Waikiki and Brickell (and a few other places) as miniature Manhattans

High-density, pedestrian-oriented residential urban neighborhoods in the United States are rare. If one sets the criteria tightly enough—substantial population density and crowded sidewalks being the most important—the majority of such places are in New York, and even there largely in Manhattan and in certain parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. There are only a few statistically comparable areas in smallish parts of a few other cities—especially San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Chicago—and even these are generally characterized by higher levels of automobile ownership than in New York.

In the great majority of existing high-density, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods, many aspects of the built environment were created in the 19th century or earlier. The street patterns, the lot-covering building footprints, and arguably cultural expectations about how daily life is to be led often date back a long time.

It’s been argued that the association of high density with older places is basically a function of the fact that developers shifted to building more spread-out environments the minute that the advent of motorized transportation made it possible to do so. They did this because Americans preferred to live at lower densities. No doubt there is much truth in this idea. But it’s pretty clear that, even in the United States, there has often been a substantial minority of people who found the idea of living in compact urban spaces appealing and that this minority has been growing in size over, well, something like the last hundred years (admittedly with a bit of backsliding during certain periods). Interest in high-density urban living seems to have been growing at an especially fast pace over the last forty years or so, as cities have become cleaner and safer, as families have become smaller, and as many people have come to look less favorably on certain aspects of suburban living. This growing interest has run into a supply problem. There isn’t enough high-density housing to meet the demand. Thus, costs have skyrocketed in places that are felt to be desirable. Builders have responded to some extent by building where they could, but it’s not easy to construct high-density housing in the United States.  Zoning codes sometimes forbid it completely, or prohibit the mixing of commerce and residential structures, or insist that new buildings have parking spaces even where there is little demand for them. Then there is NIMBYism. These factors have often been most significant in cities and suburban areas where the majority of growth occurred in the 20th century. There has been serious resistance to adding density to these places.

Recent travels have reminded me that there are actually a number of admittedly relatively small areas where new, high-density neighborhoods have come into being in mostly low-density urban areas during the 20th and 21st centuries. I’m not talking about the inevitably tiny “new urbanist” projects that now dot American suburbs but of actual, complicated urban neighborhoods. The salient characteristic of these areas is that, unlike most American urban spaces of the last century and a quarter, they are to some degree pedestrian-oriented: their sidewalks are often crowded.

It isn’t an accident that many of these neighborhoods function in part as recreational areas. I can’t prove it, but I’m willing to hypothesize an “ideal-typical” history of these places. Because tourists even in the United States often don’t have access to cars when they visit large cities (and in any case may not be in any particular hurry when they’re on vacation), they’re willing to do more walking than when they’re at home. Over time, many visitors to such places find the bustle (along with the tourist attractions) appealing and decide to move in, at least temporarily, perhaps by acquiring a pied-à-terre or even a permanent housing unit in the community. Developers respond by building more residential structures. Because there are few long-term residents (at least at first), there is not the kind of NIMBYism that occurs in established communities, and much of the new housing ends up being high-rise. The fact that the spatial trope of the high-rise urban recreational community (especially along a waterfront) is a positive one even in the United States is a factor here. The result after perhaps several decades is a complicated, dense, walkable, and “vibrant” residential community, with a mix of condominiums, rental apartments, single-family houses, and hotels. There is, obviously, not quite the same mix in such places that you might find in the dense neighborhoods of older cities (in midtown Manhattan, for example). There isn’t likely to be much if any industry. In some cases, there will be few office buildings. In some, but not all, examples, poor people are priced out even more than in older cities, since there is unlikely to be rent control, and there certainly aren’t going to be public housing projects.¹ You do nonetheless have enough density to discourage automobile use—and this in American communities that date from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Consider two quite different examples: Waikiki in Honolulu and Brickell in Miami. I recently spent a week in Waikiki (my only trip there except for an earlier brief visit in 2000 on my way home from China), and I’ve been in Brickell several times over the years, most recently in February 2022. My comments below are based on census data, informal fieldwork, and a modest amount of reading.

