Suburbanites Will Flock to This 15 Minute City and Like It

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Americans like to vacation in places where they can walk or bike everywhere and then get home from vacation and make angry phone calls to their city council for allowing a multi-use apartment building to be built in view of their suburban castle.

One uncomfortable takeaway that could be made here is that many suburbanites are much more open to the car-free aspects of urbanism than they are to aspects such as density and socioeconomic diversity. They're happy to ditch the car for a bike if they're in a place with very low density and (presumably) a high-income population. It could be that the biggest challenge urbanists face is not getting people onto bikes, but getting them to live in proximity to people who make less money than they do.

I grew up in Sunriver. One thing visitors don't grasp is the fact that operating a destination resort takes a lot of people who can only afford to live farther away from their workplace. And, as bikeable as Sunriver is, there is no dedicated bike path to the surrounding communities where employees live, and the bus system is virtually nonexistent. People also live farther away from grocery stores because they have been priced out of the cities. Consequently, everyone who lives there drives to and from work and . This fifteen minute city rests on a mountain of lower income people who drive there from dozens of miles away. Plus, the destination resorts have an outsized influence on local politics. Actually, that's an understatement. In Sunriver and other resorts which aren't in incorporated cities, the local governing body IS the HOA. The existence of Sunriver and other resort communities comes at a cost most visitors never even consider.

Your description of the stress leaving your body upon entering the Ponderosa-zone is on point. It truly is a beautiful part of Oregon

This timing is funny. We live in Bend, and ride our bikes down to sun river frequently. I always complain that it’s boring, and my wife counters that it literally has all the nice urbanism features I complain about other places not having.

City Nerd "What I did on my summer vacation" video. I respect it. Video idea since you're a former competitive golfer: pros and cons of municipally owned golf courses.

My suburbanite parents go here almost every year (they are going on Monday LOL) and they drive pretty much everywhere in Sunriver itself, which makes it make even less sense to me

Amazing how awesome suburbs can be without car traffic and with stores / restaurants within walking and biking distance

I agree that it's not all about density. Design for accessibility by bike/walk/transit doesn't actually require density as high aa some people think.

This reminds me of Sanibel Florida a barrier island with a very solid system of multi-use paths where you see tourists renting a bike for their stay but at the same time complaining that the traffic in their cities "is insanely bad because they are way too many cars"

It is worth noting that Sunriver was designed in the 1960s.

7:45 is an incredible example of how few parking spaces it takes to house a hundred bikes.

One major way you can tell it's more on the vacation side of the spectrum and not the walkable urbanist side is that the only way to get there is by car or private plane; seemingly no public transit access.

This video kinda exemplifies my complaint about US urbanism, that basically to live anywhere that's walkable and possibly not need to own a car, you need to live in a city. I don't think I'd necessarily want to live a pseduo-resort town even to retire, but I'd like to be able to (easily) live without a car for the most part while still having a lot of nature around and not have light pollution for miles. Reinvigorating cities seems hard enough around the country and is on the time scale of decades probably, but creating quaint, urban villages you'd find in Europe or Japan doesn't even seem to be on the radar of possibility.

Is this an ad? Because now I want to go here! Great video, as always

"Sunriver... It's like an enchantment... where... the stress just starts leaving my body" - CityNerd (from an embedded Sunriver Tourism Board ad tomorrow)

Undeveloped topic suggestion: hospitals. Hospitals are enormous employment centers that also drive large travel volumes from non-employers on a daily basis. In other words, the ideal transit use case. Looking around many cities, however, major hospitals often have a large blast radius in the urban environment. Hospitals are often surrounded by expansive asphalt graveyards and even vacant land—because nobody wants to live next to large parking lots. Hospitals should be drivers of urbanized living, not destroyers of it. A hunch is that this is largely related to the economic health of the city overall. When a city is doing poorly, it’s easy for hospitals to convert local housing into parking for non-local employees. Thriving urban cores seem not to have been effected by this as much as struggling urban cores, at least anecdotally. Really not sure how you would quantify this, but it’s a though I wanted to put out there.

This reminds me of a housing development -- Village Homes, in Davis CA. I wonder if you've looked at it? Village Homes is similar to this, but it's the regular place to live rather than a vacation spot. It was designed in the 70s IIRC. The street system was designed for the business of getting cars to houses, bringing refuse trucks around to take trash away, and the like. Unlike regular suburbia where the street-side of a home is a big yard, in Village Homes the streets are like old school alleys. The non-street side of the homes is what faces into a large yard, as well as common space running between the homes. The common space is jointly managed by the residents and features lots of fruit trees and interesting plants. This makes the common area into a multi-use walking/biking area. I got to visit it for one day and it was very very interesting, very attractive idea.

One thing i notice here, and have seen in other place that have this feel, is that the main road goes BY the town, not THROUGH the town. So many towns in the country areas and mountains are dominated by the main highway blasting through the city center.