Stub street seminar: why developers keep building tiny, pointless dead-end roads.

The term “stub street” rarely comes up in conversation, yet enough people have a mental image of what it entails that it would be almost patronizing to explain what it means.  However, those cognitive apparitions vary so greatly that I’m going to go right ahead and patronize.  After all, a consistent definition of a stub street is essential for making sense of this article.  An online legal dictionary provides three definitions—one short, one medium, one long—and since all seem to be valid, I’ll cite the dictionary, while directly quoting the most succinct one: “a dead-end local street which provides for eventual expansion of the street onto unplatted land.”

So stub streets are dead-ends, but they’re more than that.  Or less.  Here’s a perfect example of a stub street in a run-of-the-mill middle class neighborhood on the far south side of Indianapolis.

The photo above captures the entire length of Pomroy Drive, the stub street that terminates at Alcona Drive.  There’s nothing else to it: stub streets like Pomroy Drive are usually very short—probably no more than a couple hundred feet long—and usually provide access to nothing.  No homes have a Pomroy Drive address; it doesn’t get anyone anywhere.  Its primary function is additional parking for neighbors in the area, much like a secondary driveway.  But it’s still public right-of-way.

These details should suffice to explain why everyone can conceive of a street stub, since they’re pretty much ubiquitous in the United States.  Everybody has seen one.  But they’re also difficult to describe because their function is a bit elusive.  Why would a real estate developer design a stub street?  They have to follow city prescribed engineering, in terms of legal mandates for curbs and storm sewers.  They require extra pavement.  If the subdivision adopts a charter for a homeowners’ association, chances are that at least part of the annual dues will go to the maintenance and repair of pointless little Pomroy Drive.  They’re an investment that yields no discernible value—a sunk cost.  So what’s the point?

Essentially stub streets are placeholders.  They allow the site plan to anticipate (to pre-engineer) the possibility of additional growth into adjacent, vacant land.  At one point in time (the mid or late 1990s, I’d guess), the developer purchased this large vacant parcel in Indianapolis and subdivided it into residential lots befitting a middle-income buyer, branding it with the name “Richmond Hill”.  The tangle of streets accommodated a few hundred houses, but land immediately adjacent to this new Richmond Hill subdivision remained undeveloped at the time.  The developer might have perceived that the site plan would serve as a phase one development, with the expectation that a second phase two would come around eventually, if the housing demand were high enough: after purchasing the large, undeveloped adjacent tract, the developer could build a site plan that extended Richmond Hill into the new land, using Pomroy Drive as the linkage street between old and Richmond Hill.  Alternatively, the developer simply engineered these stub streets so any other land developer might purchase adjacent parcels and grow Richmond Hill to the west.  Here’s a map of Richmond Hill that clearly reveals Pomroy Drive as the exclusive stub street, reflected by the purple circle.

The only ingress point to Richmond Hill is where Towhees Drive intersects the more prominent Indianapolis collector road, South Sherman Drive.  At one point in time, Pomroy Drive might have held promise that Richmond Hill would grow westward.  But those days are over.  Notice the wooden fence at Pomroy Drive’s westernmost termination point, right where some of the neighbors have co-opted the little road to build a half court in honor of Indiana’s most beloved sport.

The wooden fence isn’t just an impediment to a right-of-way extension.  It’s under private ownership, completely unrelated to any homes in Richmond Hill.  As the map above indicates, a tiny little cluster of homes surround a cul-de-sac under the name Brooks Farm Lane.  It’s an awfully long road to serve just three homes, but the developer may not have sought a profit-making enterprise; the road is private and gravel.  My guess is this land was formerly a farmstead under the Brooks family, who either sold and turned it into a tiny development or developed it themselves, for parents and adult children in the separate homes.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when Brooks Farm Lane emerged, but the land developers clearly decided not to extend the Richmond Hill subdivision westward via Pomroy Drive.  Perhaps housing demand in the area cratered (in keeping with the collapse in the late 2000s), dashing hopes for a Phase II for Richmond Hill.  Or perhaps Richmond Hill’s reputation made additional growth impossible.  This otherwise very normal subdivision achieved notoriety in November 2012 for a gas explosion in a certain house that caused enough damage to require 30 homes to be completely demolished and rebuilt.  The explosion, a rigged attempt to defraud insurers, put five people in prison (two for life) after killing two of the neighbors.

