Give Up My SUV?


Wouldn’t you just love to be able to walk to every place you wanted to go? Imagine having work, shops, schools, libraries all just a few short blocks away. We’d not only have the good life in this lovely new development, we’d cut down on pollution and traffic because we’ll hardly use our cars at all.

This type of development is called mixed use, in which business and residential activity all takes place in the same area. And it also describes my hometown of Batavia, Ohio when I was growing up there in the 1960s.

My father walked to work. My sisters and I walked to school. (And despite what I tell my daughter, school was only three blocks away on flat ground, not five miles and uphill both ways) Before Kroger’s built a new store on the edge of town in 1961, my mother walked into town to buy groceries. We also walked to the drug store, the hardware store, the dime store, the shoe repair store, and the appliance store.

There was no master plan that ordained this mixed use. Batavia was founded in 1814, nearly a century before the automobile came into wide use. It was built with a main street straight through the middle of town and houses on either side.

Although nearly everybody in town owned a car in the 1960s, it was still more convenient to shop in town as opposed to driving the two lane highway to Cincinnati 45 minutes away. Going to the city was a rare treat. You dressed up, shopped all day and had lunch at Hathaway’s in the Pogue’s arcade.

That all changed with the construction of I-275, the ring road which made the trip into Cincinnati faster and easier. Shopping malls went up around the exits, including the one called Eastgate, five miles outside of town. Over the years, people stopped going into town for things like appliances and hardware, preferring to drive out to the mall to shop at Sears. One by one, the family owned business closed their doors.

But Batavia is no ghost town. As the county seat, the county offices have grown along with the population. Lawyers and county offices occupy many of the buildings now. The business that remain are the ones that office workers can go to during lunch or after work, like restaurants and hair salons.

My point is that this type of development can’t be replicated. The town had just enough people to keep its modest businesses going. And for a long time, there was no place else to go. These days, a business needs more than just the people in the immediate area to survive. They have to attract people from other areas and that means a steady stream of cars and big parking lots.

Americans love the freedom of movement their automobiles bring, but they don’t want to live with the urban sprawl and traffic the automobile has engendered. So they build their houses in one place and their businesses in another place, miles away.

Mixed use developments may take off, but I doubt it. There just won’t be enough people in the residential part to sustain the business part. You have to have people coming in form elsewhere in the city and they will come in their cars. Short of bulldozing every housing development and starting over from scratch, there’s not a whole lot you can do change that fact.

Except maybe move to Batavia. Buy a house in town, get a job at the court house, have all your meals at the Snappy Tomato on Main Street (sorry, Kroger’s moved to Eastgate a few years back) and you could probably get rid of your car all together.

Wouldn’t it be nice?