Supposing you have enough population - an older and more developed suburban area - you actually don't need to buy out entire neighborhoods, in many cases you co

Supposing you have enough population - an older and more developed suburban area - you actually don't need to buy out entire neighborhoods, in many cases you could get pretty far by just buying out a few homes or strip malls and connecting small scale streets through the gaps - even ped/bike only streets if you want. The main problem with that is that it's still not worth it in most cases. For most neighborhoods there's nothing to walk to because the population density is too low to support businesses or services. There's too much fragmented farmland separating out all the little pods of cookie cutter houses and strip malls, so the only configuration that works is to have a little pod of commercial at some highway intersection while all the residential to support that is sprinkled around a 10 mile radius of fragmented development.