Why the suburbs were built for cars (and the forgotten plan for shopping centers)

The suburbs won't change. Why?

How this video happened

This started with strip malls.

I stumbled on this Masters thesis and was hooked. Though the author was writing it to make the argument that strip malls should be considered a preservationist's subject (which...I dunno about that), I was intrigued by the research and wanted to learn more.

I quickly found out there was a bigger story that spoke to the planning of the suburbs at large. I'd delved into some of the suburban design issues before, but I quickly discovered a new and richer subject matter that included shopping's key role in planning suburbs to be car friendly. That car obsession was also a unique insight of JC Nichols, a developer whose work I'd run into by accident and got to learn more about over the course of the video.

Check out more

Here's a link to the reaction video (for some paid tiers).

Why so many shopping centers are the same

One of the big mistakes I've made, for much of my life, is thinking that suburban conformity was a state of mind, but it was also a regulated act. And that includes shopping centers.

In the Community Planner's Guidebook, you'll find suggestions for countless best practices in shopping centers, from ceiling height, to basement usage, to shrubbery, to, of course, parking. But I became particularly transfixed by the listing of shops that were ideal for a shopping center of any size.

It comes in the form of a neat little table.

Preceded by a message from JC Nichols (and a modest disclaimer that any "hard and fast rules" would be a mistake), it's a listing of sizes of shopping centers followed by possible tenants. I'll share the template for the smallest centers.

What jumps out to me is how dated some of the stores are - you're unlikely to find bakeries, shoe repair shops, or beauty shops in most strip mall developments today. Yet, at the time, it was highly recommended you have them.

These lists ran the gamut of shopping center sizes and provide a fascinating window into the 1947 view of commerce. As you might expect, haberdashers and milliners are recommended for only slightly larger spaces.

In addition to the quaint makeup of the stores, however, is a prescriptive nature that rhymes with the video I made about suburban car love: these recommendations had a lot of heft. Because the Community Builder's Handbook influenced the FHA, and because the FHA had a lot of power over developments, the fact that JC Nichols wanted you to have a shoe repair shop could, reasonably, be considered an offer you couldn't refuse.

Of course, there's a tension in this history too — it's really tough to draw a line between what the FHA wanted and what the market wanted. There's a chance that the market would have naturally coalesced on shopping centers pretty similar to the ones Nichols recommended. After all, he contended that his recommendations were data driven ones drawn from his own experience. However, I have to think that some of the geographic and cultural diversity that was ignored in suburban planning at large also got shoved into the service alley in this case, too.

But if you think I'm getting over my skis in saying that commerce itself was shaped by one man's weird preferences, I hope you can at least enjoy digging into the list of store types at a large shopping center and be transported.

Public stenographer! Popcorn and nut shop!

The past is a foreign country and, thankfully, you don't have to drive to get there.

Sources for the video

Above I've linked the thesis that started it all and the Community Builder's Handbook. Here are some more sources:

• This JC Nichols book was helpful for background. The final quote in the video comes from there.

• Planning Profitable Neighborhoods: this is really an essential and fascinating document. Most of these sources I'm like, eh, here you go but don't bother reading this. This one is pretty interesting though and every page reveals an answer to a question you might have had about suburban design.

• Here's a paper I read to get background on the subsidization of the suburbs.

• Richard Longstreth writes about shopping centers, and I read a couple papers by him. It still helped even when I pivoted to be more about cars.

• This book about the Regional Planning Association initially felt like a wild goose chase, but I'm super glad I read it. This association was a group of fascinating urban planning types behind Radburn and also a very successful neighborhood in Queens. They shut down just when the FHA was getting its start, in part due to funding/financing woes for communities. It really made me feel comfortable with the thesis as the end of the video — that the FHA plopped into the discourse at a specific period in time and it could have gone another way if that hadn't happened.

• As I mention in the video, the redlining discussion is pretty well-covered. However, I always am fascinated by this collection of geolocated maps.