The Street is for Everyone

I spent a few days in El Poblado, the bougie part of Medellín. Green, safe, full of coffee shops and expats on macbooks. Within a day of arriving, I was on foot more than I expected, especially for someone who hauled a loaded touring bike across a continent. The neighborhoods just pull you out onto the street.

Today I started my bike tour and arrived in El Retiro, about a few hours ride south, and the same thing happened immediately. It’s a small town, maybe a kilometer end to end. There is a taller de bicicletas next to a juice stand next to someone’s abuela selling arepas out of a window. Buildings are two or three stories tall, and almost nothing on the first floor is residential. Commerce, life, people, all of it faces the street. Everyone walks and immerses themselves in their community.

It sounds simple. It is simple. And American cities have spent decades engineering this exact thing out of existence.

The default American urban logic says you get in a car to do anything. Garages on the ground floor. Parking lots wedged between buildings and the sidewalk. Setback requirements that push everything back until the sidewalk stops mattering. Drive through Houston or Phoenix or any midsize American city and the first floor is a dead zone: a garage door, a blank wall, a lobby for a building that wants nothing to do with the street.

San Francisco is one of the better American counterexamples. The Mission, Hayes Valley, parts of the Haight: you can walk a mile and actually accomplish something. The city was built before cars, and people, to some extent, appreciate the walkability. But even there it’s a fight. Every new development is a negotiation. The default is still a parking podium and a dead sidewalk. (Don’t get me started about the recent election.)

Every American who visits a genuinely walkable city goes through some version of this crisis. I’ve felt it in Istanbul, in Tokyo, in Paris. But those cities are easy to explain away: medieval street patterns, Haussmann’s grand redesign, post-war transit investment, geography that made sprawl impossible. It’s easy to explain why other cities can be walkable and why American cities can’t.

El Retiro is just a regular Colombian town governed by people who understand the value of community. They make decisions at every scale to keep the first floor alive. To let the street be for everyone. And it works. It genuinely works.

I walked the length of town, stopped for a coffee, ate dinner, bought what I needed. The whole thing took forty minutes. I never once wished I had a car.

Back on the bike tomorrow. But tonight I’m glad I walked.