Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck

Walkability is both an end and a means, as well as a measure. While the physical and social rewards of walking are many, walkability is perhaps most useful as it contributes to urban vitality and most meaningful as an indicator of that vitality.

In the absence of any larger vision or mandate, city engineers—worshiping the twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking—have

turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to but not worth arriving at.

The General Theory of Walkability explains how, to be favored, a walk has to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.

Useful means that most aspects of daily life are located close at hand and organized in a way that walking serves them well. Safe means that the street has been designed to give pedestrians a fighting chance against being hit by automobiles; they must not only be safe but feel safe, which is even tougher to satisfy. Comfortable means that buildings and landscape shape urban streets into “outdoor living rooms,” in contrast to wide-open spaces, which usually fail to attract pedestrians. Interesting means that sidewalks are lined by unique buildings with friendly faces and that signs of humanity abound.

In Miami, for example, people wonder why intersections in residential neighborhoods are often so fat: two relatively narrow streets will meet in a sweeping expanse of asphalt that seems to take hours to walk across. The answer is that the firefighters’ union once struck a deal that no truck would ever be dispatched without a hefty number of firemen on it.

These three issues—wealth, health, and sustainability—are, not coincidentally, the three principal arguments for making our cities more walkable.

“How can we keep our children from leaving? How can we keep our grandchildren from leaving?”

millennials, vastly favor communities with street life, the pedestrian culture that can only come from walkability.

With no pedestrian culture, there were no opportunities for the chance encounters that turn into friendships.

Sixty-four percent of college-educated millennials choose first where they want to live, and only then do they look for a job.4 Fully 77 percent of them plan to live in America’s urban cores.

“If we can build a successful city for children, we can build a successful city for all people.”

Leinberger is optimistic about the larger impact of these population trends on cities. Writing in Grist, he concludes that “meeting the pent-up demand for walkable urban development will take a generation. It will be a boon to the real estate industry and put a foundation under the American economy for decades, just as the construction of low-density suburbs did during the last half of the 20th century.”

In order to study real estate performance, Leinberger divides the American built environment into two categories: walkable urbanism and drivable sub-urbanism.

In the Detroit region, he finds that housing in walkable urbanism

fetches a 40 percent price premium over similar housing in drivable sub-urbanism; in the Seattle region, that premium is 51 percent; in Denver, it’s 150 percent. New York City, unsurprisingly, tops the list at 200 percent—that is to say, people are paying three times as much per square foot for apartments in walkable neighborhoods as for comparable suburban houses.

In most markets, the demand for walkable urbanism dramatically outpaces the supply: in Atlanta, only 35 percent of poll respondents who want to live in a walkable ...

In Washington, D.C., walkable office space recently leased at a 27 percent premium over drivable suburban office space and had single-digit rather than double-digit vacancy rates. The Wall Street Journal has confirmed similar trends nationwide: while the suburban office vacancy rate has jumped 2.3 points since 2005, occupancy in America’s downtowns has held steady.

The metropolitan area that does not offer walkable urbanism is probably destined to lose economic development opportunities; the creative class will gravitate to those metro areas that offer multiple choices in living arrangements.… As consumer surveys in downtown Philadelphia and Detroit in 2006 have shown, this seems to be particularly true for the well-educated, who seem to have a predilection for living in walkable

urban places.

Walk Score, the website that calculates neighborhood walkability.

● In a typical example, Charlotte, North Carolina, Cortright found that an increase in Walk Score from the metropolitan average

of 54 (somewhat walkable) to 71 (very walkable) correlated with an increase in average house price from $280,000 to $314,000.17

“When selecting a community, nearly half of the public (47 percent) would prefer to live in a city or a suburban neighborhood with a mix of houses, shops, and businesses.… Only one in ten say they would prefer a suburban neighborhood with houses only.”

families that spend less on transportation spend more on their homes,23 which is, of course, about as local as it gets.

“Housing prices on the fringe tended to drop at twice the metropolitan average while walkable urban housing tended to maintain [its] value and [is] coming back nicely in selected markets today.”

“the cities with the largest drops in housing value (such as Las Vegas, down 37 percent) have been the most car-dependent, and the few cities with housing prices gains … have good transit alternatives.”

The National Building Museum, in its Intelligent Cities Initiative, notes that this reduction in auto use results in as much as $127,275,000 being retained in the local economy each year.■

experiment at the University of Michigan, where “researchers brought groups of people together face to face and asked them to play a difficult cooperation game. Then they organized other groups and had them communicate electronically. The face-to-face groups thrived. The electronic groups fractured and struggled.”

“In Europe you can get five good meetings done in a day. In Australia, maybe three, and in Atlanta, maybe two, because you’ve gone way, way farther and way, way faster but you haven’t been in an accessible place that allows a lot to happen. You’ve spent a lot of time sitting in traffic.”

Phoenix, for instance, has been characterized by below-average levels of income and innovation (as measured by the production of patents) for the last 40 years.

an inverse relationship between vehicle travel and productivity: the more miles that people in a given state drive, the weaker it performs economically.

The conventional wisdom used to be that creating a strong economy came first, and that increased population and a higher quality of life would follow. The converse now seems more likely: creating a higher quality of life is the first step to attracting new residents and jobs.