Waikiki’s status as a resort may date back to the late 19th century, but it was only after the construction of the Ala Wai Canal on its western and northern edges in the 1920s helped drain the once swampy land that large-scale development began. Tall hotels along the beach began to be added in the 1950s, and, over the decades since, much (but not all) of Waikiki’s once low-rise building stock has been replaced by taller hotels and apartment buildings. The process has been gradual, but the result is quite an impressive skyline despite the fact that the Honolulu urban area has barely a million people.²

Waikiki and vicinity from Diamond Head.

Of the tall buildings in Waikiki, the hotels tend to be located along the beach, the apartments (and especially the condos) along the Ala Wai Canal, to the north and west, but there are plenty of exceptions to this generalization.

Brickell has a very different history.³ Its distinctive character dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, as Miami came to take on its modern role as a Latin-America-oriented financial center. Miami’s old, mostly low-rise downtown seemed rather grubby to the sort of people who were making decisions about where to build new skyscrapers for banks, and, Brickell, a high-prestige residential neighborhood across the Miami River from the traditional downtown, was an obvious alternative. (CBDs inevitably move in the direction of wealth when there are no obstacles to doing so.) As elsewhere in North America, many people were increasingly attracted in (roughly) the 1980s to the idea of living in a high-density environment and were willing to pay extra to do so. Thus, developers aiming to build residential buildings began to find that they could profitably outbid developers of office buildings in Brickell (as well as in certain close-to-CBD areas). A factor more important in Miami than anywhere else was the desire of some well-off Latin Americans to own residential real estate in the United States; in no other urban area of the United States can one so easily get by in Spanish alone. The result was that tall apartment buildings began to be built in Brickell (and elsewhere around downtown Miami). Brickell now includes one of the most impressive high-rise residential clusters in the United States. Its tallest apartment building (868 feet/265 m) comes close to being a “super-tall,” and larger buildings are planned (heights until recently were limited by the FAA since Brickell lies close to one of the corridors used by planes landing at Miami International Airport).

Tall buildings (mostly residential) in Brickell, across from Brickell Key.

Note that, while Brickell has never been a tourist center in the way that Waikiki is, plenty of tourists do come to the Miami area, and some of them have always chosen to stay in or near downtown Miami instead of in Miami Beach or another beach town, so Brickell came to acquire a number of hotels at roughly the same time as office and apartment buildings were being built. The hotels, of course, also house business visitors.

In 2020, Waikiki had a population of 20,470 in an area of 2.00 square kilometers. Its population density was thus 10,235 people per square kilometer (26,452 per square mile). This is high for the United States but way below, say, Manhattan’s population density of 28,873 per square kilometer. Consider, however, that hotels make up a substantial part of Waikiki’s area and that their guests would not have been counted in the census. Note in the map below how much lower in density the hotel district along the beach is, although building density is generally highest there.

Brickell had a population of 42,692 on 2.05 square kilometers in 2020. Its population density was therefore 20,835 per square kilometer, two-thirds of Manhattan’s. Note that, as in Waikiki (and of course Manhattan too), the people staying in hotels weren’t counted in the census figures, so the effective population density at any time is higher than indicated by the Census. Brickell’s still significant office function, of course, makes its high population density even more impressive.

Maps of Waikiki and Brickell and vicinity showing population density by census tract, 2020. The heavy black lines show the neighborhood boundaries (in the case of Brickell, this boundary is somewhat arbitrary). The Waikiki map includes Ala Moana and a small part of Kaka’ako on the left. The Brickell map includes downtown Miami, which lies north across the Miami River. The nominal scale of these maps is 1:25,000. That’s the scale they would have if they were printed on an 11 x 17 inch sheet of paper. The statistical data and tract boundaries on these maps come from the U.S. Census Bureau but were downloaded from the NHGIS-IPUMS website. Most of the other GIS data come from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve done some editing of these files.

