by
Adam Bond, Architectural Preservationist
Walkable Neighborhoods
The walkability of a city is not simply an amenity — a lifestyle feature that makes urban life more pleasant for people who choose to walk. It is, as the research of the past two decades has established with increasing precision, a determinant of health outcomes, economic opportunity, household financial stress, traffic safety, environmental quality, and social cohesion. And it is distributed inequitably: the research consistently finds that the burdens of unwalkability — car dependence, pedestrian fatality risk, distance from daily goods and services — fall most heavily on precisely the populations that are least able to bear them.
The relationship between walkable environments and physical health outcomes is among the most robust findings in urban health research. Residents of walkable neighborhoods accumulate more daily physical activity, have lower rates of obesity and related metabolic conditions, and have lower rates of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality than comparable residents in car-dependent environments. A 2023 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that women in highly walkable New York neighborhoods had significantly lower risk of obesity-related cancers than women in less walkable areas — an effect that persisted after controlling for income, race, and other confounders.
The pedestrian safety picture is more complicated. Walkable environments have lower pedestrian fatality rates per capita (because fewer pedestrians are exposed to high-speed traffic) but can have higher pedestrian injury rates per mile walked in disadvantaged neighborhoods (because the infrastructure supporting pedestrian activity — sidewalks, crosswalks, lighting — is less well maintained in lower-income areas). Smart Growth America’s equity research has documented that the pedestrian fatality rate for Black Americans is approximately 75 percent higher than for white Americans, and the rate for Latino Americans is approximately 60 percent higher — disparities that reflect both the lower quality of pedestrian infrastructure in majority-minority neighborhoods and the higher rates of pedestrian travel in communities with lower rates of car ownership.
A 2022 study in the Journal of Transportation Research found that lower median income census tracts in Oregon had significantly higher rates of pedestrian injury, controlling for other factors — a finding replicated in national data. The conclusion is not that walking is more dangerous in poor neighborhoods but that the built environment support for safe walking is worse in poor neighborhoods, because decades of infrastructure investment have prioritized vehicle throughput over pedestrian safety in these communities. The Urban Institute’s 2022 “Redefining Walkability” research documented that communities of color live in areas with fewer streetlights, higher speed limits, and more police stops per capita — conditions that undermine safe and comfortable walking even where physical infrastructure exists.
The economic dimension of walkability is less frequently acknowledged than the health dimension but is arguably more consequential for household welfare. According to AAA’s 2023 vehicle cost survey, the annual cost of owning and operating a typical new vehicle in the United States is approximately $10,728, comprising finance costs, insurance, fuel, maintenance, and depreciation. For a household at the Allentown area median household income (approximately $50,000 to $55,000 according to recent American Community Survey data), this represents roughly 20 to 22 percent of gross income. For households in the bottom income quintile, transportation costs consume approximately 42 percent of household income — more than housing costs in most markets, and several times the proportion spent by upper-income households.
This transportation cost burden is not a natural consequence of low income. It is a consequence of land use patterns that make car ownership necessary for participation in economic and social life. In a city where daily goods, employment, healthcare, and education are accessible on foot or by transit, the transportation cost burden for low-income households drops sharply: a household that can meet its daily needs without a car spends $10,000 to $15,000 more annually than a comparable car-owning household on other priorities. The World Resources Institute’s research on mixed-use development has quantified this effect in comparable cities: residents of walkable mixed-use neighborhoods spend significantly less on transportation than residents of car-dependent neighborhoods at the same income level.
Allentown’s historic street grid and mixed-use fabric — developed before the automobile and calibrated to pedestrian movement — provides the physical infrastructure for this transportation cost reduction, if it is maintained and if the land use policy supports it. The progressive erosion of ground-floor commercial uses, the conversion of corner buildings to residential, and the elimination of neighborhood commercial zoning in favor of segregated-use residential designation has undermined this infrastructure not by removing the buildings but by removing the uses that make walking to them purposeful. A neighborhood of row houses on a walkable grid where no daily goods or services are available within walking distance is walkable in form but not in function.
A 2024 study in the Journal of Urban Affairs examined sidewalk policies in the 30 most populous American cities and found that 77 percent assign maintenance responsibility to abutting property owners — a policy that produces systematically worse pedestrian infrastructure in lower-income neighborhoods, where property owners have less capacity to maintain sidewalks and where city enforcement of maintenance obligations is typically less rigorous. The study found that only three of the 30 cities examined had policies that could be characterized as equitable, in the sense of providing city-funded maintenance of sidewalk infrastructure regardless of property ownership.
Allentown’s sidewalk maintenance policy assigns primary responsibility to abutting property owners, consistent with the majority pattern documented in the national study. The predictable consequence — observed in every city with this policy structure — is that sidewalk conditions are worse in lower-income neighborhoods where property owners have less financial capacity to maintain them, creating a positive feedback loop in which the neighborhoods most dependent on pedestrian mobility have the worst pedestrian infrastructure. Addressing this through a Sidewalk Equity Index — mapping sidewalk conditions against income and pedestrian fatality data to target public investment — is not a novel idea; it is an application of existing data to a problem that is well-understood but systematically under-addressed.
The connection between historic preservation and walkability is structural, not incidental. The building types that create the conditions for walkable urban life — the commercial block with continuous street-level facades, the row house without setback or front parking apron, the mixed-use building that puts activity at the sidewalk edge throughout the day — are historic building types. They are the products of an era of planning and construction that preceded the automobile and was calibrated to human movement rather than vehicle movement. They cannot be replicated in suburban markets, because their economics require urban density; and they cannot be replicated in contemporary urban markets, because the zoning conventions of parking minimums, setback requirements, and use separation that accompanied automobile-centric planning have made them illegal to build in most American cities.
Every historic commercial building demolished for a surface parking lot reduces the walkability of its block, not simply by removing a building but by removing the street-level activity, the continuous facade, and the reason to walk that block on foot. PlaceEconomics’ Walk Score analysis of historic districts found that local historic districts in cities including Savannah, Georgia, Nashville, Tennessee, and San Diego, California consistently earned Walk Scores significantly higher than their citywide averages — not because they have been upgraded with pedestrian infrastructure but because they retained the building types and land use mixes that create walkability as a byproduct of their original design.
Appleyard, Donald. Livable Streets. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
Smart Growth America. Equitable Streets: Fact Sheets on Equity and Complete Streets. Washington: SGA, 2012.
Urban Institute. Redefining Walkability. Washington: Urban Institute, 2022.
Roll, Joseph, and Julia McNeil. Understanding Pedestrian Injuries and Social Equity. Oregon Department of Transportation SPR 841, 2021.
ScienceDirect. ‘Identifying disparities in the relationship between neighborhood walkability and active transportation safety within South Carolina.’ Journal of Transport & Health 35 (2024): 101785.
AAA. Your Driving Costs: How Much Are You Really Paying to Drive? Heathrow: AAA, 2023.
World Resources Institute. ‘People-Oriented Cities: Mixed-Use Development Creates Social and Economic Benefits.’ WRI Insights, 2013 (updated 2022).
Litman, Todd. Economic Value of Walkability. Victoria Transport Policy Institute, 2024.
Venson, Carl. ‘Complete Streets Policies in U.S. Cities and Towns.’ Smart Growth America, 2021.
ScienceDirect. ‘Complete streets meet fragmented policies: Sidewalks in 30 U.S. cities.’ Journal of Urban Affairs (2024).