America Needs More Sprawl to Fix Its Housing Crisis

Before the 19th century, regular travel between the core and the outlying areas of cities made sense only for those wealthy enough to afford carriages, boats and other forms of private transit. First railroads, then automobiles changed that, opening the gates of suburbia to the middle class. In his book, Bruegmann traces widespread anti-sprawl rhetoric to London in the 1920s, when it emerged as a way for aristocrats to denigrate their new middle-class neighbors under the guise of protecting nature. The word was popularized in the United States by a 1958 essay, “Urban Sprawl,” by the Fortune writer William H. Whyte Jr., who described the modern suburbs as “smog-filled deserts.”

“The attack on suburbs in the U.S. didn’t really become a dominant motif among the chattering classes until after World War II,” Bruegmann told me, “when the move out from the city by lower, middle and working classes in American cities became very obvious.” As millions of expanding families moved to larger homes in more spacious neighborhoods, artists and social critics followed with a long list of books (“Revolutionary Road”), songs (“Little Boxes”) and movies (“The Stepford Wives”) that criticized the conformity of suburbs and the American appetite for growth.

Cities and states responded by adopting anti-sprawl rules that created growth boundaries, made it easier to sue over new development and in some cases prevented even moderate density by limiting housing to multiacre parcels. The predictable result was that the pace of building slowed, housing costs exploded and anti-development sentiment became so pervasive that by the early 1980s the word “NIMBY” — short for “not in my backyard” — had proliferated to describe it.

One of the better accounts of this shift is a 1979 book, “The Environmental Protection Hustle,” by a professor of urban planning at M.I.T. named Bernard Frieden. Frieden documented how organizers in the San Francisco Bay Area were often as hostile to denser housing in urban neighborhoods as they were to low-slung developments on farmland. Chapters of the Sierra Club, he wrote, would protest exurban housing for being too sprawling, suburban housing for being insufficiently close to job centers and urban housing for taking up open space.

Frieden’s book points to a second distinguishing feature of postwar sprawl: Because most of today’s suburbs were built after zoning and land-use laws became more widespread and stringent, it has been harder to fill in the closest suburbs with density the way older cities did. This has increased the pressure to grow outward. Since 1950, big American cities have added very little new housing in established neighborhoods, according to an analysis by Issi Romem, an economist at MetroSight, an economic research and consulting firm. It might not seem that way when you look out on the glass-tower apartments and condominiums that have risen in the downtowns of big and even midsize U.S. cities. But those projects are frequently part of an industrial redevelopment, like Mission Bay in San Francisco or Hudson Yards in New York. They rarely disrupt neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes, which account for a majority of the land mass in many U.S. metro areas.