulless with the adoption of heavy car use. Then we rural people NEED our cars, and can walk long and far AND our small towns still have the old school street scapes.

As an Architect in Paraguay, I appreciate a lot this video and it will help a lot in future classes...

For anyone that wants to deep dive into the nuance of this discussion, Strong Towns is the gold standard organization for it

I feel like that defeatist attitude of "it's hard to change the suburbs" is a bit sad. Suburbs are basically a bigger, more cookie cutter version of european villages and the easiest way to help them is kill zoning and minimum parking policies and allow houses to be replaced or reused with/for stores(for basic necessities, grocers, bakery, coffee shops..) while also making roads smaller in exchange for other lanes like bike and pedestrian when the street is up for repairs anyway. Sure, it's slower change than just tearing everything down and building it less shitty, but slow progress is better than no progress at all.

The suburbs were the most cost efficient way to offer a dream that so many had. A house and a yard.

People don't really love cars. We need cars because everything is made for them. So we have cars. So everything is made for them.

The suburbs can change by just removing some of the stupid limitations that the government has set on them, allow houses to have small businesses in the garages, maybe a small restaurant or coffee shop, maybe a corner store, maybe they can build in the front yard a small little taco stand, allow for communities to have it's own identity and culture by allowing them to grow naturally instead of forcing a single way of doing things. At least you won't have to drive 15 minutes to get a bag of chips or a taco

it sucks but I think it's fixable as long as we advocate for things like bike lanes and transit. biking makes the spread out-ness of the suburbs more traversable without a car and same with transit. you can even build bike parking at transit stations to let people bike to the train and reach more people than you could with walking. as for the euclidean zoning, I say we change zoning laws now and let the problem fix itself overtime; no need to demolish entire neighborhoods at once.

Sadly I’d love to live in a major city near me but I cannot afford to do so. Only other option is a much cheaper suburb that is abysmal in public transit availability. Wish there was a middle ground.

I was once invited to give a class at James Madison University. I was staying in a Best Western and over the weekend I attempted to walk to a nearby mall (less than a mile). There was no sidewalk so I had to walk on the grass next to the road. After a few minutes I was pulled over by a police car. Someone had reported somebody ‘acting weird’ (ie walking). Once the police realised I was a Brit on my way to the shops they let me go on my way

In England we have Pavements (Sidewalks) and public footpaths through the country side. This makes walking so much easier. Whenever I've been to the States (Minnesota) it has always frustrated me that I needed to drive a few miles to walk. It's probably hard to fix, since folk wouldn't want others walking over their property: English paths back date back centuries and are protected by law.

Transit is part of fixing the suburbs, but it's not the first step! The first step is density, by building new developments on top of old parking lots or by allowing people to build second homes in their backyard. By doing that, you'll have more people living in the same plots of land, which means you now have both the demand for transit, and enough tax value to pay for it.

Phil, you shaved 😮

Its crazy how bad American roads and streets are designed given how we're completely dependent on driving on them. No pedestrians or cyclists were accommodated in the design, but seemingly neither were cars.

The good news is that these single family homes make EV charging much easier. So promote EVs for these areas.

"Robert No sus" - Gold

I love cars

I love your approach to this. The self awareness, the little jabs at things. There is so much potential here. I just hope we can improve things here in America

To us the suburbs make no sense, and dense urban living is much more attractive. You can walk places, amenities are closer, its more vibrant and dynamic. But to the people that built the suburbs the memory of the industrial city was still fresh in their minds. Turn of the 20th century inner cities were dirty, crowded and polluted. From that perspective suburban developments with space and greenery were near utopian. In retrospect the consequence of that space is car dependency and all its ills we're now all too familiar with, while inner cities have largely de-industrialized in the US and are now desirable to live in again.

This video seems very similar to the type of content that Not Just Bikes produces. I found this video really interesting. You touched on this but I think the real reason that the suburbs were made to be so spread out and car friendly was to make sure that only middle class people lived there so they would be “nice”.

I hate how Orange County is designed around cars.

Sam's Park & Shop in DC! 6:28 I live down the street and it still looks remarkably similar to the way it did in the 20s.

Morgantown, WV now has one of the best public transit systems, in my opinion - the PRT system alone is miraculous.

