As stated by one of my favorite Youtubers, Jarvis Johnson, this episode is sponsored by ADHD. It’s rambling, rant-y, and mostly subjective (I did put numbers in some places, though!) but from the heart. Sorry in advance and please yell at me (respectfully) if I have any bad takes in here. I think I want to make this a living document, where I add new ideas and points as I think of them. I’ve been working on this for months, and I’m still not satisfied with it (I didn’t even talk about the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956!). I just have a lot of thoughts and very few writing skills.
What constitutes good urbanism? Ask anyone involved in the practice of taking transit and walking around their city, and they would likely list the same things: walkability, safe bike infrastructure, transit-oriented development, abundant affordable housing, green spaces, third spaces, and public institutions. Even checking off just two or three of these criteria put a place miles ahead of its competition in car-dependent America. These are the bones of good urbanism, but we need to look at the muscles and tissue of a city to find out what makes it a great place to live.
By the standard criteria, a place like Carmel, IN would be a bastion of urbanism. Its downtown is reminiscent of a European city center, with mixed-use zoning, fairly dense housing, local restaurants and shops, and easy access to green spaces. Spend an evening there, and you can see families out biking with their kids, high schoolers walking to a coffee shop with friends, and retirees grabbing dinner— granted, this idyllic scene is punctuated with luxury cars racing through the roundabouts of Main Street. Fishers is similar but far newer, with a self-described “entrepreneurial” spirit [1]. It is home to a variety of startup-sized tech companies, as well as a student loan provider’s corporate office, but is also close enough to Carmel and Indianapolis that it is home to many commuters looking for more affordable property prices.
I recently visited eastern Kansas, and my first takeaway was that, ahem [clears throat], PITTSBURGH IS NOT THE MIDWEST! My second takeaway was that all Midwestern cities except Chicago and anything in Minnesota is almost copy-pasted. My third takeaway was that Culver’s is so good and non-Midwesterners are missing out. Part of my visit included heading to Lenexa, KS, a suburb of KC that is very reminiscent of Fishers, IN. Its biggest employer is a technology company, and its population has exploded in recent years due to an influx of engineers. New, expensive restaurants serving quote-unquote elevated cuisine, where corporate lunches are held and conformity is expected. A brand new rec center, an overabundance of pilates/crossfit/whatever-else-is-trendy-these-days institutions, a free art gallery, and more. All barely accessible by foot/bike, clean, and sterile. [coming soon: Iceland, Norway, and Indianapolis]
What makes a place a great place to live is how much opportunity there is to encounter people that are different from you. And I don’t mean in a formal, organized setting. I mean that you pass someone on the street speaking a language you’ve never heard. You walk through a so-called “rough” neighborhood and chat with a friend about last night’s game. You see people of all socioeconomic classes, abilities, ethnicities, genders, and ages using and enjoying amenities like libraries, buses, museums, and parks. There are countless family-owned restaurants offering real food made by real people, and they stick around because they can afford to lease their space. Kids have the freedom to hang out with their friends regardless of what neighborhood they live in, because their guardians have confidence that the community has their back. This sort of diversity and robustness of a community relies on the aforementioned “bones”, but without the meat, a place feels sterile, hostile, uninviting. Even unsafe, for those who don’t look like the majority. Somewhere like Lenexa could be one of the “safest” places in the states to live. For the right kind of person.
Parents have become overprotective, and understandably so. While crime rates as a whole are lower than ever, our 24/7 access to the worst news is not helping our perception of safety. Additionally, being a pedestrian or a cyclist in the US is dangerous, especially in suburban and rural areas where non-car infrastructure often just doesn’t exist at all. For example, in my parents’ neighborhood, there is no way to access any amenities without driving. The neighborhood of detached single-family homes is on one side of a massive highway, separated from restaurants and parks by an incredibly dangerous cloverleaf interchange across it. The apex of my frustration with this design occurred one evening as I was driving home. I saw a truck driver crossing this busy intersection in the dark on foot— it turns out that the truck parking is located on the opposite side of the highway from the restaurants, and there is no way for trucks to park at those establishments. (The solution here is NOT to create parking spaces for trucks— it is to connect these amenities in a way that non-drivers can access. Nobody should have to risk their life just trying to get a hot meal).
I feel for the grade-school kids that live in my neighborhood; until they go to college, they will likely never know the joy of being able to walk to a coffee shop or a store with friends without having to have a drivers license. Spontaneous meetups without the dependence on a parent/older sibling to shuttle you around is such a crucial aspect to development— I believe the lack of this independence plays a key role in the prevalence of loneliness [2]. We have begun to criminalize just existing. We hear about the crisis of loneliness plaguing American teenagers with the advent of social media and generative AI. I believe that dependence on these technologies is actually a symptom, and not the root cause itself. Because of legislation consistently destroying what used to be ways for people to connect without needing a car or needing to make purchases, we have essentially attached a price tag to in-person social interactions. Loitering is now illegal in many areas, and groups of teenagers are seen as a threat. We lack third spaces that don’t require spending money, and the consistent critical lens from which we view teens leads to a sense of hopelessness. In the past, teens could reasonably expect to be able to go to the mall or something without driving. The cultural zeitgeist of the 20th century slowly evolved to require driving as a rite of passage, romanticizing long road trips and driving fast on empty roads late at night. However, as stated by William Hazen in his interview for the Indiana Historical Society’s The Electric Railway: Indiana’s Interurbans exhibit, “Public transportation at its best is a third space”. Cars are inherently isolationist. Public transit is not.
