This underscores how important small businesses are to the health of a city.
I live a in less walkable neighborhood on this map - but about a year ago a small (tiny really, ~700sqft) corner store opened up 2 blocks from me. It sells coffee, pastry, simple sandwiches, but also pantry staples (flour, sugar, milk etc.) and has a really good beer and wine selection.
I can't do my normal grocery shopping there, but being able to walk 2 minutes to get coffee or a quick breakfast or that missing stick of butter for a recipe has been such a wonderful change to the neighborhood. (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.) They also host food trucks several days a week so its almost like having a restaurant in the neighborhood too.
All it took was 1 little store, owned and operated by a couple who lives in the neighborhood, to turn a 20 minute neighborhood into a 5 minute neighborhood for several thousand people.
Shame we decided to shutter all those down across the country, for an extended period because they were deemed "non-essential", leading to many of them to shutter forever. At the same time massive mega-corps were able to be deemed essential, and allowed to continue to operate, turning record profits.
But of course that's just conspiracy theory thinking and only someone who hates grandma would say something like that.
I lived in a neighborhood like this too, and it was fantastic. I hated the city, but loved where I lived. I've been wishing to find something like it ever since, but it was a very old neighborhood and everything now seems to be planned, isolated communities.
We need zoning revamped, and you'd see a lot more of this.
7-11 or CVS/Walgreens fills this void in a lot of US geographies.
They aren’t as personalized or localized as the neighborhood place, but the use case you describe is exactly the market 7-11/CVS/Walgreens is going after.
Incredible analysis! As a Seattleite I can say the conclusions here are very close to accurate, with the key additional note being that distance is not the only thing that defines walkability.
Seattle has some of the most confounding civil engineering I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived in five cities and visited dozens more. Here are some things that make a pedestrian life near impossible in my neighborhood:
- two high-traffic, multi-lane streets where people routinely run red lights and drive erratically, one dividing us from my child’s elementary school
- Many areas with no sidewalks and no area on the side of the road that’s safe to walk
- 5-way intersections with extremely confusing walk signals.
Seattle is complex in this regard as the elevation changes between neighborhoods are an additional dimension. If I was living at the base of Lower Queen Anne and the "facilities" meeting the 15m criteria was at the top, that's not something I would consider a viable walk.
Was thinking about this too. A 2D distance map doesn't do it justice, really, because it ignores the non-trivial hill in the middle of your route.
The other thing about Seattle is that you can have a grocery store nearby, but still not really have access to it if you're lower income. We have a lot of premium stores, especially in walkable neighborhoods. When I was a student I lived in Wedgwood, and I had 2 grocery stores within a 5-minute walk: the PCC, and the Metropolitan Market, both places where a week's groceries were about 2-3x as expensive as they were at the nearest Safeway, which was more than 15 minutes away.
Not faulting the creator of this article, as it's an okay rule of thumb, and it's hard to include details like that in a model.
> (...) that's not something I would consider a viable walk.
Why not? As long as it's truly a 15m walk? The metric should take into account that the speed is going to be reduced when walking on a steep incline, otherwise it's a bad metric...
> Seattle is complex in this regard as the elevation changes between neighborhoods are an additional dimension.
And then there is the socio-economic history of elevations in Seattle. tl;dr Historically poor people (and minorities) lived at the bottom of hills, rich people at the top. To this day, you can literally see houses get nicer as you go up hills.
There are also neighborhoods with a hill in the middle where one side of the hill was historically poor, and the other side well to do. My dad used to tell me that when he was a kid, him and all his friends knew not to go to up the hill where they didn't belong.
When I first started reading this article, I'll admit, the first thought, as a life-long Seattlite, that crossed my mind was, here we go again, some dumbass writes about what it is like to live in Seattle. Goddamit. But when I saw the chart that showed walking distance to a park at the top of the list then I started to realize this one hit the mark.
I actually purchased the home that I did because it is one block from my favorite park in the whole world, it is a magical place, to me, I discovered on a bike ride training for the STP. And I vowed I was going to buy a place near this park someday.
Call me crazy, but parks, just in general, are so extremely important to the quality of life and sometimes I think people overlook the importance of having a lot of public spaces like that.