It’s important to note that many apartments in both Waikiki and Brickell are pieds-à-terre only occupied part-time. In 2020, 6,833 of Waikiki’s 18,786 housing units—36.37%—were “vacant.” The Census tries very hard not to double-count, and it considers apartments whose inhabitants’ chief places of residence are elsewhere as “vacant.” Note on the map below how Waikiki’s unoccupied apartments (like its major hotels) tend to be concentrated along its southern, beachfront edge.⁴ In Brickell too (but to a lesser extent) some housing units—17.8%—are occupied only part-time. Their inhabitants’ permanent homes are elsewhere, presumably mostly either in northern United States or in Latin America. (Other parts of the downtown Miami area have an even higher proportion of such units.)⁵

Maps of Waikiki and Brickell and vicinity, showing percent of housing units “vacant” by census tract, 2020. This is an approximate measure of the percent of apartments occupied only part-time. See first map for information on the maps’ scale, extent, and data sources.

In other words, it’s a safe assumption that, when Waikiki’s and Brickell’s hotels come close to being full and when a substantial number of its temporary inhabitants are using their apartments, the effective population density of these neighborhoods would be much higher than the official figures suggest. Their high density is of course the chief reason that these are bustling places. Everything is close together, and there is not much parking available. It would be ridiculous to try to move around within these areas by automobile, although I don’t doubt that some people do so.

Pedestrians on Kalakaua Avenue, Waikiki.

Street scene in Brickell, from Brickell City Centre.

Both of these neighborhoods, reflecting their urban areas’ population makeup, are ethnically diverse places; their diversity is more or less by definition one of the things that makes them seem so intensely urban. Waikiki’s permanent population, when classed into standard Census Bureau racial and ethnic categories, was more non-Hispanic Asian than anything else in 2020⁶; there were also a large number of non-Hispanic white people.

Hispanic                                         1479       (7.2%)
Non-Hispanic white                     7690     (37.6%)
Non-Hispanic Black                       526       (2.6%)
Non-Hispanic Asian                      7727     (37.7%)
Non-Hispanic Pacific Islander      641       (3.1%)

Brickell’s 2020 population, just like the Miami area’s, had a large proportion of people of Hispanic descent:

Hispanic                                          24106   (56.5%)
Non-Hispanic white                      13846   (32.4%)
Non-Hispanic Black                          950     (2.2%)
Non-Hispanic Asian                        1304      (3.1%)
Non-Hispanic Pacific Islander             3     (0.0%)

Note how, in both neighborhoods, the locally dominant “racial” category makes up the largest share of the population while non-Hispanic whites are second. The latter, compared to their proportion of the general population, are overrepresented in these generally prosperous neighborhoods, while minority groups that are on average poorer (Pacific Islanders in Waikiki and non-Hispanic Blacks in both neighborhoods) are underrepresented.

Maps of Waikiki and Brickell and vicinity showing the distribution of population by “race” and Hispanic status by census tract, 2020. See above for information on the maps’ scale, extent, and data sources.

The small representation of some minority groups in Waikiki and Brickell reflects the fact that these are expensive neighborhoods. When you consider, however, that condo and rental prices in both Waikiki and Brickell are high, Waikiki’s permanent residents are (somewhat surprisingly) not uniformly well-off. Per capita income was $45,392 in 2014/2018 (as reported in the 2015/2019 American Community Survey). Income was highest along the beachfront where “vacancy” levels were highest and much lower (although hardly low) on its northern edge. I suspect that many of the poorer inhabitants of Waikiki are living in one of the several dozen lower-rise buildings with external corridors that still make up a substantial part of the neighborhood’s housing stock. It’s possible that many of these people work in the tourist industry.⁷

Apartment buildings of various sizes on Lewers Street near the northern edge of Waikiki.

Per capita income in Brickell is consistently higher than in Waikiki (and in most other parts of Miami). But, because the census tract boundaries changed in 2020, it’s impossible to calculate an income figure for the area defined as Brickell on the maps. The per capita income of central Brickell in the 2014/2018 period (from the 2015/2019 American Community Survey) was $86,742; the per capita for what might be called Greater Brickell (including two tracts that spill over the borders of 2020 Brickell) was $68,931.

Maps of Waikiki and Brickell and vicinity showing per capita income by census tract, 2014/2018, as reported in the 2015/2019 American Community Survey. See above for information on the maps’ scale, extent, and data sources.

