The False Promise of Suburban Town Centers
This article was originally published in Southern Urbanism Quarterly. It is shared here with permission.
(Source: Unsplash/Humberto Arellano.)
When Fenton, a new mixed-use development near downtown Cary, North Carolina, opened in June 2022, many Cary residents praised the arrival of a “walkable” shopping, dining, and entertainment district. Others mourned the loss of a forest plot treasured for its trails. Fenton is one of many new mixed-use developments popping up in suburbs across the country. Claiming a sort of hipness, these town centers hope to be the solution to suburban areas that lack a walkable, mixed-use downtown. Yet, upon closer inspection, these centers that combine residential and retail may not be a departure from the suburbs around them at all. What’s more, time and again, they prove to be a bad investment.
Fenton is home to a movie theater, apartments, one hotel, and an array of clothing shops, home goods stores, and eateries. (You could also toss in green space, but with only an unshaded bit of astroturf in front of the theater, that would be a stretch.) Now back to the term “walkable.” The development is more or less walkable insofar as there are sidewalks, and no trip within Fenton is more than a quarter mile by foot. But using the term here would be unfaithful.
For one thing, residents are expected to own a car to access the rest of Cary. Bike lanes start and stop, and plans for a nearby bus stop are not yet settled. At the same time, owning a car in the Fenton area is easy, as there is plenty of room for parking in one of the development’s eight—yes, eight—garages. There are more subtle messages encouraging car ownership, too, with one of the most telling indicators of how walkability is defined at Fenton appearing on the sidewalks, themselves: While no pedestrian crossing sign can be found at the development’s intersections, an engraving underfoot warns people to look for vehicles before crossing.
When Rachel Quadneau of Strong Towns describes this new model for suburban shopping developments, she uses the catchy phrase “town square out of thin air.” Beyond the critiques you can offer against the developments’ possible charm deficit, Quadneau identifies a larger issue with suburban town centers: “While the style of this development may be a little different from the typical culs-de-sac, four-lane speedways, and fast food restaurants you'd find in a suburb, the funding mechanisms and long term outlook are exactly the same.”
The process looks something like this: A local government puts millions toward a large development, guided by the belief that residents and businesses will flock to the project, maintenance will not be an issue, and the city might—one day—make back their investment. As time goes on, however, the space proves unadaptable, unmaintained, and unable to come close to returning on the city’s multimillion-dollar investment.
Strong Towns Founder Chuck Marohn has criticized the detrimental nature of this all-at-once development strategy, coining what he calls the “Growth Ponzi Scheme.” According to Marohn’s research, towns and suburbs as we build them today experience “a modest, short-term illusion of wealth” in exchange for “enormous, long-term liabilities.” Money is poured into a project, and, as time goes on, the only way to continue to support the initial development is to develop more and more around it. But the loose ends are never tied, and the towns always lose. Beyond the warming touches, the water features, and the lantern string lights, there is little to differentiate Fenton’s construction from that of a strip mall or a row of cookie-cutter homes. The same top-down, plop-down narrative is present.
In the Fenton example, this analysis of what many laud as a boon for Cary’s suburbs is cynical. However, it is not meant to say that suburban areas can never have a walkable core. On the contrary, it is still possible to build the productive Main Streets designed for incremental growth, and cities in the American South are successfully doing so. Some New Urbanist developments, like Southern Village in Chapel Hill, come close, but other existing examples are still pricey, low-density land clearings on the edge of town. There, everything you could need is a short walk away—unless it’s anywhere else, in which case it’s an automatic trip on the highway.
At the end of the day, it might be an emphasis on newness that is leading cities away from the solution. Specifically, a solution around the understanding that town centers, as they were built throughout millennia, are designed to grow. Some municipalities are catching on and developing with this simplicity in mind. For instance, by building up the existing downtown along its original footprint, planners in Senoia, Georgia, successfully created a town center people want to live close to.
Moving forward, developments that claim to be walkable should work to be more aware of their surroundings. Dropped down into a suburban vacuum, they aren’t offering cities a solution to much of anything, except perhaps to a crisis of conscience. Southern towns should also be more dubious of these town centers’ financial model. Instead of creating another Fenton, they would be smart to read Galina Tachieva’s Sprawl Repair Manual, which offers a wealth of suggestions for addressing the troubles of suburban development. She reminds us that complete communities are possible—even in the suburbs—if the right opportunities to create good urbanism are identified and pursued.
Adeleine Geitner is the Spring 2023 Duke Initiative for Urban Studies Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.
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