Eff Cars. Power to the People.

Devin Vermeulen - Director of Design & Development

06/12/24

At the MicroLife Institute, one of the main drivers to our mission and dedication to Missing Middle Housing is rooted in reestablishing a sense of belonging and community that seems to have gotten further and further lost as we’ve stopped designing cities and neighborhoods for humans, and instead designed them for cars.

Personally, many years ago, I used to be really into cars.  Like a lot of suburban kids that came of age in the 90s, I was caught up in the obsession with car modifications and spent a lot of time in the garage of my friend whose dad worked on restoring old army jeeps in his spare time.  To a teenager in the suburbs, cars represented freedom—the ability to get out there on our own and experience the world.  After college though, I spent two decades in New York City where my love for cars turned into complete resentment.  I started to see cars less as that key to freedom, and more as I do today—incredibly expensive, steeply depreciating, dangerous machines that we have unfortunately become slaves to due to our continual spiral into sprawl, adding freeway lanes, and so, so much parking.

The high cost of ownership can soak up an exorbitant amount of money, especially for individuals who already live paycheck to paycheck and are often forced between the unreliability and occasional “oops, that's $1,000; there goes a chunk of savings” experience of owning a used car vs. the premium pricing and upkeep necessary for owning a new car.  Ultimately, they become a barrier to breaking out of poverty.  Cars aren’t freedom—for me, they were just the only pathway a suburban kid had to anything outside biking, walking or public transit distance—which, in the suburbs is basically everything beyond your next door neighbors.  I realized kids in New York were going to the movies with their friends much earlier than I did—because all it took to release them from the necessity of being shuttled around by their parents was a sense of responsibility and a $2.50 Metrocard.  

Cars have created a barrier to our communities seeing themselves as fellow humans.  Like the internet often is, a car is an anonymizer that gives people a facade—the excuse to make selfish, often ignorant decisions without the guilt of taking responsibility or showing empathy for fellow neighbors.  It’s amazing what a simple thing like face-to-face eye contact can do to remind us that we are part of a society, not individuals who are being inconvenienced by the existence of other people.  Yet we continue to further urban design that favors the convenience and expediency of car travel, even at the expense of human safety.

It’s for this reason that many Missing Middle design philosophies and modern urbanists are set on removing parking requirements, giving “road diets” (subtracting lanes from roads in service of protected bike lanes and sidewalks), and otherwise promoting design that focuses on human scale and pedestrian activity rather than ease of travel for the growing amount of cars that clog our streets.  Intermixing commercial live/work spaces, gardens, parks and shared amenities creates incentives to walk around your neighborhood, and spend time outdoors and on porches—where you can not only make eye contact with your neighbors, but even interact with them, get to know them, and form the bonds of a real community.

This is also, sadly, one of the most contentious issues in modern urban design and a place where NIMBYism often rears its head.  “Subtracting lanes will make already bad traffic worse” is an easy concept to embrace.  Being concerned about already packed street parking being exacerbated by even gentle density is often an argument against Missing Middle solutions.  We are stuck in a cycle of thinking that more people = more cars = more need to design for those cars.  But this just spirals us into sprawl thinking and the kind of terrible urban design we have in the suburbs.  The reality is that turning the page as a society to being more driven by walking, biking, and public transit requires, as painful as it may be at first, making things a bit less convenient for cars.  Inconvenience of driving is the nudge that can push people to alternative forms of transportation like bikes and subways.  Increased ridership of those things will lead to better funding, safety and communal support.  It’s an admittedly arduous start but creates a positive spiral that can reach a tipping point if we continue to push together.  Change is hard for creatures of habit like human beings.  But this kind of change can actually help us create that human interaction we are often so sadly missing.  

This is one of the primary drivers of the “court” in “cottage court” and our design philosophy around pocket neighborhoods: using these shared amenities and courtyards as a way to encourage serendipitous interaction, shared experiences, and that vital human-to-human connection that makes us feel part of something.  Not only do these spaces help stitch together those connections, but they are also shared and subsidized by your fellow neighbors, making them larger and more accessible than an isolated backyard that is empty but for personal use by one home.

When I lived in Brooklyn, we spent many years in a typical “brownstone” row house—dense blocks of housing (often small multifamily units) that encircled a closed-off grid of back yards.

Time, fear, and a sense of individualism led to that “grid” being established by boxed-off individual yards, often with fences that became more and more opaque as the decades went on.  As I looked out my back window at them from above once I thought “what if these fences were just gone”, and instead of 60 isolated and tiny backyards, this was a shared park, where trees, playgrounds, BBQs, walking paths and gardens could be enjoyed and shared by everyone, and things like block parties could be held in the comforting, protected shelter of nature rather than in the depressing asphalt roads (which are often interrupted by dangerous cars).  This concept was one of the light bulb moments that drove me to embrace pocket neighborhood thinking.

One of the societal barriers to this kind of thing happening, even in already pedestrian focused urban areas like Brooklyn, is group dynamics.  Sixty people is a large pool of individuals to come together and agree on programming, upkeep, and empathetic shared use of these kinds of resources.  Much like how large tower apartment buildings are often filled with so many units that the residents don’t recognize or even talk to each other in the elevator, large group sizes create a sense of anonymity just like cars do.  A high school class of 500 will divide into cliques and like-minded smaller groups.  A high school class of 20 will probably all have met each other's families at some point.  Smaller groups create deeper bonds, more personal connections, and a stronger ability to align on decision making.  This is why pocket neighborhoods encourage a finite number of units—typically no more than 13-15—who share these spaces together and help retain a sense of ownership and care, balanced with a sense of empathy for accommodating fellow neighbors.

So the next time you’re worried about the influx of people or cars that gentle density brings, or the noise and traffic of a live/work building popping up in your neighborhood, remember that you, as a human, will benefit immensely from feeling part of a vibrant society, and that fewer cars means safer streets and more face-to-face interaction.