We can easily rebuild, if we use eminent domain and centrally plan. We have to accept the fact. There is no libertarian market based solution to this problem. Considering the fact that we bulldozed much of the inner city in the 1950's to build freeways to the benefit of the car manufacturers and oil companies. They centrally planned so they could profit. We have to centrally plan to solve the problem,. So we have liveable cities.

People kept voting for it with their money.

I was born and raised in a Sydney suburban area that was laid out in the 1950’s and 60’s. My suburb was identical to all the other thousands of suburbs built across Australia at that time. I’m amazed that I recognised everything you said here. It’s as if the Australian state governments got a hold of the US Federal handbooks and replicated it across Australia. My suburb had such an emphasis on cars that we never had a sidewalk in front of our houses. (When I go back to see the street in which I grew up, there still isn’t a sidewalk even now.)

2:05 Right there. The baby was thrown out of the stroller. Long live suburbia. XD

I mean, I totally get the push for mixed housing and public transit… seeing a stroad makes my heart sink. But I still choose to live in a suburban nightmare because I wanted a single family home with a large yard. Yeah, I think America’s hooked for the long-term.

15:15 Please don't downplay the "race stuff" it's very important to focus on so we can move forward as a nation

I lived next to one of the first planned communities: Greenbelt, Maryland. A documentary was done on it and a couple other locations. The music for it was done by some nobody by the name of Aaron Copeland. Walt Disney studied it and the guy that designed it, along with many many other people to come up with his plans for his designed community that never came to be, known as Epcot. I also lived in one of the first Levitt-towns, And one of the most successful planned communities to date, being Columbia, MD.

This is such a good video. There's so much stuff about why we have suburbs but this video explains how.

I really don’t like driving and I don’t have a choice in America! I hope the train infrastructure improves someday so we can take trains and subways across the country better.

Zoning feels so alien to me. I live in the UK and we're one of the handful of countries without zoning, in theory anything can go anywhere but you have to apply to the local council first, but they won't flat out say no and enforce the same kind of zoning rules except not being explicit but if you were to set up industry in the middle of a residential area you would have to comply with various pollution (air, water, sound, light) and so industry doesn't generally try, but in my home town Europe's largest playground equipment manufacturer is placed in the middle of houses and you have employees who live a minute walk from it, there are also shoe factories, and more surrounded by residential. We also have a lot of corner shops, they're a really good place to go for your essentials rather than going to a big shop frequently, from the house I grew up in there were 3 corner shops within a 10 minute round trip (including buying stuff), and then a larger small supermarket which was an 8 minute walk away (but time spent there varies), if you want to grab some food you can go to a house where the ground floor was converted into a takeaway, hairdressers are also pretty common, the house that backs up against the house I grew up in was a physiotherapist, you could quite easily survive on these while going to your industry job on the same street without having to go further than 100m from your house. I don't live in a city, it's not particularly walkable (definitely still a preference for cars) but not having zoning creates such flexibility in spaces, where if there is a demand you can appeal to the council and they can say that you can - if the business or industry does not create excessive noise or crowding they'll allow you to do it and now everyone in that area has a thing to walk to. Right now tho I live in the countryside far from everyone, and I still don't drive (well, I'm not allowed to but my wife doesn't drive much) because we have a basement and we have so much storage space for non-perishables and non-food things, and plenty of freezer space for perishables, and we batch cook so we can turn fresh ingredients into meals that are quick to make and are actually good for us. Our car gets used like once a month for stuff we need, and then any extra time is for visiting my parents (a 22 minute drive on country roads that never have traffic and there are no traffic lights, the variability is so low I can be as specific as 22, not just 20 ish). American houses are so big you should use that space to fit more freezers and store your food better so you don't have to go out more often.

...I bet J.C. Nickols was so "afraid" of other races that the only way of comuting for him was within the security of a car. If he needed to go into suburbs, it better have a parking space near the building entrance...:P

I moved cities a few years ago from my hometown that had a fairly decent amount of multimode transportation to one where there's only a couple of bus routes that only serve a local college. I feel absolutely trapped by my car and I hate it to my core.

I have an acre of lawn. I use a push battery-powered mower for the entire yard. My core is immaculate!

I feel like you kind of missed out on why they viewed cities as dirty and squalid and why they wanted to separate zoning. The industrialization and lack of regulations meant cities were highly polluted by industrial waste and the human waste from nearby workers without sewers. The car let planners separate these workers from the factory pollutants and the "undesirable minorities" that were stuck in those polluted areas after the initial white flight, only exasperating the racial component and the expansion