Have you ever tried to walk or bike from one part of Orléans to another. More often than not, you find yourself choosing between taking a confusing maze of disconnected, curvy side streets, or putting yourself in danger by driving right next to fast-moving traffic on main roads? Or have you wondered why you have to get in a car for a simple trip for milk or eggs, because the nearest store is a 5-minute drive away rather than being just down the road? These daily frustrations are not accidents or oversights; they are the direct, intentional outcomes of a set of policies from bygone decades that have shaped our suburban landscape for the better part of a century.
I’ve talked around this before, but let’s get right into it today. To build a better future, we first have to understand how we got here.
The car-dependent design of post-war suburbs like Orléans was not a market-driven inevitability; it was the result of deliberate policy choices. After the Second World War, three key policies converged to create the suburban model we know today:
- Exclusionary Zoning: This is the practice of legally separating different land uses. Homes go here, shops go there, and offices go somewhere else entirely. This simple-sounding rule made the traditional, walkable neighbourhood with a corner store or a family-run bakery illegal, enforcing a separation that effectively makes driving between zones a necessity. The city’s zoning laws, in effect, have made it as illegal to open a small, neighbourhood-serving business as it is to not maintain dozens of parking spaces for such a business, whether you want that much parking or not.
- Infrastructure Funding: For decades, senior levels of government poured billions of dollars into building massive highway networks and wide arterial roads. This effectively subsidized a car-centric development pattern, making it cheap and easy for developers to build on the edge of the city while ignoring the long-term financial liabilities. This is the tip of the actual pyramid scheme that leaves our city struggling to pay for maintenance today on the ever expanding urban footprint.
- Parking Minimums: As mentioned above, local zoning rules require every building to have a large and predetermined number of parking spots. This forces businesses to be set far back from the road, surrounded by a sea of asphalt. It not only makes walking between stores unpleasant and dangerous but also creates the profoundly low “land use efficiency” that plagues our commercial strips and weakens our municipal tax base.
Understanding this history is not about assigning blame; it’s about empowerment. If a set of policy choices created the problems we face, then a new set of choices can solve them. This is the core of my advocacy for a new Orleans. When I argue for zoning reform to allow for gentle density and neighbourhood retail stores, it’s to reverse the policies that outlawed walkable communities. When I call for complete street makeovers on our main roads (wider sidewalks, more tree cover, bike lanes, and slower speeds for traffic, it’s to correct the imbalance created by decades of car-exclusive infrastructure funding.
The neighbourhood you see outside your window is not a fact of nature; it is a policy document written in asphalt and wood framing. By understanding the outcomes and consequences of past decisions, we as residents gain the power to write the next chapter. It begins by getting involved and advocating for the kind of neighbourhood we truly want to live in.
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