10 Suburbs That Are Becoming More City-Like

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It's not an accident that so many of these cities are in California. New California legislation is literally forcing cities to build more housing or else they risk fines and other penalties. The law actually sets a number of new units each city is required to build by a particular year in order to remain compliant with the law. This is forcing formerly suburban places like Irvine, Calabasas, and Rancho Cucamonga to add mixed-use developments to their housing stock. The results will be interesting to see.

Don't miss the main headline about Mountain View, CA -- we just opened up a pedestrain mall and re-discovered our downtown (Castro St!). I am happy to see California suburbs embracing some walkability. Hard to see from Street View though, since Google can't drive its cars down that road anymore.

I love the extra touch of placing Chicago's 6-pointed star in your graph at 2:00 for Chicago, whereas the other cities have the typical 5-pointed star.

There’s an active campaign to restore Santa Clara’s lost downtown that was obliterated by urban renewal. A citizen-led campaign has resulted in a plan being approved by city council in December 2023. They’re adopting a form-based code and zoning for mixed use. It’s a remarkable story. The campaign only began three years ago.

When i was in Palo Alto we’d joke that Redwood City is the only place on the SF peninsula that understands it’s actually supposed to be a city (not just keep pretending to be a suburb). Their city staff is pretty great and forward thinking too

Was a kid in Redwood City in the early nineties. Over the past 3 decades it has transformed more than almost anywhere in the Bay Area. Downtown was completely dead back then, except for a few businesses (shoutout to defunct pizza and pipes!) Now incredibly vibrant for a suburb and the density has expanded significantly beyond the few blocks of heritage downtown.

CityNerd being a Sega kid explains so much.

Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, currently has a higher skyline than Vancouver and is outpacing it in terms of skyscraper construction by an extremely high degree. Now Surrey and Coquitlam want to do the same, and they're even farther out suburbs. Surrey is actually going to have a higher population than Vancouver within a few years, and there's something like over a hundred towers planned for what will be the GVRD's second CBD around the skytrain corridor from Gateway to King George. That's not to mention the utterly massive multi-billion dollar developments of Oakridge, Fleetwood, Fraser Mills, Lougheed, Burquitlam, Lansdowne, and Clayton. With the smallest of those developments being Oakridge at a mere 3300 units and the largest of those developments being Lougheed at 10,000 units, it's going to be fascinating to see our geographically small metro region basically Manhattanize within the next decade or so.

I feel like most of Richardson's reasons can be completely explained by the explosive growth of the student population of UT-Dallas located in Richardson, TX. I lived there car-free between for 4 years between 2019 and 2023 while doing my undergrad and so did a lot of other students especially International ones who sometimes even lived off campus and commuted to school using the DART buses, which are free for UTD students and the 883 Bus (a.k.a The Comet Cruiser) is likely the highest ridership bus in the whole system.

0:00 Suburbs really are a sort of limbo for so many people. There are people who want to live in the city, but can’t afford it. Then there are the people who want to live in a rural area, but can’t find work.

There's been a lot of new high-rise development in Mt. Vernon in recent years, much of it with lots of affordable housing units for low-income residents. I would imagine that probably has a noticeable effect on the amount of folks using public transit in the area, and owning fewer cars per household, which is great.

1:11 ok the picket fence and schools joke actually got me good

The bay area suburb urbanization is real. I’m sure a lot of it is being driven by work from home, but I went to school in between redwood city and Mountain View, and I’ve watched all of the suburbs along the Caltrain slowly develop. Unfortunately there’s a long long way to go on housing affordability, but hopefully the new state laws going into affect will accelerate this. I have so much hope for the Bay Area becoming an urbanist hotspot (not just SF)

Interesting to see which suburbs are becoming almost their own cities over in North America, here in Australia and more specifically Sydney we have multiple examples of this where small satellite cities are popping up around major shopping and transport routes, Parramatta and Liverpool being the biggest 2 examples of this

12:45 CA passed a law abolishing parking minimums within a certain proximity to transit. No way that would already have accounted for this spike though, since it only came into effect last year.

NYC immediate suburbs are more urban than urban neighborhoods in other cities. You can also argue some of NYC suburbs have their own suburbs

Richardson is being intentional about transit and active transportation. As an inner ring suburb it benefits from cheaper housing that is well located to jobs in in Dallas, Plano, and Frisco. While not always next to transit, more apartments usually mean opportunities for people to live close to work. Additionally, Richardson is more diverse than many Dallas suburbs.

I love your sarcasim "Fences ... usually white. Quote unquote good schools ... usually white" 🤣

Downtown Richardson is definitely a fun spot that the town seems intent on revitalizing and invigorating. It looks like they're really trying to densify the area near 75, and not to mention that Richardson's Chinatown is an amazing spot (and to think how much better it could be if the giant parking lot was converted into a pedestrian square)