I spent my childhood in an inner suburb of Cleveland. Between kindergarten and eighth grade, I took a bus to school for part of sixth grade. Otherwise everything was in the 15-minute distance, mostly afoot. (The junior high school might have been twenty or thirty minutes on foot, but of course less on a bicycle.) Nobody mistook it for Paris, but within the radius was a quite decent library, an independent bakery, a deli, and a grocery store.