I'm going to venture an educated guess that proximity of things like grocery stores, restaurants and schools in urban areas is going to be highly correlated with income. Lower income neighborhoods are going to have gas stations and 7-Elevens/AMPMs. So an effort to make a true 15-min city should help improve quality of life and access to healthier food for lower-income residents. That would be a good thing.
The way “supermarkets” are in the US, I don’t WANT to be a 15 minute walk from one. They are usually surrounded by a mile of blacktop and concrete, for all the drive-in shoppers in the front and all the trucks offloading goods or picking up deliveries in the back.
Would much rather be near a decent small or midsize grocery with no or limited off-street parking, and which receives its deliveries on the street in the early morning (no loading dock)
I like the idea of walking 15 minutes to get all the things.
But man when I think of the costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
Good point in that European high schools (generally) do not have large sports facilities and therefore are suited to typical urban multi-story buildings. Kids do sports at private/public sports clubs that are usually located outside town or in suburbs.
So high schools within 15 min walk/bike in Europe is much more doable than in the U.S.
Caveat: this is how it was when I was growing up in France; it may have changed since then, though I looked up my old high school and it's the same.
Seattle doesn't have nearly enough density to have that many high schools. Given the ever falling birth rate, it likely never will. The density would need to be obscenely high.
Figure high schools have 4x the number of students that elementary schools do, and we'd need 2x the elementary schools to make them all walkable, that means Seattle would have to have 8x the number of students in high school than it currently does to justify building enough high schools to make them all walkable.
Not to mention Seattle couldn't really afford to build that many schools, as the city can't even maintain the current schools to basic levels of safety (ongoing lead water pipe issues...)
(This is going to sound like we're playing Sim City 2000) but don't forget to add a hospital (a proper one, with an emergency room), a fire station, a police station...
> a grocery store
Are there many neighbourhoods which don't already have some kind of grocery store?
I was thinking the same thing. This doesn't seem like it's a realistic goal, as much as I do really like the idea. 15 minutes of walking isn't really much in terms of feet or meters or however you want to measure it. 15 minutes of biking time, that's better. I guess I live in a "15 Minute Area" if you only count the bike time. Maybe more like 20 if you count the time I end up sitting at intersections?
> he costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
A high school I understand (where I live in the UK it's common for high school kids to catch the bus to school if they don't live close - as long as you live within a 15 minute walk of the bus stop that seems fine). But a grocery store? What's difficult about that? Just convert a house.
I think every neighborhood should have an elementary school within walking distance (my local elementary school is not and it annoys me to no end) but I agree that for high schools this might be unrealistic, and anyway a good transit system should be able to make it easy for kids to get to high school whether they attend their local school or not.
> or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
> Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
I don't get this. Isn't a restaurant at the corner great? Why would you be annoyed? I like living next to a restaurants. It increases your quality of live I think, you can literally just swing by if you feel like it and after a while you get to know the owner and develop a personal relationship. It really makes this place more my home I think, I always greet them and have a quick chat, and brings some life to the street. Of course, there's a question of the size but that can be dealt with. A grocery store is another thing because often they tend to be really big, but I think often suitable places can be found. But I think the supermarkets in mind are small, not a giant supermarket. Something where you can get most of your stuff but don't really have a variety to choose from, something where you swing by because you forgot your eggs.
I don't live in the US so I am really unsure why that's so bad. I don't think living 15 minutes to a Walmart (I picture them to be massive) is meant.
I assume, of course, that you're living somewhere somewhat suitable. But we're talking about living in seattle, so I assume it's ok.
You make a good point. Living in walkable neighborhoods means evacuating most of the country and concentrating ourselves in fewer, denser cities. It'll be a great thing to the extent we can accomplish it, but people have a strong attachment to place and to suburban lifestyles, and the shift will fuel the nasty culture war we already have.
> But man when I think of the costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere
Not absolutely everything needs to be walkable in 15 minutes. Once kids are teenagers having go to school on transit or bicycle would be fine.
Perhaps focus on elementary schools being walkable.
> I like the idea of walking 15 minutes to get all the things.
But
>Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
>But man when I think of the costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
Even has the weak "what about the costs" argument.
