Strip malls may solve US’s housing crisis

Forget 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 US 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 humanising 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 US 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.

—Bloomberg