The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”

a) Palo Alto can hold onto its old town feel because it’s literally the epicenter of Facebook, google, sand hill road and Stanford university. Some random town in Florida isn’t going to have all that.

B) in places like Florida, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Houston, etc, it’s simply not feasible to constrain parking when a good part of the year no one wants to walk a half mile or more to get groceries.

There are other ways for places to be nice and not look like an early 1900s town center... I’d submit Austin as an example: it’s totally car centered but has lots of intriguing and distinct neighborhoods and plenty of variety while also being quite suburban and housing quite a lot of strip mall retail.

The small downtown can also be very restrictive and expensive for lower income families. For example, in New Jersey, and eastern PA there are quite a few quaint little towns. Oh sure their town centers are full of small restaurants and dog grooming, pharmacies and banks, but conspicuously absent are grocery stores. I know of whole towns with 10-40k residents and not one grocery store. It’s worse in places like Chicago where lack of access to quality fresh produce has been linked to higher rates of crime.

These small towns create high rates of NIMBY-ism and while they do retain their turn of the century charm, I would suggest that it’s just as Hollywood as the new urbanism but in different ways.

I think we can all agree strip malls probably weren’t the best invention and new urbanism isn’t perfect but at least developers are trying to do something appealing rather than just put up another crappy building with nail salons and vape shops.

* You have to have commercial and residential delivery infrastructure which means roads that reach individual businesses and enough space to park them, and unload. This doesn't immediately mean vehicle sprawl but if the roads are already there...

* You have to support garbage trucks being able to reach every business and residential building. I love the idea of having pooled shared trash areas but in practice it just means more litter and worse public health because you've just increased the cost of disposing of rotten food.

* There are going to be people that actually want land for their hobbies like gardening, woodworking, smithing. You can push them to the suburbs but they'll still need to come into the town center to buy things and more area to cover means higher public transportation costs and lower ride density.

* You have have a system to deal with the fact that people's lives change. A family whose jobs were both previously local and close are now split and aren't walkable.

* Housing a school districts are 'sticky' to families because people put down roots in a place.

* The town needs to bring in outside money -- really no way around this one which means you need some industry (which if your lucky is walkable and fits in with the small town vibes but probably isn't) and tourism / business travel to support secondary industries who are coming in with ... cars. And since not all industry is office jobs that can be done anywhere/remotely you'll probably need to push them outside the town square and figure out work transportation.

* You'll need a public transportation system which is almost surely going to be vehicle based because buses are cheap and flexible.

* You're also gonna need a way to get people to and from the nearest airport. You could try to get a small airport just outside of the town within range of your public transportation but most likely you'll either need private cars or a greyhound style system.

The dream of self-contained communities is the "movie-set" idealism. It's like we're ignoring all the factors that lead to the current state of things and pretending that they're just not problems anymore.

RTC and the current major development is an interesting case... RTC predates the expansion of the subway system, so drive-to urbanism was, as you suggest, a reasonable option given other constraints.

Now that the Metro is (almost) expanded past Reston to the airport, there is (was?) an opportunity to build a true human-scale urban environment (at least within the designated development area, roughly between Sunrise and Sunset Rds and just east of Whiele to just west of RTC).

However, that's not what we're seeing. Developers are dropping absolutely massive buildings (several blocks square) with little in the way to pedestrian access. The new complex on the north side of Weihle Station is NOT accessible by foot - you have to cross 8 lanes of traffic coming from the east, and if you "win" that game of Frogger, it's not intuitive how to access the new complex - it's a disjointed mess, at least visually.

The new development south of RTC (Halley Rise, where my office is located) isn't any better. The new Wegmans building doesn't align with existing roads and is several blocks wide. Getting from Halley Rise to RTC requires another game of Frogger across the Reston Parkway bridge (at which point, you have to cross the parking lots at Bechtel and Microsoft).

It's really frustrating as a resident and worker in the area. It seems the real problem is the cost of legal/political approval for development is so high that it only makes sense to do giant buildings that don't work at a human scale. There's no mix of building sizes/uses - it's just whatever the developer thinks will be most profitable today, with little regard for future evolution (short of tear down and rebuild the whole thing in 20 years).

It is, and it's why dense housing can't compete. Cars are cheap, fuel is cheap, land is cheap. In the short term, other costs, such as harm to walkability, lack of community, pollution, etc are not quantifiable or too far out in the long term to make it a viable business proposition to go with density.