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And every apartment building, and every fast food restaurant... Why Everywhere in the US is Starting to Look the Same: https://youtu.be/UX4KklvCDmg

> Increasingly though, so much of the U.S. looks so much like the rest in terms of retail/food that I begin to feel the entire country is in fact a mall of sorts.

Here's a good video on the subject: https://youtu.be/UX4KklvCDmg

On the points of culture, there's a video [1] that talks about how common US zoning pressures towns to all build very similarly, to the point where they look almost indistinguishable from one another. There's similar videos done by City Beautiful and Not Just Bikes, but I'm having a harder time searching my history for them on my phone. (I'll try to post them once I'm back at a real computer.)

Here's another video [2] that discusses how city tax revenue is primarily earned in their dense downtown regions, and spent on their more distributed suburban environments.

Others in the comments have discussed this, but the issues with towns being walkable and cyclist friendly tend to intersect directly with anti-goals if car design. Places aren't walkable if there's huge roads and parking lots that people have to traverse in order to get to them. Similarly, cars are quite hazardous to pedestrians and cyclists. If we're optimizing for human-scale environments, we're inherently car-hostile. Similarly, if we're optimizing for efficiency of cars, then we're hostile to human-scale design. The ideas are largely antithetical.

You can get some hybridization--metra trains from city cores to the suburbs, street cars or trams along main suburban drags alongside with automobiles, but one system constrains the other.

Historically, highway systems have segregated neighborhoods whose citizens were poorer, and relied disproportionately on public transit or bikes and walking. If you have to go half a mile out of your way to find an overpass over the highway to get to the nearest grocery, and that overpass has a litter-covered sidewalk barely two feet wide, we definitely aren't building our suburbs to be walkable or bikable.

[1]: https://youtu.be/UX4KklvCDmg [2]: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI

⬐ megablast

This is the way it is in the Uk. Every town has a high street with the same boring stores.

⬐ rexpop

As the video goes on to say, it's the same across many parts of the world.

⬐ enos_feedler

And online too. We started with diverse web pages and we ended up with vanilla facebook. Its familiar and easy, just like locating the McDonalds restroom after exiting the highway.

⬐ animal531

The same is true for consumer goods. Every year that passes everything becomes more and more available everywhere (except perhaps when some group has a monopoly in a country and only sells certain brands/things).

⬐ foreigner

There's a great word for this: "Genericana". Everyplace you go is the same as everywhere else. I created my startup to try to help fix this problem. We're selling gift cards that can only be spent at local businesses in a single town. The idea is to keep places unique by supporting their local businesses instead of national chains or Amazon. Check us out if you're interested: https://giverrang.com

⬐ maxerickson

Expiring, store locked gift cards are not more thoughtful than cash. They shouldn't exist.

⬐ foreigner

But gift cards do exist, and currently the bulk of them are funneling money to Amazon and corporate chains. Our cards can typically be spent at any independent business in the town. They expire in 5 years where allowable by law (or never elsewhere) which is practically forever.

⬐ maxerickson

How do you prevent businesses being excluded? Small towns pretty much definitionally have conflicts of interest.

Also, being better than Amazon doesn't make something better than cash.

⬐ rhapsodic

None

⬐ black_13

None

⬐ pjc50

Anyone care to provide a summary of this that I can spend 30 seconds reading rather than twenty minutes viewing?

⬐ Tr03P

Zoning laws

⬐ RichardHeart

Everything is a franchise, or 5 store residential wooden over 1 floor of concrete structure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1). Because those structures are most effective for capital , and for fire codes.

⬐ culopatin

Across the street from where I am in Florida I have the same exact design (colors and all) as the article’s first picture from Austin.

⬐ runnerup

"5-over-1" refers to building codes, not # of stories: multiple floors of "Type 5" wooden frame over a single floor of "Type 1" Concrete construction.

"5-over-1"s happen to always look like every other up-and-coming new "urban middies" with 75-95th percentile rents. Generally with names following this format: "The [Noun]".