Wet Hot American Suburbs

Going to Town in Small Town USA

The shark in Jaws is terrifying—but it’s perhaps not the scariest thing about the movie.

I recently saw the nearly 50-year-old film on the big screen at Austin’s historic Paramount Theatre. The tension builds palpably as the ocean, the source of Amity Island’s prosperity, becomes a sea of terror with a monster lurking in the depths offshore. While the shark-denying mayor forges ahead with the town’s Fourth of July celebration, the townspeople placidly bustle along Amity’s narrow downtown streets, oblivious to the danger. As I watched this scene, an irrepressible feeling bubbled up from under the surface, a sense of mounting horror as unrelenting as the shark itself, as I realized that— 

This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities.

Still from Jaws showing downtown Amity Island (Source: Universal)

For the uninitiated, the above phrase is in reference to an internet meme that ironically and often absurdly points out that the places we most love, those that we regularly built in the past, are largely impossible to recreate today thanks to zoning and other land use restrictions. 

But the thing that really struck me, watching Jaws, was that downtown Amity is not absurd at all. This was not some backlot film set at Universal Studios; it’s a real place: Edgartown, Massachusetts, on Martha’s Vineyard. And as the screenshot dramatizes, even if it's mostly populated by extras, downtown Edgartown is a place that people want to be. 

It’s not hard to see why.

Notice how the buildings hug the street, inviting in customers and passersby, without overwhelming it. The street is narrow, encouraging cars to slow down while allowing people to walk or bike in relative safety. While I haven’t been to Edgartown since the days when it was cool to wear double-popped collars,¹ it hasn’t changed much: you’ll find a mix of historic homes, offices, civic buildings, restaurants, boutiques, and churches, all connected by lovely brick sidewalks. It’s the kind of place that fosters amity and community—except perhaps when a murderous shark is hectoring your shores.  

Indeed, this kind of smart, walkable, mixed-used urbanism is so smart that the average home in Edgartown is worth more than $1.85 million, per Zillow. As the Vineyard Gazette notes, Edgartown’s Main Street has the most valuable real estate on the island.

Main Street in Edgartown, MA today (Source: Vineyard Gazette)

The price points are eye-watering in part because of the island location, but also in part because people want to be there. The town counts the Obama family among its summer residents. 

And yet, today, it’s largely illegal to build this.

Due to zoning restrictions and minimum lot size requirements, and a pattern of car-centric development outside of the historic village, you couldn’t even build more of downtown Edgartown in most of Edgartown today. But the price points indicate that there are lots more people who would like to rub shoulders with the former president if they could afford it. 

The point is, people love this stuff.

What they perhaps don’t realize is that this thing they love is an urban pattern of development, one that was common in America’s early history and yet is mostly not the way we have built our cities and towns since. Indeed, when we talk about American urbanism and the benefits of density, we’re not talking only about our megalopolises but about small towns like Edgartown, too. 

As

Addison Del Mastro

writes, urban density is not some kind of conspiracy to foist a New York lifestyle on suburban America. Rather, the project of American urbanism is to rediscover the idea that density is what people naturally build when they’re allowed to do it. 

Our small towns are reflective of that.

While the former fishing village has become an exclusive enclave, the American landscape is a lattice of small towns that emerged to serve farming communities, textile manufacturers, mining operations, and railroad stops that’s held together by a patchwork of forests, prairies, and deserts. Wherever they are, from California to Massachusetts, Colorado to Texas, you can see a familiar pattern of development: pedestrian-friendly streets integrated with dense, mixed-use buildings on small lots featuring a wide variety of commercial, residential, and civic uses. In many of these places, the tallest structure is a church steeple. 

This small-scale density was how we used to build America. 

Small-town urbanism was perhaps the dominant form of urbanism in American life from the Founding until World War II, before the automobile became the dominant form of transportation and the single-use suburban subdivision became the dominant form of residential development. As the country grew in the post-War era, we built a lot of suburban subdivisions in the interstitial spaces between towns, connected to their historic downtowns, if at all, only by the cars they were designed to accommodate. Levittown, New York, built from 1947, is the archetypal suburban subdivision—it’s a city without a center. It bears scant resemblance to America’s historic small towns.

Levittown: This kind of sprawling, unwalkable, single-use suburb is basically all that’s legal to build in most American cities. (Source: Wikipedia)

But perhaps future American suburbs might.

Research from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies suggests that the Millennials who left cities in recent years did so not because they hated urban density but because they could not find affordable housing that fit the needs of their families. (We’ve written a lot about that here, here, here, and here.) The researchers also find that the suburbs that Millennials move to tend to see an increase in amenities, which “offers some evidence that their urban preferences may yet be alive and well.”

It’s not just Millennials, though. 

Savvy developers have been building new suburbs that look a lot more like traditional towns. My mother (Hi, mom!) lives in the popular Market Common, a planned community built according to New Urbanist principles in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Meanwhile in Florida, places like Seaside and The (sorta-New Urbanist) Villages, are also hugely popular communities for older folks—The Villages is America’s fastest-growing metro because Baby Boomers want this, too. Meanwhile, in older suburbs, there’s a tremendous opportunity to create “town centers” that cater to ex-urbanites who still want urban-like amenities. As

Eric Weatherholtz

writes, other savvy developers are finding ways to transform underdeveloped suburban strip malls and shopping malls into higher density, all-around better places that people actually want to be. 

And that’s really the crux of it. 

Urbanism is not about building skyscrapers everywhere, or cramming people into micro-apartments, or forcing people to live within a 15-minute prison. Rather, it’s about creating places in which people can gather, connect, and build full and flourishing lives—places where people actually want to be. When we allow density, people will build it. Sometimes it looks like Manhattan Island, other times like Manhattan, Kansas—but people love it.

Unlike Jaws, density is not inherently scary or undesirable; it’s as American as the summer blockbuster. This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use, small-town urbanism is urbanism. We should allow more of it.

Just a few of the small towns I’ve visited across America recently, including (top row): Shelburne, MA; North Adams, MA; Saint Michaels, MD; (middle row): Havre de Grace, MD; Healdsburg, CA; Franklin, TN; (bottom row): Telluride, CO; Wallingford, CT; Market Common, Myrtle Beach, SC. 

1. Fact check: it was never cool.