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Cars pass by a Wendy’s and a Dairy Queen restaurant in Lancaster, Ohio on Aug. 27, 2012. Ty Wright/Bloomberg
orget the open road. The true emblem of the contemporary United States is the “stroad” – those high-volume, hybrid arteries that are not quite walkable streets, not quite high-speed roads. Lined on both sides by parking lots and strip malls, they are the commercial lifeblood of conventional suburban development. They may also be the answer to America’s housing affordability crisis.
Civil engineer and urban planner Charles Marohn named these soulless features of the U.S. landscape back in 2011. Route 59 in metro Chicago’s DuPage County, a short distance from my home, is a prime example of the type. It’s full of never-ending, often-repeating retail franchises every few miles, served by traffic moving at 50 miles per hour.
Nothing about stroads is oriented to pedestrians. Rarely do they have sidewalks. Intersections are so highly engineered, with long traffic signals and left-turn arrows, that crossing them on foot can be quite dangerous. Set back behind huge parking lots, stores on either side of a stroad can stand a quarter of a mile apart. These commercial corridors are space-eaters. They are a blight on the suburban landscape.
Since the Great Recession in 2008 drove many large-scale retailers out of business, many stroads have begun to hollow out. The growth of online shopping and delivery during the pandemic fueled even more commercial vacancies. Today many of these corridors are struggling to survive. Those that serve high-income residents can probably afford to maintain their commercial pattern for the foreseeable future. Others will never fully return to their earlier, shall we say, glory.
Most of us who have given thought to improving the stroad template have focused on humanizing its transportation elements. Current stroads could be softened by becoming boulevards complete with landscaped medians, sidewalks, bike lanes, and even separated roadways for local and express traffic. Street parking could be added to local lanes to reduce the need for gargantuan lots.
For the last few years, however, the architect and urban designer Peter Calthorpe has been promoting a much more ambitious vision for stroads. He suggests not just transforming them into boulevards but replacing the strip malls and parking lots with multi-family residences. Looking at El Camino Real, a 43-mile-long commercial corridor stretching from San Francisco to San Jose, Calthorpe estimates that 250,000 housing units could be built within a half-mile of the roadway, in addition to an existing 55,000 single-family homes and 90,000 apartments and townhouses.
That would nearly triple the housing density of the El Camino Real corridor, increasing it from 5.3 to 14.3 dwelling units per acre. That’s enough to make public transit viable. Importantly, by replacing decaying commercial properties, those new condo buildings and townhouses would have a negligible physical impact on existing homes, blunting the usual not-in-my-backyard resistance to development. (Of course, many existing homeowners might still complain about a perceived increase in traffic.)
What’s interesting is that this is essentially an old idea adapted for today’s environment. Between 1890 and 1930, many U.S. cities laid down a similar development pattern, anchored by the streetcar. It didn’t last long because the introduction of the automobile fundamentally altered American roads.
Perhaps most importantly, this kind of suburban infill could relieve pressure on hot urban neighborhoods, thus reducing the displacement of poorer families. If developers include affordable housing in the mix, it could bring more people closer to the jobs in suburban office parks that are currently out of reach for many city residents. It would provide a new foundation for suburban revitalization.
There is one significant hurdle. Once again let’s look at El Camino Real. As it stretches from San Francisco to San Jose, it passes through 14 other communities. Each municipality maintains some land-use control over a portion of the corridor. Several have their own plans for that slice, independent of what the community next door thinks.
Getting one municipality to adopt this approach would be an achievement. Getting all of them to agree on the integrated redesign of a 43-mile-long corridor? Even with some intervention at the state level, it would be an extremely complex project. And El Camino Real is just one of thousands of such commercial corridors nationwide.
There’s also a chance such an approach might steer money from cities to back to suburbs just as new investment in inner-city neighborhoods is bringing economic and social stability to many metropolises. Still, that might be a risk worth taking if it increases the overall supply of housing, produces more equitable outcomes – and eliminates a great American eyesore.
Pete Saunders is the community and economic development director for the village of Richton Park, Illinois, and an urban planning consultant. He is also the editor and publisher of the Corner Side Yard, a blog focused on public policy in America’s Rust Belt cities.
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