Car ownership among permanent residents in Waikiki and Brickell is not the 99% typical of American suburbs, but it’s still fairly high. In Waikiki, 16.6% of occupied housing units were carfree in 2015/2019. Still, plenty of residents did walk or take transit to work. (Honolulu has a pretty good bus system and, one of these years, the Honolulu Area Transit Authority may start operating trains to Ala Moana.⁸) Car ownership among permanent residents in Brickell is higher than in Waikiki but, again, not universal. Occupied units in the central tracts of Brickell were 9.0% carfree in 2015/2019. The figure for a slightly broader definition of Brickell, including two tracts that extend beyond the borders of Brickell as defined on the maps, was 12.5%. But here too many people did walk or take transit to work. Note though that more than 80% of the inhabitants of Brickell Key—the triangular island that is one of Brickell’s densest tracts—drove to work, and (somewhat unbelievably) no one used public transit (the recreational trail around the perimeter of Brickell Key is full of people during both day and evening, however). Their substantial level of car ownership is one of the ways that these neighborhoods differ most obviously from neighborhoods in Manhattan.

Maps of Waikiki and Brickell and vicinity showing the extent of car ownership and the modal split of journeys to work by census tract, 2015/2019. The pie charts only include people reported that their journey to work was by one of the four listed modes. See above for information on the maps’ scale, extent, and data sources.

Both neighborhoods have an oddly unbalanced pattern of retailing. In Waikiki, there are numerous upscale stores (Prada, Gucci, and the like) on Kalakaua Avenue, and it almost seems as though there’s a tourist-oriented ABC Store selling sunglasses, bathing suits, packaged sandwiches, and the like on every block, but there are no full-service supermarkets. To find a supermarket you have to go to Ala Moana Center, said to be the world’s largest open-air shopping center, which lies just northwest of Waikiki, and what you get there is a branch of the upscale Foodland Farms. At least Ala Moana is easily reached by foot, bus, or car. Brickell has fewer street-level shops than Waikiki, but it’s arguable that, perhaps because tourism doesn’t color the retail sector quite so much, it has a less peculiar pattern of retailing than Waikiki but not by much. It’s easier to find an upscale restaurant or a gym on one of Brickell’s few streets zoned for commerce than a grocery store (and then you’d be stuck with a 7-Eleven). But there’s an enormous shopping center in the middle of Brickell (called, not surprisingly, Brickell City Centre) that sells all sorts of mostly expensive things. And there’s a large Publix supermarket just across the Metrorail tracks from southwestern Brickell and a Whole Foods just across the Miami River. I’d estimate that in the early evening maybe a quarter of the many pedestrians crossing the Brickell Avenue Bridge in a southerly direction are carrying Whole Foods bags. (My New Yorker’s instinct is that you can define a pedestrian-oriented neighborhood as one in which most people shlep groceries home by hand.)

Waikiki and Brickell are most certainly not the only places in Honolulu and Miami with newish big apartment buildings. It’s possible to argue that the success—along with the limited availability of spaces to build—in these neighborhoods has, in fact, led to the proliferation of high-rise apartment buildings elsewhere. Developers have constructed high-rise residential buildings all around All Moana Center, as well as in Kaka’ako, the neighborhood just to the northwest of Ala Moana, and even around Honolulu’s somewhat forlorn downtown.⁹ The view of these buildings from, say, Ala Moana Beach is quite impressive.

Apartment buildings in Kaka’ako and the downtown area, looking northwest from Ala Moana Beach.

But I was struck in walking around these often huge buildings at how few pedestrians they generate. One project quite close to Ala Moana—Ward Village—has released a great deal of publicity about its walkability and has included some pedestrian facilities in its plans, but, so far (the development is far from finished), sidewalks in Ward Village are fairly (although not completely) empty. Could it be that carless tourists are absolutely necessary for high building density to generate high pedestrian density in American urban neighborhoods of the 20th and 21st centuries?

Still partly industrial/commercial part of Kaka’ako, northwest of Ala Moana. Despite the tall buildings, this area has few pedestrians, perhaps partly because it barely has sidewalks in places, but also perhaps because the area has few tourists.

