9 Ways Local Population Growth Can Improve Your Quality of Life

This town is ready for a party…but there’s no one around to enjoy it.

I live in my childhood neighborhood. Having moved back here after nearly 20 years away, my overriding impression is of an almost overwhelming sameness. It’s a stable neighborhood — peaceful and middle-class then; peaceful and middle-class now. Virtually no new buildings have been built of any sort. You could show me a photo from most vantage points around the street I grew up on, label it with any year between 1990 and 2024, and I’d just have to take you at your word for what year it was taken.

I’ve written before about how weird this is by any sort of historical standard. Cities are organic things, and they are meant to change and grow as people come and go. Thriving places are meant to get bigger as people vote with their feet and move to them. It is only because of an artificial straitjacket of regulations and finance that so many American neighborhoods look the same after 30 or 40 years.

But living here, what bugs me day-to-day isn’t the abstract principle of the thing. The sameness itself isn’t unpleasant. Heck, I’m only human, and I enjoy the nostalgia of seeing and doing all the same things with my kids that I so fondly remember doing with my mom and dad.

What bugs me now is something more concrete.

There’s a small playground I walk to with my kids at least a couple of times a week. I played on it as a kid (though, mercifully, they did finally replace the wooden play structures, which were responsible for dozens of slivers in our household, with modern ones). It’s perfectly nice. But 75% of the park, which occupies a city block in our quiet residential area, is a big empty field that I pretty much never see humans use.

On recent evenings at the playground, I’ve taken to thinking, "What would liven up this blank canvas of a space?" Wouldn’t it be great to host a weekly movie night in the park? To get a big projector out and invite the neighbors with their picnic blankets?

The biggest impediment to doing this is that I highly doubt I could get enough people to show up to justify the effort — let alone to sustain the momentum and make it a repeat thing.

Why can’t we have a Thursday movie night in the park? Weekday morning yoga classes? A vendor with a cart selling fresh-cut fruit on sunny Saturdays? Why can't we have the kinds of things I’ve seen make small urban parks lively and delightful in all sorts of cities? The answer to all of these is the same: There would need to be enough people around to sustain such activity. There aren’t.

I love it here, but I could really go for a few thousand new neighbors. My sense of pride wants more people to recognize what a great little corner of my city this is and come put down some roots here. But more than that, I would tangibly benefit in a host of ways from some growth around here.

Let me list some of those ways.

With More People We Could…

Support a Neighborhood Coffee Shop or Brewery

I would kill for a good third place within walking distance of my home. Coffee shops have popped up in the neighborhood a couple of times in my life, but they haven’t lasted. The economics of running this kind of business are merciless. You must have a good product, but also a solid base of customers — people living in the area.

When you hang out in this kind of place, you can absolutely watch it foster meaningful connection, as regulars run into each other, strike up friendships, set up standing engagements or bring their friends from outside the neighborhood.  It’s not even that I would be an ultra-regular patron; I’m a busy dad of two young children. But I would go when I could, and I would greatly value having a couple more neighborhood hubs, places to sip a beverage and live life in public.

Support a Corner Grocery Store

We have a big-box grocery a mile from my house, which I typically drive or bike to. It gets the job done, but how nice would it be to walk a block and a half for those last-minute kitchen staples I realize I’m out of? I did this when I lived in San Francisco, and it was liberating and convenient.

Again, the reason I can’t is largely a numbers game: Grocery stores need customers to be viable. The corner grocery model specifically requires customers who live in very close proximity, since proximity is what makes the store appealing to customers. (Big-box stores will always outcompete on superior selection or low prices.)

Get a Bite To Eat Late at Night

We’ve got a great little deli nearby that sells sandwiches and pasta salads. It’s open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. There are a couple of sit-down restaurants, but after 8 p.m. or so, you’re pretty out of luck in my neighborhood. Around-the-clock options make urban life delightful and spontaneous, but — I’m turning into a broken record here — they require customers.

Make Friends at the Playground

I often deliberately go to the playground that only my neighbors patronize, rather than the larger one in the big regional park nearby where families are liable to be from all over St. Paul. I do this because I’m hoping we’ll meet families who live nearby. It’s happened a couple of times but not often enough. We’re often the only ones there, even on a picture-perfect evening.

It’s not just about playmates for my kids; I also want to know their parents. I’d like to let my kids be free-range kids when they’re a little bit older, as I was to some extent. (I walked alone to the park at age 10 and took the city bus by myself at 14, and this was pre-cell-phones!) It’ll be a lot easier to pull off if I know there are adults around who know the kids and know how to contact me.

