Quote:
Originally Posted by ChiSoxRox
Midwestern suburbs fall off a density cliff. Cul de sacs, gigantic lots, forest preserves... The cores may have high density but the suburbs simply overwhelm them numerically.
Eyeballing San Antonio, it looks like even on the outskirts it's a more Western mode of smaller lots mostly filled by housing set along tighter subdivisions than the Midwest.
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Speaking for San Antonio and Austin those dense developments are a new typology locally and only started getting built within the last five or so years. Most of Bulverde and Boerne and Fair Oaks Ranch and New Braunfels and Canyon Lake and Spring Branch and Wimberley and Bear Creek and Hays and Helotes and Leander and Georgetown and Grey Forest and Lakehills and pretty much everything on the outskirts was initially developed as large acreage homesites. What is remaining of the still agricultural, ranch, and industrial land is now slowly being infilled as those landowners sell out at much higher densities than previously. For the most part, though, the large lot houses are being left alone, so functionally distinct from places like Vegas, which have VERY hard borders and the neighborhoods are at a consistently high suburban density. In places like Austin and San Antonio the census precincts are so large that even they fail to capture the sometimes extreme swings in population density as you move from (what was) one land grant parcel to the next. In fact, I think the only few towns in the suburban belt of either city that began their suburban journey in this cycle and thus don’t have any large and medium acreage homesite development: Jarrell, Hutto, and Manor. Even Kyle and Buda were initially large acreage homesite boomburbs when they started booming and it wasn't until the last five or so years that massive subdivisions have started going in as infill between those neighborhoods.
A good example of this is Fair Oaks Ranch, actually. A new infill neighborhood is Front Gate, the houses have 8-10 spacing, small lots, large presence on their lots, two stories almost uniformly. The Hills and Mirabel are also other examples of this in Fair Oaks Ranch. But in between these nodes are neighborhoods that are 1/10 the population density like Elkhorn and Fair Oaks and Pimlico (I have a friend from Pimlico). The further you go out, the larger the lots generally get and generally the population density declines EXCEPT in these very specific infill neighborhoods and suburban apartment complex ghettoes.