It's not about rent so much as density. Seattle has this "urban village" concept where designated areas have zoning that allows apartment buildings and usually has a commercial strip. I'd guess the urban village map [1] overlaps the 15-minute zones pretty closely.
Outside of the urban villages, Seattle is comprised of neighborhoods of single-family homes. Those areas can't all be 15-minute walkable because catchement areas don't have the population needed to support those amenities.
But it's also certainly a class issue. The people walking to the grocery store are mainly the poor, students, and a small core of idealists who go out of their way to live a "city lifestyle". Everybody else drives everywhere. Which has a strange effect that wealthier neighborhoods are less likely to have things like a pharmacy, because the wealthier are in the habit of driving everywhere. I get my prescriptions filled at Costco, five miles from my house, even though the closest pharmacy is one mile.
Madrona probably doesn’t have anywhere to rent, it’s just enormous old houses. 6 of the 9 are downtown+surrounds, all very expensive. Ballard and Green Lake are going to be the cheapest on the list, and I would guess they’re in the most expensive quarter of neighborhoods?
The toggleable map in there is amazing and you can really see how it's the schools and libraries letting the map down... which is distinct in that they're the government-provided services. Here in Ontario we had a knock-down fight like a decade ago as the province decided to save money by shutting down unneeded schools, ending a lot of locality in the school system... and ever since the school boards have been scrambling to deal with insufficient bus-drivers as they effectively offloaded the problem onto the busing system.
Aside, the conspiracy-theory right has decided that "15 minute city" is another "agenda 21" conspiracy to force all westerners to live in tiny urban walled ghettos, and traveling outside of your "15-minute-city" will be illegal. And of course, the mainstream right media has been feeding this monster by treating walkability as some nefarious conspiracy but without explicitly mentioning the most insane tinfoil-hat parts of it.
I would say that the right wing conspiracy theory is half being locked in a ghetto, and the other half just who you're being locked in with, given right wing views on immigration and the "police abolition" movement.
Interesting how the visualization highlights the Eastlake and Montlake neighborhoods (along the south bank of the canal northeast of downtown) as walkability outliers.
When I was newer to the Seattle area and looking for housing I did a similar exercise and charted the location of grocery stores. I was surprised that those neighborhoods just didn't have any grocery stores, especially given their proximity to downtown and the UW. Given the amount of investment the city/state is making to improve the WA-520 corridor (the east-west highway which goes through there) for cars and pedestrians, I wonder if that's going to change in the near future.
Cool map. If you select Elementary schools and all of the amenities except Link stations, the map basically highlights Seattle's Urban Villages (plus a few extras).[1]
Really neat visualization. Would love to see it for other cities (perhaps Paris would be a good one for comparison, since it's touted as the fifteen-minute city par excellence).
I spent my childhood in an inner suburb of Cleveland. Between kindergarten and eighth grade, I took a bus to school for part of sixth grade. Otherwise everything was in the 15-minute distance, mostly afoot. (The junior high school might have been twenty or thirty minutes on foot, but of course less on a bicycle.) Nobody mistook it for Paris, but within the radius was a quite decent library, an independent bakery, a deli, and a grocery store.
I'd be super interested to see an analysis using exactly the same methodology as this performed on various other cities (SF, NYC, LA, maybe some European cities like Amsterdam or Cologne) for comparison. I would bet Seattle is near the top for the US in walkability (probably behind NYC only)
I live in West Seattle and tbh the maps for West Seattle look pretty solid, especially when you factor in the significant reduction in housing costs. I remain more people don't live here!
[+] [-] battery_glasses|3 years ago|reply
I live a in less walkable neighborhood on this map - but about a year ago a small (tiny really, ~700sqft) corner store opened up 2 blocks from me. It sells coffee, pastry, simple sandwiches, but also pantry staples (flour, sugar, milk etc.) and has a really good beer and wine selection.
I can't do my normal grocery shopping there, but being able to walk 2 minutes to get coffee or a quick breakfast or that missing stick of butter for a recipe has been such a wonderful change to the neighborhood. (btw this store is not reflected on the map for coffeeshops or groceries.) They also host food trucks several days a week so its almost like having a restaurant in the neighborhood too.