Fill In the Weird Empty Spaces

What should be our neighborhood’s modest commercial downtown is half-full of underused parking lots and cheap, disposable low-rise buildings. I want there to be enough demand for something beautiful to go here. I suspect the reason it hasn’t in 40 years is that no local developer has been able to make the numbers work.

See Gestures of Neighborliness Be Appreciated

The brilliant urban designer Steve Mouzon talks about “gifts to the street,” little things that people add to their property that benefit the whole street. My neighborhood is full of these gifts. Only one problem: If a gift is given and nobody is there to receive it, was it ever gifted at all?

I want people to read this poetry hung on the fence at the house proudly labeled “Tibetans on Nebraska [Avenue].”

I want them to honk for Jude’s 84th birthday. (Bicycle bells would suffice too.)

I want them to sit and rest on these benches that my neighbors put out. Or on the one in a rain garden on city land, where I’ve never seen a single person sit.

I want them to appreciate the whimsical little fairy garden across the street.

I want lots of dogs to drink from the bowl that somebody sets out every day as an altruistic act.

Prioritize Better Bus Service

We have two bus lines, one of which comes every 15 minutes — decent, but not good enough to feel like I can just come and go as I need without consulting a schedule. The other, the east-west line, comes every 30 minutes, which is a big impediment to using it for any trip not prescheduled and exactly on the line.

For a transit agency with scarce resources, this too is a numbers game. Better service will only come with better ridership.

Enjoy Safety in Numbers While Walking and Biking

The corner where my neighborhood gives way to a large public park is a kind of scary place to cross with my 4-year-old and 2-year-old. Drivers don’t consistently yield to us. Many of them are coming to the regional park from outside the neighborhood, so they're unsure of where they’re going. I know from experience that a critical mass of people walking around would shift this dynamic and cause the people in the large, dangerous vehicles to slow down and exercise a different level of vigilance.

Fix the Stroad at the Neighborhood’s Edge

Snelling Avenue is a nightmare. It may just be the worst road in St. Paul. To some extent, this is about engineering priorities (traffic speed and volume over safety). But it’s also because a lot more people perceive this neighborhood as a place to whiz through than consider it a destination. Doubling the population would dramatically increase the constituency for making the neighborhood a place to be, rather than a place to easily vacate. In turn, this would make it harder to sustain the argument for maintaining a fast-moving car sewer (a place that's unsafe for nondrivers because of cars and car infrastructure).

Flipping the Script on Population Growth

This all may seem obvious and facile to many Strong Towns readers, but I think there’s something worth saying about how the solution to these problems is more people.

In the rhetoric of local development politics, advocating for more homes is often framed as altruistic. “It’s unfair to pull up the drawbridge; you should let other people have the opportunity to live where you do," or, “Your concerns about aesthetics/neighborhood character/quality of life simply aren’t important when people in your community can’t afford rent! We need to build homes to alleviate that suffering! Do it for them."

Accepting that there needs to be more homes in your neighborhood isn’t like taking your medicine, though. It’s not actually something you have to suffer because it’s only fair and right, even though it will degrade your quality of life and your neighborhood’s charm. I don’t accept this framing one bit.

I’m deliberately flipping the script by saying that, actually, I want a lot more people to live in my neighborhood and a lot more apartments to be built to house them, and I want this for selfish reasons. (As well as the altruistic ones.) My quality of life would get better with more people here, to an extent that would easily outweigh the physical changes required for that to happen.

I also recognize that this isn’t a solution that scales universally. I would love to see my neighborhood double in population, and I would love to see my city double in population. But every neighborhood in every city isn’t going to do that unless the country does, and nothing about our demographic forecasts suggests that as a possible outcome. Lots of places will not densify.

I feel the zero-sum nature of this dilemma differently than I did when I lived in booming Florida. Here in the Midwest, our population growth is modest, so every new suburban subdivision carved out of a cornfield feels like an affront to me. Not just because I recognize the costs associated with this development approach, but also because it feels like they’re taking something that I want. People. Energy. Positive momentum.

Not everyone wants what I want. And not every place is built in a way that what I want — as described above — would happen even with an influx of population. But this place is. I live in a place that was built for urbanism, for a pattern of life that involves serendipity and connection rather than predictability and seclusion. My housing politics in a nutshell are that places like this ought to be able to grow. The buildings that would make that possible ought to be legal and viable to build. We’re working on that in St. Paul, but there’s a lot left to do. I hope that my street looks very different in 2054, and I hope I’m happily living here to see it.

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