My observation is that literally where there's 10 people, the 11'th one will try to sell them something. Hamlets of 100 houses have 2 grocery stores, 3 bars and a slot machine parlor.
I also live in a suburban area in Europe and there's shops everywhere. Noone "planned them", it's just the observation above. And yeah, house prices went through the roof also, probably went up everywhere where there's no war or famine going on regularly.
The thing I hate most about housing are traffic jams. The more they build and cram more "affordable housing", the worse the nightmare of getting anywhere becomes. Coze at some point you know, you'll need something that's just not within "walking distance" and then you're funked.
My guess is your conception of a suburban area (relatively densely populated?) is a bit different from ours in the US. Also for some reason you seem to think that because your area doesn’t have zoning or enforce it, other places don’t.
And if you write "independent shops", that is no longer true of even many European countries. While people do have a nearby shop, it might be typically from a chain (R-Kioski in Finland is essentially a monopoly, Żabka in Poland is omnipresent). The situation of, say, Spain, with its Chinese and Pakistani-owned independent shops, or Romania with its local family-owned shops does not extend over the whole EU.
Random suburb in California, USA. Use Google streetview and find a shop within walking distance.
If you want a walkable / bikeable neighborhood you could certainly do a lot worse than this random suburb in California.
To the downvoter: I don't know what more you want. That's the synopsis. The density is too low, so they don't get enough money to sustain themselves with all the infrastructure that is required to have suburbia
This means that they exist because they're being subsidized by revenue collected from elsewhere, such as from cities.
Whether this is fair or exploitative depends on how you figure the math for "it's being collected from people who live in the suburbs and just happen to work in the city."
The question is how long they can keep taking out more and more debt against the promise of never-ending growth and income from one-time development sales. The answer probably isn't "forever".
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/11/21/choose-your-f...
I also bet a lot of people in suburbs of Bay Area / NYC wish they only payed $9200/yr.
These so called "hellscapes" are no longer cheap. Waves of people are fleeing the cities to these "hellscapes."
http://public.kulak.us/screenshots/2023-11-14-150246.png
and here's central Portland:
http://public.kulak.us/screenshots/2023-11-14-150343.png
Those may be expensive houses in the first image, but I guarantee cost per square foot is an order of magnitude cheaper. If waves of folks want the first image, more power to them. I'm not gonna stop them. But I also don't want to pay for it.
I guarantee they're not. Portland average house price is $500k [0]. Your example of Katy, TX is $365k [1]. Not even close to an order of magnitude.
>If waves of folks want the first image, more power to them. I'm not gonna stop them. But I also don't want to pay for it.
If waves of folks want this image [2], more power to them. I'm not gonna stop them. But I also don't want to pay for it.
[0] https://www.redfin.com/city/30772/OR/Portland/housing-market
[1] https://www.redfin.com/city/9764/TX/Katy/housing-market
[2] https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/10/portla... https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
It feels like living in a corporate office park. And no, it’s predominantly not walking friendly. Not only is is massively spread out, the roads one has to walk next to are all 4-6 lanes wide and have freeway like speed limits. It’s unpleasant to walk a mile with that traffic noise and bland invariant office park landscaping.
Some people are okay with that setting, other do find it a soul sucking sterile place. I live there a number of years for a job, was ecstatic to move away. Should have done it sooner.
And that place is a super nice upscale suburb, like the one all suburbs aspire to be. and yet this paragon of suburbs is awful.
I didn’t even get into how bad ecologically the office park landscaping is. I haven’t scratched the surface of the many ways suburbs like Irvine are intrinsically bad. I do find most people who enjoy the place are tend not question the why of things or ask questions about their defaults.