All it took was 1 little store, owned and operated by a couple who lives in the neighborhood, to turn a 20 minute neighborhood into a 5 minute neighborhood for several thousand people.
[+] [-] kneebonian|3 years ago|reply
But of course that's just conspiracy theory thinking and only someone who hates grandma would say something like that.
[+] [-] silisili|3 years ago|reply
We need zoning revamped, and you'd see a lot more of this.
[+] [-] marssaxman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThePowerOfFuet|3 years ago|reply
Why not fix that? Submit it to OSM, Apple Maps, or Google Maps or all three.
[+] [-] tiffanyh|3 years ago|reply
They aren’t as personalized or localized as the neighborhood place, but the use case you describe is exactly the market 7-11/CVS/Walgreens is going after.
[+] [-] kweingar|3 years ago|reply
In this case it wasn’t the size of the business but rather the size/location of the physical store that mattered.
[+] [-] rubidium|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teucris|3 years ago|reply
Seattle has some of the most confounding civil engineering I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived in five cities and visited dozens more. Here are some things that make a pedestrian life near impossible in my neighborhood:
- two high-traffic, multi-lane streets where people routinely run red lights and drive erratically, one dividing us from my child’s elementary school
- Many areas with no sidewalks and no area on the side of the road that’s safe to walk
- 5-way intersections with extremely confusing walk signals.
[+] [-] kenperkins|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
The other thing about Seattle is that you can have a grocery store nearby, but still not really have access to it if you're lower income. We have a lot of premium stores, especially in walkable neighborhoods. When I was a student I lived in Wedgwood, and I had 2 grocery stores within a 5-minute walk: the PCC, and the Metropolitan Market, both places where a week's groceries were about 2-3x as expensive as they were at the nearest Safeway, which was more than 15 minutes away.
Not faulting the creator of this article, as it's an okay rule of thumb, and it's hard to include details like that in a model.
[+] [-] bialpio|3 years ago|reply
Why not? As long as it's truly a 15m walk? The metric should take into account that the speed is going to be reduced when walking on a steep incline, otherwise it's a bad metric...
[+] [-] com2kid|3 years ago|reply
And then there is the socio-economic history of elevations in Seattle. tl;dr Historically poor people (and minorities) lived at the bottom of hills, rich people at the top. To this day, you can literally see houses get nicer as you go up hills.
There are also neighborhoods with a hill in the middle where one side of the hill was historically poor, and the other side well to do. My dad used to tell me that when he was a kid, him and all his friends knew not to go to up the hill where they didn't belong.
[+] [-] jgust|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zw123456|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdlyga|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammock|3 years ago|reply
Would much rather be near a decent small or midsize grocery with no or limited off-street parking, and which receives its deliveries on the street in the early morning (no loading dock)
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
But man when I think of the costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
[+] [-] jrochkind1|3 years ago|reply
Still, I'd guess you'd be right that it would be enormously expensive and difficult to bring this back.
But it was once this way, and it was human decisions that made it not this way. If we want it to be this way again and start, it can be eventually.
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|3 years ago|reply
So high schools within 15 min walk/bike in Europe is much more doable than in the U.S.
Caveat: this is how it was when I was growing up in France; it may have changed since then, though I looked up my old high school and it's the same.
[+] [-] com2kid|3 years ago|reply
Figure high schools have 4x the number of students that elementary schools do, and we'd need 2x the elementary schools to make them all walkable, that means Seattle would have to have 8x the number of students in high school than it currently does to justify building enough high schools to make them all walkable.
Not to mention Seattle couldn't really afford to build that many schools, as the city can't even maintain the current schools to basic levels of safety (ongoing lead water pipe issues...)
[+] [-] logifail|3 years ago|reply
(This is going to sound like we're playing Sim City 2000) but don't forget to add a hospital (a proper one, with an emergency room), a fire station, a police station...
> a grocery store
Are there many neighbourhoods which don't already have some kind of grocery store?
[+] [-] blakesterz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicoburns|3 years ago|reply
A high school I understand (where I live in the UK it's common for high school kids to catch the bus to school if they don't live close - as long as you live within a 15 minute walk of the bus stop that seems fine). But a grocery store? What's difficult about that? Just convert a house.
