[TarHeelJ]

Great, another "Why can't the U.S. be more like Canada?" thread.

From what I've seen, storefronts in the 20s and 30s where not as you have stated (the one-story building). The strip centers and auto-centric shopping centers came much later, as the automobile did not become commonplace for a couple of decades.

The "sunbelt" cities followed much the same pattern as other cities during the specific eras - if they were large enough cities at the time to do so. Cities like New Orleans, Atlanta, L.A., Houston, Dallas, Richmond, Memphis, etc were large enough to have had a great amount of development in the city prior to the rise of the automobile.