In 2023, the Waterfront in Pittsburgh passed a new regulation that banned groups of teenagers from being in the area after 11 PM without an adult. Seen as a deterrent to crime and a way to create a family-friendly environment, this was a blatant attack on the autonomy of minors. Yes, teenagers can make stupid decisions, but constantly making it harder for them to simply live is not doing them any favors. As kids enter middle and high school, they should be given an amount of independence proportional to the responsibilities we impose as a society. They may be working their first jobs, or babysitting younger siblings, so they should be allowed to go see a movie with their friends or explore new places independently from their caregivers. By creating environments where it becomes impossible for a non-driving person to go anywhere without help, we impose artificial restrictions on their autonomy. No wonder people are lonelier than ever.
It’s the type of isolation born from car dependency which leads to the “other-ing” of minorities. A recent example (in March 2025) is of Larry, a Wisconsin man who showed up at his state’s legislature to testify in support of a bill banning all gender-affirming care for minors. After listening to trans people testify about their lifesaving experiences with gender-affirming care, he had a change of heart. He realized that trans people are people that are just trying to live their lives— “I was invited here to give my support for [the bill]. I have very little knowledge of gay people and things like that. So, when I came here, my eyes were opened.” [3] This goes to show that listening to others is so important. Meeting people different from you is crucial, and with our non-urban-core communities so isolated, it’s nearly impossible to build that sense of acceptance. Why are cities so often the places with the most inclusive legislation? It’s because of diversity.
The Midwest is filled to the brim with a live-and-let-live attitude, which even extends (sometimes) to those minorities that are so “othered”. Until I moved to Pittsburgh, I didn’t understand how much I was missing out on in terms of community. I found my people in this city, where I can feel free to express my interests knowing that I’ll find someone who shares them. While I don’t feel necessarily unwelcome in places like Carmel and Lenexa, I lack that community and sense of freedom. After all, plenty of South Asian folks live in those communities, influenced by the relatively high median income of this demographic. According to the Pew Research Center, the household median income of Indian Americans in 2022 was $145,000, almost double the national median of $74,580 [4][5]. They are more than capable of living comfortably in those communities, driving the diversity metrics up and allowing places to claim multiculturalism. However, (and I’m generalizing here), that economic privilege leads to isolationism in the community, despite still being an ethnic minority. It’s a limitation of class separation, where people who “make it” can finally move out of “crime-ridden”, noisy cities into quiet, spacious suburbs. They get to raise their kids in a protected bubble, where their idea of altruism is organizing something like Dance Marathon to fundraise for Riley Children’s Hospital. Important? Yes, absolutely. But also, largely performative. Something nice to stick on the resume to get into a good college. I’m not saying that’s everyone, and I’m definitely not trying to imply that that work isn’t important. In my experience, though, some of my peers involved in those activities were truly passionate about helping those less fortunate, but fundamentally averse towards status-quo-distrupting systemic change that would render that type of charity work obsolete. I am reminded of IL-09 congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh’s story [6]. She was raised with conservative values, but by moving to a school district with a large population of undocumented immigrants, she realized that a significant portion of the narratives around hard work and the bootstrap myth lacked nuance and were based on false assumptions. It’s difficult to challenge one’s values that are instilled from childhood, but even more so when you never encounter the people about whom these narratives are constructed.
So then what do we do about rural communities? Density and walkability aren’t possible in the middle of a cornfield (although rural Indiana in the era of the electric interurbans would beg to differ). We do what so many other countries do well— connect even the smallest communities to each other with affordable, reliable public transportation. Allow rural residents to access the amenities that come with high population density without having to drive for hours and hours. Politicians and economists will argue that building that infrastructure isn’t profitable, because there aren’t enough people willing to use it, especially in areas with fewer residents. There are a few counterarguments to be made here. Firstly, public transportation shouldn’t be expected to be profitable in a direct, traditional sense. It is always going to cost more to maintain and build new infrastructure than what is going to be collected with fares. The return on investment comes indirectly— improved quality of life, less air and noise pollution, less road accidents and preventable pedestrian fatalities, improved access to public amenities... the list goes on and on and on. People adding yet another highway lane never consider the externalities of car dependency, yet when it comes to public infrastructure, that’s all they care about. We need to change the narrative that transit must pay for itself.
As I said, I will add more to this. Stay tuned!
[1] Fishers, IN
[2] I wrote this section on loneliness a few weeks before CityNerd’s video on the “male loneliness epidemic”. Coincidence? Yeah, probably. But definitely a video worth watching.
[3] LGBTQNation
[4] Pew Research
[5] US Census Bureau