[+] [-] jgwil2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeanderK|3 years ago|reply
> Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
I don't get this. Isn't a restaurant at the corner great? Why would you be annoyed? I like living next to a restaurants. It increases your quality of live I think, you can literally just swing by if you feel like it and after a while you get to know the owner and develop a personal relationship. It really makes this place more my home I think, I always greet them and have a quick chat, and brings some life to the street. Of course, there's a question of the size but that can be dealt with. A grocery store is another thing because often they tend to be really big, but I think often suitable places can be found. But I think the supermarkets in mind are small, not a giant supermarket. Something where you can get most of your stuff but don't really have a variety to choose from, something where you swing by because you forgot your eggs.
I don't live in the US so I am really unsure why that's so bad. I don't think living 15 minutes to a Walmart (I picture them to be massive) is meant.
I assume, of course, that you're living somewhere somewhat suitable. But we're talking about living in seattle, so I assume it's ok.
[+] [-] dkarl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|3 years ago|reply
Not absolutely everything needs to be walkable in 15 minutes. Once kids are teenagers having go to school on transit or bicycle would be fine.
Perhaps focus on elementary schools being walkable.
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
Why?
[+] [-] adamsmith143|3 years ago|reply
> I like the idea of walking 15 minutes to get all the things.
But
>Heck I'd be annoyed if someone decides "Sorry we're rezoning / creating an incentive to build a restaurant in the plot next to you, not enough restaurants nearby. Good luck..."
>But man when I think of the costs involved in making sure there is a High School (in the US they tend to be large and draw from a distance) within 15 minutes of everywhere (no small cost to drop in a high school somewhere), or plop down a grocery store in a neighborhood ... that sounds both super expensive and politically difficult, and for some good reasons.
Even has the weak "what about the costs" argument.
[+] [-] elAhmo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] actionfromafar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdorazio|3 years ago|reply
I'd love to see the median rent in those nine compared to elsewhere in the city. Can any Seattle residents here provide some insight?
[+] [-] lph|3 years ago|reply
Outside of the urban villages, Seattle is comprised of neighborhoods of single-family homes. Those areas can't all be 15-minute walkable because catchement areas don't have the population needed to support those amenities.
But it's also certainly a class issue. The people walking to the grocery store are mainly the poor, students, and a small core of idealists who go out of their way to live a "city lifestyle". Everybody else drives everywhere. Which has a strange effect that wealthier neighborhoods are less likely to have things like a pharmacy, because the wealthier are in the habit of driving everywhere. I get my prescriptions filled at Costco, five miles from my house, even though the closest pharmacy is one mile.
[1] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/87/cd/9f/87cd9ffd44c33154445747de3...
[+] [-] lazyasciiart|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WaxProlix|3 years ago|reply
International District: Euphemism for Chinatown, not expensive
Pioneer Square: It varies, but fairly expensive despite the rampant homelessness
Pike Place Market: Very expensive
Ballard: Expensive new buildings, more affordable older ones
Capitol Hill: Expensive, generally
South Lake Union: Expensive
Madrona: Expensive
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Pxtl|3 years ago|reply
Aside, the conspiracy-theory right has decided that "15 minute city" is another "agenda 21" conspiracy to force all westerners to live in tiny urban walled ghettos, and traveling outside of your "15-minute-city" will be illegal. And of course, the mainstream right media has been feeding this monster by treating walkability as some nefarious conspiracy but without explicitly mentioning the most insane tinfoil-hat parts of it.
[+] [-] sbierwagen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chabons|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __derek__|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-... (using this for the nice map image because Seattle insists on publishing hulking PDFs)
[+] [-] jobs_throwaway|3 years ago|reply
Asking as a NYer who would consider living there if the car-free life wouldn't be too painful
[+] [-] jgwil2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattpallissard|3 years ago|reply
I highly recommend playing around with some of the datasets and visualization tools.
https://www.healthdata.org/data-tools-practices
[+] [-] kyeb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scuds|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pclark|3 years ago|reply
I live in West Seattle and tbh the maps for West Seattle look pretty solid, especially when you factor in the significant reduction in housing costs. I remain more people don't live here!
[+] [-] mungoman2|3 years ago|reply