The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”

I first encountered this kind of shopping center in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Main Street at Exton struck me as incredibly strange - it's a strip mall dressed up to look like an urban downtown, right down to parallel parking spots on the street. Once you do park, it is actually fairly walkable.

A couple of years later, after having moved to Philadelphia, there was something I wanted to grab at a store in Main Street at Exton. There's a regional rail station a half mile from the shopping center, so I hopped a train. The absurd thing about this particular arrangement, which otherwise sounds like a great way to connect nearby markets, is that there is no sidewalk between the train station and the shopping center. The station sits where a major local road meets a major highway, so one way or another, you're crossing six lanes of traffic to get past the local road, and you have to cross two major highway four-lane on/off ramps as you go under the highway overpass, walking along a beaten grass path with only a curb between you and the traffic.

Exton Mall's another mile up the road, and while there's sporadic sidewalks between the two malls, I've never bothered with that walk.

Given the proximity of this shopping center to public transit, I don't think it's a big leap to suggest that the decision to exclude sidewalks was at best a classist choice, at worst a racist choice.

I live in a part of Philadelphia that's unusually pedestrian friendly, all things considered. I can walk to pick up groceries (except I get those delivered), the hardware store, coffee shops, restaurants, galleries, all manner of everyday things that, when I lived in the exurbs, I had to hop in the car and drive anywhere from 5-30 minutes to get to, and it's fantastic. We've also got more methods of public transit than almost anywhere in the world (not saying the coverage is great, mind you), and I've been here long enough that despite all the challenges that come with living in an old urban center, I hope I never have to go back to a suburban lifestyle.

It was clear from the moment I pulled up to "Main Street" that these psuedo-downtowns miss the point.

The main issue he cites seem to be parking taking up so much space. Wouldn't a parking deck solve this? Build a 6 story garage and the 18% goes to 3%.

Manhattan has almost no middle class people with kids. At most there are some upper middle class lawyers/bankers/programmers fighting it out over a handful of decent public schools. I don’t consider that functional or healthy.

By age 45, 86% of Americans have had kids. Out of the remaining 14%, half say they wish they had kids. Just 5% say they don’t want kids—a number virtually unchanged from 1990. You can’t call an urban area functional and healthy if it can’t accommodate the medium and long term needs of 80-90% of the population.

He complains it is all parking, but there's solutions to that. Here in Santa Monica there's a whole row of public parking buildings a few blocks from all the popular downtown areas (beach, pier, 3rd street promenade, mall, etc.). So if you shell out the money, you can compress the parking into one block along the otherwise active walkable downtown area. In this case the developer must have just calculated it's cheaper to have parking lots.

As someone who grew up in Manhattan, though, I do kind of laugh that he considers that development plan non-walkable. I was always happy to walk across the island east/west and only took subways north/south, so his impossible to walk to shopping center part of the development looks trivially walkable to my Manhattan self...

> But while they might say they like those benefits, most people will choose the benefits of low density living,

This is heavily dependent on one's conditioning. I grew up in a late mid-century low density suburb - nothing like the exurban sprawl you see today, but still very far from walkable. I instinctively moved from that to high density older neighborhoods as an adult.

At least at the moment the trend tends to be towards demand for the benefits of increased density, as the culture has shifted to valuing experiences more than large (expensive-to-maintain) spaces.

However, with the old and still vibrant urban neighborhoods now priced out of reach for most, people who are seeking the benefits of urban living are attempting to densify first ring suburbs, which is leading to intergenerational conflicts in many suburban city halls.

> Not to mention the benefit of being able to segregate children into different schools by socioeconomic status, by restricting different incomes from living in the same school district via zoning laws requiring large lots and expensive properties, which also leads to unfeasible public transportation.

I agree that these factors are all present, and are usually enabled by planning and zoning rules, which often function as a replacement for the illegal racial neighborhood covenant system that used to be common in the US. IMO the current system is a shame, but I'm also aware that the system is working for the subset who can afford to exist on it's beneficial side, and those people tend to vote in local elections.