Take a look at these pictures.

These spots are all within about five minutes of each other, around Union, New Jersey. Every Christmas, when we go to visit my parents, we stop at a German/Hungarian sausage shop and an old-school Italian deli around here. I always stop and notice the urban design here.

You have commercial strips, single-family houses, duplexes, and small apartment buildings all very close to each other, basically forming neighborhoods with lots of distinct living options all very close together. It’s ordinary, but it’s remarkable for how much it diverges from more recent suburban construction.

This is not exactly a small town setting. It’s a kind of earlier, denser, more humble suburb, where you have your private space but also lots of proximity to stuff. Most places that look like this were built in the middle of the 20th century. The building pattern, and whatever zoning codes determined it back then, still retained a lot of traditional urban characteristics. To use an evolutionary term, these suburbs are transitional species between classic towns and modern suburbs.

Scroll up to the two images showing a commercial strip. There’s a thrift store in the first one, which used to be a neighborhood-sized grocery store. It’s a shame that closed, because it was walkable, bikeable, or drivable within a couple of minutes, to hundreds of people. There are delis, coffee/breakfast shops, restaurants, and stores too. Lots of everyday businesses, close enough to really cut down on how much driving you have to do on a daily basis.

Take a look at the third image, of the tall, narrow house that goes back deep into the lot. There’s an ordinary single-family house to its left, and a very nice duplex to its right. That tall narrow house is not, I don’t think, a house. Take a look at the Google Maps 3D view:

It’s the very, very long one in the middle at the bottom. That’s a very creative use of limited land to add density without fundamentally changing the look and feel of the place. (Here’s a listing for the property. It doesn’t say there are multiple units in the building, but it is a rental and it’s huge, so I’m sure there are.)

We often value things like large yards or lots of parking capacity for the things we might do one day, or do very occasionally. It’s a little bit like building giant commercial parking lots for Black Friday and a couple of days in December. That excess capacity has a value, and many people feel that it enhances their standard of living. It’s convenient, it reduces the friction of competition and unchosen human contact.

What I’ve learned and observed as an urbanist is that there’s another way to look at it and think about it. What if having a little less excess capacity day to day, a little more tightness and closeness, a little more friction and messiness, means more opportunity, more productivity, even more convenience, in a different way than we’re accustomed to thinking of it?

I remember a dinner—out on the deck, in October, because it was 2020—with some friends from grad school. A couple of them rent and split a small house in Greenbelt, Maryland. The houses have small-ish yards, and are very close to each other. The street parking is a little tight. The houses are on the small side and the streets are narrow. The area feels kind of crowded. It’s of the same vintage as the neighborhoods in the images above.

But as we sat on the deck, with a floor lamp hooked up to an extension cord so we could see the table, and as we pulled up chairs around a fire pit and roasted marshmallows, the darkness shrouding everything, I completely forgot there were other houses 20 or 30 feet away on every side.

The little yard felt quite big enough.

Related Reading:

Taking Off the Car Blinders, Opening Your World

Apartments, Ownership, and Responsibility

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekend subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive of over 200 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!

Share