You know those rows of fake building facades with nothing behind them that you see on a movie set, like for an old Western? They’re, of course, carefully shot from a limited range of angles during film production to disguise the fact that these places are all hat and no cattle.

Well, this trick is not just for Hollywood anymore.

Something funny has happened since the rise of New Urbanism as an architecture and design movement in the 1980s and 1990s. The New Urbanists’ resurrection of traditional pre-WWII American built forms—the walkable neighborhood main street with shops along the sidewalk and apartments above; the narrow, shady residential streets; the foursquare home with a quaint front porch—proved popular with the public. People gravitate to traditional design, not only for nostalgic reasons but because it follows principles evolved to meet humans’ basic psychological needs.

What hasn’t proven so popular among developers is actually challenging the basic spatial logic of suburbia, in which different land uses are strictly separated and everyone drives everywhere, on wide stroads that connect one pod-like “development” to another. This logic is wired into our zoning codes through things like parking minimums and subdivision regulations.

And so, the look and superficial feel of New Urbanism is increasingly just co-opted by developers of run-of-the-mill suburbia to make consumers feel like they’re being sold something other than run-of-the-mill suburbia. Call it Movie Set Urbanism.

Take, for example, the marketing around a new master-planned “town center” district in Florida (currently under construction). At first, the artists’ renderings of this place look pretty promising: