While suburbanization once symbolized prosperity and expansion, it now represents a cancer for small business. In this piece, we explore how halting suburban sprawl and investing in urban areas can lead to a more vibrant and economically sustainable future for businesses.
Hello Stroads, Goodbye American Dream
Stroads…The word looks and sounds familiar. But, what is it?
A stroad is a cross between a street and a road and has taken over most North American cities. For reference, a street is a smaller, human-scaled pathway where humans, animals, technology, and businesses interact. Roads, on the other hand, are designed for higher speeds and are meant to connect productive parts of a region over large distances. Strong Towns, a nonprofit media advocacy organization, actually coined the phrase in 2013 and does a great job at explaining what they are in further detail here.
Stroads are, essentially, built to move as many personal vehicles as quickly as possible with little to no consideration for the small businesses, pedestrians, or cyclists that must also utilize these thoroughfares. Interestingly, the United States and most cities before suburbanization (c.1940s) actually were comprised mostly of streets and very few roads. However, small businesses flourished and launched the American economy into new heights. Our superpower status as a nation was rooted in our ability to generate wealth for anyone who worked hard enough and leverage the collective power of thousands of small businesses in our downtowns, uptowns, and mixed-use neighborhoods. After veterans successfully defeated the Axis Powers in WWII, they began pouring back into the country to rejoin their families, wives, partners, children, and loved ones. This posed a challenge to the American housing stock, though.
Our walkable, mixed-use, resilient downtowns and entertainment corridors began to lose small businesses to suburban outlet malls and single-use neighborhoods far from the city center. Because of this, dense, mixed-use buildings became very impractical to build in these car-centric neighborhoods. These neighborhoods feature hundreds and sometimes thousands of single-family homes, or single-use neighborhoods, where residents would live in one part of a city and drive to another district to shop or work. Naturally, office buildings followed the trend as strip malls and gas stations replaced neighborhood cafes and corner grocery stores. Large parking lots surrounded single buildings, and the American city completely changed from a dense city center with dynamic small businesses and neighborhoods, to a cement and asphalt cityscape where cars rule and speed is the expectation.
At this point, stroads began to make their appearances. As more Americans drove and less Americans lived in walkable neighborhoods, our downtowns started to die as drive-thrus flourished. American urban planners and engineers felt that prioritizing the speedy movement of personal vehicles over the pleasant, safe, and dynamic urban experience, called for a new type of road design; one that increased lanes on both sides of the median, shortened the width of sidewalks, turned thousands of driveways into parking lots, and conceded our cities to oceans of cars and asphalt.
How Do We Fix the Suburban Dilemma?
So, what’s the solution? Do stroads merit such concern, and are walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods really something we should return to?
Let’s take a look at what the data says, then we’ll ask ourselves personally what kind of cities we deserve and if the status quo is actually serving us.
Strong Towns has so much literature on healthy municipal economies and the impact of single-family dwellings and their neighborhoods. You can get the full details here.
TLDR: Mixed-use and multi-family parcels and neighborhoods provide more tax revenue for cities per acre than car dependent, single-use, single-family parcels.
The tradition in the United States has been to concede public space to cars and to even outlaw mixed-use zoning, making building a multi-story building with a healthy mix of housing, retail, etc. outright illegal. This is why we don’t build the way we used to, and why we can’t seem to revive our downtowns to their former glory.
Interestingly, though, cities and states are reawakening their industrious pasts and are quite literally reversing this trend by outlawing new single-family zoning, outlawing parking minimums, and rebuilding their inner cities:
- Minneapolis, MN banned new single-family housing within city limits.
- Here’s more data on the effects of this policy.
- California, in an effort to diversify its housing stock and provide more affordable types of housing, essentially banned single-family zoning for anyone looking to build ADUs (accessory dwelling units) on their land.
Just Follow the Money
Why do Americans – and people from almost every country on earth, pay so much to experience places like Disneyland, or San Francisco, or Chicago? Why do we visit tourist destinations like Barcelona, Tokyo, Mexico City, Melbourne, Casablanca, Seoul, or Yosemite?
These places have remained dedicated to the human experience and have refused to concede precious social space and infrastructure to personal vehicles. They’ve agreed that the public square is sacred, and that cars are useful where they belong – on the peripheries of these cultural landmarks. Granted, Disneyland is surrounded by a sea of parking, but the park itself makes no space for personal vehicles and caters only to pedestrians. Barcelona, on the other hand, is actually removing roads within city blocks and creating larger super-blocks where humans, animals, and non-cars are only allowed to access. Residents can now move more freely, enjoy less polluted air, more green space, easier access to goods and services, and no longer concede their lives to other people’s personal vehicles.
Instead of building wide roads to accommodate cars, these places are building narrow lanes and wide bike/pedestrian paths. They’re building more transit lines using cleaner energy, encouraging healthy lifestyles that include walking and spending at local small businesses instead of driving to Walmart to pick up a week’s worth of groceries.
What were once dynamic American downtowns with innovative architecture, lofts, and hotel rooms above bakeries and pharmacies, are now abandoned parking lots, crumbling buildings, hotbeds for crime, and the ruins of a prosperous nation during which the American Dream still existed for small businesses. And the stroads, which move cars at the expense of humans and the space we need to thrive, are the catalysts that are supercharging the frightening loss of precious agricultural land, water resources, and natural habitats. Worst of all, these stroads are an addiction to the unhealthy lifestyles we’ve bought into while the rest of the world is returning to economic and personal prosperity with the freedom to move without cars by way of mixed-use housing and small businesses along walkable streets. But we can do this again. We can rezone our cities and become competitive again. We can keep small cities small with more dense development and stop the suburbanization of our great cities. This freedom to prosper and to claim the pursuit of happiness is just a city council meeting away.
The Unheralded Power of Urbanization
Urban centers are a melting pot of cultures, ideas, and opportunities and should be revitalized. Now, this density isn’t about the number of people per square mile; it’s about the potential each individual brings to the collective table. For a business, this means access to a vast and varied customer base within a walkable radius. The proximity to such a diverse clientele can spark innovation and drive sales in ways suburban environments might not.
Accessibility is the other jewel in the urban crown. Well-designed public transportation and pedestrian-friendly streets make urban centers easily navigable and more enjoyable. For businesses, this means increased foot traffic, easier access for employees, and a reduction in logistical headaches. The urban setting fosters a sense of community and connectivity, which can increase networking opportunities, partnerships, and collaborations that can catapult a business to new heights.
The shift towards urbanization also brings with it a greener perspective. Urban businesses tend to operate in a way that encourages sustainable practices; from reduced energy consumption to sourcing locally. Also, using existing infrastructure and engaging in adaptive reuse of buildings can significantly lower overhead costs, making urban business ventures both economically and environmentally sustainable.
As we look ahead, let’s reimagine our urban areas not just as places to live, but as thriving ecosystems where businesses can flourish, and communities can thrive. The development of stroads truly reflects the misunderstanding of the needs of urban and suburban spaces. Instead, prioritizing inefficient transportation over community and economic health. For small businesses, the effects are real and are felt through reduced foot traffic, lower visibility, and a less supportive community environment. Reimagining these spaces to prioritize safety, accessibility, and community can help revive small businesses and foster more vibrant urban areas.