I don’t think this horrific incident, which attracted national press attention, has really quelled demand for the neighborhood.  By this point, most homes have rebuilt and it once again looks like the middle-class suburban respite that the developers intended to be.  Perhaps the Brooks family lineage still lives in one or two of those larger homes on Brooks Farm Lane, which look to be not much newer than the homes in Richmond Hill.  Regardless of the circumstances, no other developer decided to extend Pomroy Drive, so, eternally consigned to a stub street, its most intensive use will be a neighborhood game of half-court basketball.  Meanwhile, Pomroy is not the only road in Richmond Hill with prospect for expansion: Alcona Drive also terminates into vacant land, as indicated by the green circle on the map. Here’s a photo of Alcona Drive’s northernmost endpoint:

Alcona is not a stub street though, since it hosts numerous homes and serves as a viable address.  It is merely a dead-end road that, to this day, terminates at a vacant field that a developer may eventually choose to subdivide for homes, extending Alcona Drive and expanding the size of Richmond Hill considerably.  The appearance may be jarring, with Alcona Road hosting homes built over thirty years apart from the original Richmond Hill, but it’s unlikely to affect demand or desirability of either the older or newer homes.

Elsewhere on the south side of Indianapolis, developers extended stub streets achieving precisely this effect, but with an added complication.

This map reveals two subdivisions of completely different phases, where the linkage is the point with the pink circle.  To the south of the circle is the older development: single-family detached homes from the 1970s, I believe.  My Google Street View shows the position looking northward, where the homes in the foreground are older, but the road reveals a strange widening (almost a cul-de-sac), the sidewalks terminate, then begin again in the background, with newer homes.  Travel a few hundred feet to the north, and the Google Street View shows the change in character, with much newer construction (late 90s and early 2000s), less mature trees, and duplexes instead of single-family detached.  Absolutely nothing wrong with this development from a site planning standpoint.  The older neighborhood provided a dead-end street that, almost a quarter-century later, another developer chose to use to link the two subdivisions.  But there’s a catch.

Venetian Way wasn’t ever a de facto stub street, since it extends southward and hosts numerous homes, much like Alcona Drive in Richmond Hill.  But Venetian Way previously terminated using stub street logic.  The strange feature is that the old neighborhood (south of the former dead-end) uses that name Venetian Way, while the new neighborhood (having expanded north of that dead-end) uses the name Oak Knoll Drive, without any indicators that the name is going to change: no bend in the road, no perpendicular intersection, no warning.  No signs either.  It just changes.  In an earlier time period, this could have elicited considerable confusion, but modern GPS probably largely resolves this.  Either way, it’s the sort of careless decision that stronger subdivision and land development ordinances could have precluded.

Travel over five hundred miles to the west, and a radically different former stub street shows the potential impact that these seemingly innocuous features can impart on a neighborhood.

This photo reveals me standing in the heart of Springfield, Virginia, an expanse of middle-class suburbia within the enormous Washington DC metro.  I’ve covered the Springfield Town Center Mall at least once.  The photo above features obvious commercial development in the background.  The road is Brandon Avenue, and I’m going to go out on the limb and assert that, at one point in the distant past, it was either a stub street or (at the very least) a long dead-end road.  How do I know? 

Notice how the sidewalk veers outward in the photo, creating a wider street for a tiny segment…almost like a cul-de-sac.  Also notice the 1950s/1960s residential subdivision in the foreground.  The road in question, Brandon Avenue, looks like this from an aerial:

Notice the cul-de-sac right where the land clearly changes from residential to commercially zoned use?

My suspicion is that, in the earliest days of development, Brandon Avenue terminated southbound at that cul-de-sac, giving the homes residential privacy.  The commercial development came later, and Fairfax County Public Works department agreed to link Brandon Avenue from the south by eliminating the terminating feature of the cul-de-sac.  This transformed Brandon Avenue from a largely private residential street to a through-street.  Northward bound, the road continues into a normal middle-class community. 

Nonetheless, I can imagine how contentious this might have been.  While direct access to the shops and services of Springfield Town Center (and all the adjacent strip malls) is convenient and fundamentally makes this suburban area walkable, it also eliminates the quiet feature that homeowners original sought, while ramping up through-traffic on a formerly local, residential road.  Brandon Avenue is now almost more of a minor collector, with far more traffic moving at higher speeds than one typically expects from a local, residential street.  Developers from sixty years ago could have prevented this by eliminating the ambiguity of a cul-de-sac or stub street, instead creating an intersecting road that formed the southern boundary of the residential area without allowing immediate access to the commercial just to the south.  Separation of uses, with a minor local road tracing the southern perimeter of the area zoned single-family residential.

But that’s not the purpose of stub streets.  For better or for worse, they’re placeholders: a chance for land speculators to hedge bets on future expansion.  No wonder postwar Americans grew to hate street grids.  Grids are certainly efficient, allowing the least amount of road necessary to promote access, while setting the stage for future expansion in any direction by simply linking to the existing network, using stub streets.  Yep, and most contemporary American households hate those grids, as evidenced by how rarely seen grids are in modern suburbia.  Americans will trade exclusivity for efficiency any day.