Maybe even more than in Waikiki, Brickell’s apparent success has encouraged the construction of high-rise apartment towers in other parts of Miami. It generally hasn’t been possible to build such structures just south(west) of Brickell, since the area is largely zoned for single-family housing (and its well-off inhabitants have mostly been uninterested in selling), but new and sometimes huge high-end apartment buildings have been built north of Brickell along Biscayne Bay from downtown almost to the city limits. Just as is true of high-rise buildings built in Honolulu outside Waikiki, I’ve been struck in walking among these enormous buildings by how few pedestrians they generate. Again, one can hypothesize that perhaps you need Brickell’s office workers and tourists to have enough pedestrians so that high-rise apartment dwellers feel comfortable about leaving their buildings on foot. There is also the fact that, while Brickell is a completely respectable place and not bordered by any dubious neighborhoods, numerous poor people frequent parts of downtown and live in neighborhoods of North Miami just inland from Biscayne Bay. I’m not justifying this, but I do wonder whether the presence of relatively poor people in these areas may make relatively well-off apartment dwellers a bit nervous about going out on foot.

Waikiki and Brickell are distinctive neighborhoods—that’s part of their appeal—but there are still some roughly comparable places.

There are, for example, several other high-density urban beachfront neighborhoods in the U.S. that welcome numerous tourists and that also serve as residential areas for substantial numbers of both permanent and temporary residents—and that are comfortable places for pedestrians. Obvious examples are the first few blocks in from the beach in Santa Monica and the southern half or so of Miami Beach (up through Mid-Beach).  Santa Monica beachfront neighborhoods may have more pedestrians than any other well-off part of the Los Angeles area, and Miami Beach is even more pedestrian-oriented than Brickell (it’s larger too). Note that neither beachfront Santa Monica nor Miami Beach is quite as high-rise as Waikiki. NIMBYism and zoning restrictions make it hard to build high in Santa Monica, and Miami Beach has (wisely) chosen to protect its art deco inheritance rather than to allow developers to replace it, but, despite the often modest height of buildings, density is pretty high by U.S. standards, and pedestrians in these places are numerous.

It’s a little harder to identify places completely comparable to Brickell, but all the many new high-rise apartment districts on the edge of the CBDs of even low-density U.S. cities are obvious candidates. The area north/northwest of downtown Denver including much of LoDo as well as Lower Highland is a good example. Residential structures in this area are mostly either completely new or else carved out of industrial buildings (the Highland end of the area is also the site of traditional gentrification of older residential structures). The area’s sidewalks are full of people, some of them presumably tourists (including many local tourists). There are also office workers in the area. There’s even a Whole Foods that attracts numerous walk-in customers. The substantial amount of new high-rise residential construction in the southwestern part of downtown Los Angeles also seems to be on its way to becoming a healthy, well-off, walkable neighborhood (it has many other functions too, and its pedestrians include a shocking number of homeless people). Belltown, northwest of downtown Seattle, is another close-to-CBD area that has acquired pedestrians as apartment buildings have been added. And, of course, all the newly residential, at least partly high-rise neighborhoods in once-industrial districts near the CBDs of Chicago (the West Loop), Boston (the Seaport area), and New York (Hudson Yards and Long Island City) are at least vaguely comparable too, although not as surprising as the new neighborhoods in once completely car-oriented places.

There is a general consensus that the United States could mitigate both its contribution to global warming and its lack of affordable-housing by building large amounts of high-density housing, especially in areas where housing is particularly expensive. There is also a widespread sense that the obstacles to moving in this direction are so overwhelming that not much has been or maybe ever could be accomplished. It looks to me as though, in fact, there are some places where there are relatively recent, successful, high-density neighborhoods. They’re not very numerous; they’re not very big; they’re expensive places to live; they tend to be rather distinct places, attractive both to tourists and to potential well-off residents; and some of them (for example, Waikiki) are more oriented to tourists than permanent residents might want. Because these neighborhoods are so special, it might be difficult to increase their size and number, and it must be admitted that the diffusion of high-rise apartment buildings away from the distinctive core neighborhoods hasn’t always resulted in places with large numbers of pedestrians. But it’s certainly worth remembering that relatively recent high-density, pedestrian-oriented places in the United States are at least possible.