Elizabeth Pope

by Elizabeth Pope

Jim and Marty Shannonhouse love the Carolina Panthers, but they don't bother with season tickets. On game days, they stroll from their Charlotte, North Carolina, home to the stadium in search of cheap seats. "If we can't find any, we go home, watch the game on TV, and leave the door open so we can hear the crowd roar," Jim says. Most days are equally relaxed: in the morning, he walks a few blocks to his office. In the evening, he and his wife saunter to bistros, ballet, and the symphony.

The Shannonhouses are part of a growing trend: 50-plus empty nesters are abandoning sprawling suburbs for pedestrian-friendly cities, towns, and planned communities.

In the past decade, affluent boomers and retirees have helped fuel major growth in the downtown populations of several cities. "The upper end of the downtown condo market is all boomers," says John McIlwain, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute. In the same period, town centers ringed with housing are popping up in big-city business districts, close-in suburbs, and new-urbanist, master-planned communities.

"Ten years ago, the concept of a town center was an anomaly," McIlwain says. "Now there's a significant trend toward the old urban retail style of parking your car, walking along the street to do your shopping, then going to a movie or a restaurant."

All those footsteps have major health benefits. Last year, a major study showed a link between sprawling, car-dependent areas and obesity and hypertension—one reason why a Manhattanite would be expected to weigh six to seven pounds less than an otherwise comparable adult living in Geauga County, outside of Cleveland, the most sprawling county listed in the report.

How can you tell if a community is walkable? Dan Burden, director of the advocacy group Walkable Communities Inc., has assembled a list of 12 requirements. His ambling essentials include a lively, compact town center with a good mix of stores; tree-lined, low-speed streets; and public space (a park or plaza) within 700 feet of a home. "Look for places that put people first, cars second," Burden says.