- [Matt] The American cities of today
are fragile and fragmented.
- [Narrator] For decades now,
when America has built new places,
they've tended to look like this.
But nowadays, we know that sprawl is
bad for the environment, traffic, business
and our physical and mental health.
- [Matt] In fact, the US Surgeon General
put a warning label on non-walkable neighborhoods
like a pack of cigarettes.
- [Narrator] Matt Lewis of Simplecity Design
thinks there's a better way.
Simplecity is leveraging some
of the oldest, simplest design principles around
to build new beautiful neighborhoods.
- [Matt] Our goal is to only work on places that
people want to hang out.
Places that are worth caring about.
Places that are affordable.
Well, how do we resolve for all of these issues?
I've got so many goals that we're trying to accomplish
but I'm gonna say we've cracked the code.
- [Narrator] What do a huge metropolis like Manhattan
and this small town have in common?
Their downtowns are laid out like a grid.
The grid is walkable, easy to navigate
and attracts a diversity of tenants.
For hundreds of years,
it was the default way American cities got built.
- [Matt] Post World War II,
we discovered a new model.
- [Narrator] The American push to build suburbs was fueled
by a lot of overlapping considerations.
Cheap cars and gas,
honest to goodness optimism about the future,
segregationist building codes and white flight.
It's complicated.
Fast forward to today
and suburbs are deeply entrenched in American life.
Unfortunately, we also have a lot
of evidence that they don't work as well for humans
as gridded development does.
Curvy streets are less navigable and walkable than the grid.
Meaning more traffic and more pedestrian fatalities.
And while the downtowns of cities usually have no problem
attracting commercial tenants
when huge retail stores
and strip malls in suburbs close down,
it's hard to get new businesses to move in.
But America is still building suburbs.
In fact, in most places in the US, building low density
sprawl is more or less legally required.
- [Matt] The development codes govern what you see
going vertical in your communities.
But the metrics on the books and conventional codes
are not looking at the long-term interest
of how the community fits together.
- [Narrator] So Matt decided to rewrite the codes
from the ground up.
- [Trey] Bastrop's located about 23 miles
southeast of Austin, Texas.
And it was always ready to grow.
We knew it was coming.
Austin's already went every direction, but east.
- [Matt] They did not wanna build subdivisions.
They wanted to build neighborhoods.
- [Narrator] But because of the decades old code
they had on the books, without an intervention,
Bastrop would have ended up with more suburbs.
So Bastrop hired Matt and his team at Simplecity
to rewrite the code.
- [Matt] The keys for the future are housed in downtown.
- Bastrop has 330 foot short walkable blocks.
The grid created a sense of community.
Every morning the same shopkeepers come out,
clean off the sidewalks and greet their neighbors.
This building is illegal
under their old development standards
and you can see that it's a human-scale building.
It's comfortable. It's lovely.
- [Narrator] The new code Matt's team came up with
is called the B3 code.
At its core, it's based on duplicating Bastrop's thriving,
fiscally productive, gridded downtown.
By stripping away the baggage of suburban development codes,
like minimum parking requirements,
Bastrop is one of the first cities in America to
explicitly code for gridded development.
And the results are promising.
- [Trey] As you connect streets, you build your waterlines
and you don't have dead end lines.
There's a better tax rate that maintains the streets,
that maintains the sidewalks, that maintains all that stuff.
If there's a traffic jam,
you can just move over and go up one block.
- [Matt] The new Bastrop Building Block code
promotes for house form commercial.
Every lot is allowed to have two accessory dwelling units.
And there are no minimum lot dimensions.
It's a low startup cost for entrepreneurs.
And as you gain wealth, then you can expand your footprint.
It is that simple.
(mellow music)
- [Trey] Everybody has their own memory
of going to visit a small town or
when they grew up in a small town.
Bastrop won't be a small town forever
but we're gonna save the small town feeling.
- [Matt] We often say cities don't get do overs.
Once your infrastructure is installed,
those patterns are established for decades to come.
And those patterns are
what we're going to be leaving for the next generations.
We believe that
the Building Block Code is the project to save America.
We're hopeful that the Building Block approach
is utilized across the country
to create authentic places worth caring about.
- [Narrator] Hey. Thanks for watching this video
made possible by Ford.
If you liked it, share it with a friend
and check out Freethink.com
for more stories of people moving the world.