Maybe you’ve heard this unkind old joke about American culture: We will pay a small fortune to amble through the cobblestone streets of Rome and Paris, or even the ersatz Main Street in Disneyland. Then we’ll return to our suburban homes and two-car garages, and swear that a place like that could never work here.
There’s a sad truth to this. In cities and suburbs across the country, a vocal contingent of Americans devote themselves to resisting change that could bring denser, more pedestrian-oriented development to their backyards. Many people I talk to about my work on American cities share the sense that streets built around walking might be a charming holdover for societies enlightened enough to preserve them, but sprawl-loving Americans simply don’t want to live that way. Earlier this year, Pew published a survey that seemed to confirm this: “Majority of Americans prefer spread-out communities with big houses.”
But that framing was unfortunate, because it emphasizes precisely the wrong takeaway about Americans’ preferences for how they want to live.
Pew’s own data, along with other evidence on the question, suggests there’s substantial pent-up appetite for a walking-friendly way of life in the US — and not nearly enough supply of places that can satiate it.
There are many reasons it’s hard for us to build that way in the 21st century, but a simple lack of demand isn’t one of them. Our shortage of places designed for walking reflects one of the most tangible but rarely voiced domains in which Americans lack freedom and choice.
In the land of the free, it should not be so hard to walk to buy a little treat! And building more places where the pleasures and necessities of daily life are close at hand does not mean eliminating the lower-density, driving-oriented communities that many other Americans prefer.
Walking has a surprisingly large constituency
The top-line claim from Pew’s nationally representative survey is correct: 55 percent of the 8,512 respondents said they prefer to live in a place where “houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away.”
But the more interesting and telling finding is how many said the opposite: 44 percent of Americans — approaching half the country! — would rather live where homes are “smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores and restaurants are within walking distance.”
That number is much higher than the share of Americans who can actually meet their daily needs on foot — and a country split 55–44 on how it wants to live shouldn’t be built overwhelmingly for the 55 percent. An analysis from Smart Growth America, a nonprofit that advocates for compact, mixed-use development, finds that 6.8 percent of Americans live in walkable communities in the country’s 35 biggest metro areas. A separate 2025 study, meanwhile, estimated that only 10.8 percent live in places designated “most walkable” by the EPA.
Other surveys have found an even larger constituency for neighborhoods where daily errands don’t require a car. In a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), using a sample of 2,000 adults in the 50 largest US metro areas, 59 percent said they prefer “houses with small yards, and it is easy to walk to the places you need to go.” The remaining 41 percent would choose “houses with large yards, and you have to drive to the places where you need to go.”
One result that particularly surprised me from NAR’s poll, given America’s strong cultural affinity for single-family homes, was that respondents were evenly split between these two options:
- “Own or rent an apartment or townhouse and you have an easy walk to shops and restaurants and have a shorter commute to work,” chosen by 52 percent of poll takers.
- “Own or rent a detached, single-family house and you have to drive to shops and restaurants and have a longer commute to work,” chosen by 48 percent.
An earlier survey, analyzed by researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, similarly found that 55.7 percent of adults “reported favoring (36.3%) or strongly favoring (19.4%) community design with stores and other destinations within walking distance even if homes are closer together.”
Public opinion polling can be an imperfect indicator of what people actually want — an issue I’ll return to. A 2024 survey from the National Association of Home Builders points to some of those complications: Two-thirds of participants said they consider a walkable community “desirable” or “essential.” But two-thirds also said they prefer a detached single-family house, and most indicated they prefer to live in suburbs, both of which can be somewhat in tension with walkability. This survey didn’t ask respondents what they’d trade off (like home size) to live within walking distance of everyday destinations, so it offers fairly weak evidence for how highly they prioritize it. But I could find no major national survey in which walkability was a fringe taste; even when asked to trade it against bigger homes, bigger yards, or detached housing, the walkable option consistently attracts a large percentage — and often a majority — of Americans.
It’s not hard to imagine why. These findings tap into a sense that the way we build our surroundings in the US has gotten badly out of whack. “It’s antisocial,” one American tourist said in a video that went viral this summer, as he walked through Munich in wonder at the vibrant public realm around him. Walking is not an anachronistic transportation technology, but rather the native scale of human life. It is “the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart,” author Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book Wanderlust. A built environment conducive to walking, unsurprisingly, causes people to walk more, and traveling on foot can turn a nightmare commute into a more pleasant and salutary experience, among myriad other benefits.
But housing in such places is in desperately short supply because much of (probably almost all) of America’s walking-oriented urban fabric dates to before World War II, and we’re doing little to expand it.
Walkability is popular. The trade-offs needed to achieve it are not.
As with opinion polling on lots of other issues, there are limits to how literally we can take these surveys. They involve weighing hypothetical scenarios that most people aren’t accustomed to thinking about. Many respondents may have never given much thought to walkability before, and so might be coming up with an answer on the spot rather than retrieving a stable internal preference.
And the surveys also don’t ask about perhaps the most significant trade-off required by walkable communities. Compact development built around walking is geometrically incompatible with designing everything around the automobile. So making walking easier also requires making driving and parking less cheap and convenient. Opinion polling suggests Americans don’t feel favorably about congestion pricing, and many people (even in the most walking-friendly cities in the US) freak out when unlimited free parking is threatened, as journalist Henry Grabar documented in his book Paved Paradise. So the mere fact that people say they want walkability does not mean it would be easy to create in places built around driving — we can’t have both. (This is analogous to other politically difficult ideas, like the debate over single-payer healthcare — the proposal polls well, and it’s indeed a good idea! But it’s much harder to get voters to accept the big tax hike that it calls for, even if it means they’d no longer need to pay private insurance premiums.)
Nevertheless, one need only look at the stratospheric real estate prices in America’s relatively few walkable areas to see that demand to live there is extremely high. With rare exceptions, we don’t build new neighborhoods like this anymore, and haven’t in decades. Although the US is often singled out as uniquely bad at prioritizing humane and liveable built environments, car-dependent development has become the norm for new communities built across much of the world since the mid-20th century, including in European suburbs.
We might one day recover the lost art of building human-scale places. Until then, the simplest way to meet millions of Americans’ desire for that way of life is for existing walkable cities and suburbs to permit more housing. If high-demand places like New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and their inner-ring suburbs added more density, it is certain that more people would move there (and this need not happen only through high-rises, which are disliked by many Americans). Doing so would also help alleviate our housing affordability crisis, while ensuring that these desirable places are replenished with new homes compatible with modern life, rather than just decrepit Victorians and walk-up apartments.
Imagine if the roughly half of us who say we want to be able to walk to meet our daily needs could live somewhere that made it possible — it would mean a dramatic transformation in the texture of American life. But that change need not come at the expense of people who prefer something else — the point is to create more choices, not fewer, and Americans who want more space, privacy, and to drive for most trips would remain perfectly free to choose that way of life.
So if Greenwich Village is not your idea of heaven on Earth, no one will force you to live there.