We need outward growth—but not sprawl

So The New York Times supports sprawl. Their land-use reporter, Conor Dougherty, wrote a piece: “Why American Should Sprawl: The word has become an epithet for garish, reckless growth—but to fix the housing crisis, we need more of it.” The headline is superimposed over an image of vast Dallas subdivisions with garages in front of every house, where automobiles are the only feasible means of transportation, guaranteed to generate clicks and reactions.

First, I want to acknowledge that Dougherty makes good points. Over-regulation and poorly conceived land-use laws have contributed to a housing affordability crisis. He writes: 

“Consider the trajectory of California. In the 1960s and ’70s, when the state added eight million residents and fruit trees were being ripped out to make space for ranch houses, its Legislature passed a flurry of land-use and environmental laws aimed at preserving agricultural land and containing development to major metropolitan areas. Those laws were celebrated for saving farming regions like Napa Valley and wild spaces like the Marin Headlands, but they also have made building so difficult that even environmentally friendly projects, like a small apartment building next to a commuter rail line in San Francisco, can be tied up in years of lawsuits that can add millions of dollars to the final cost.”

Dougherty is also right that we have always had outward, low-density development, and he cites architectural historian Robert Bruegmann. 

“The fringes of ancient Rome were known as ‘​suburbium,’ meaning outside the walls. There, and in so many other large cities — London, Paris, New York — growth has almost always pressed outward through a buffer zone that is neither fully urban nor rural. This wasn’t a permanent condition but rather the first step of growth, as, over time, the buffers filled in and were often incorporated into the city core: The Upper East Side of New York and the Hyde Park section of Chicago would have both been considered exurbs in their earliest stages of development.”

And yet, as Bill Fulton writes in his substack, The Future of Where, “sprawl is not the same thing as outward expansion.”

The first isolated houses on the Upper East Side and Hyde Park were built on a grid connected to the rest of Manhattan and Chicago. It was just a matter of time before they merged fully into their respective cities. The elephant in the living room is that the dominant development pattern changed radically in the second half of the 20th Century—both the scale and form of sprawl were new. The term “sprawl” was invented in the late 1950s to describe that new pattern. 

Zoning codes separated uses and housing types and spread them much farther apart through setbacks and minimum lot sizes. Most importantly, traffic engineers abandoned the connected grid of streets that was the foundation of real estate development in America for centuries. The image below shows housing development in Denver in the 1940s in red. 

Development occurred in an outward fashion—but it wasn’t conventional sprawl. If you zoom in on any of these areas, you will see a street grid. Development in the 1950s and beyond became squiggly and disconnected, soon becoming a completely automobile-oriented sprawl by the late 1960s. Go into any Denver-region neighborhood from the 1970s, and you can’t get from the single-family homes to the commercial areas without a car—unless you are a highly intrepid bike rider. That drive-only pattern was intentional because post-1950 planners envisioned automobiles used for all practical purposes. Walking and bicycling were for kids. Pretty soon, even children couldn’t get far on bikes, as walking and bicycling to school plummeted over two generations. The 1940s Denver neighborhoods, by contrast, remain walkable and bikeable. Earlier this month, I spent several days in the Denver suburbs, visited a 1940s-era city neighborhood, and experienced this first-hand.

Dougherty acknowledges that zoning is a factor, but only in terms of densifying 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.”

Dan Parolek of Opticos Design, notable for designing a car-free Cul-de-sac in Tempe, Arizona, responded to Dougherty: “As an alternative, if we simply made the creation of walkable communities in greenfield contexts legal to build/gave it an equal playing field, the market would decide this for us! Recent NAR (National Association of Realtors) market research shows that more than 50 percent of American Households want walkable neighborhoods, but it is just too hard to build them now.”

I would add that street design and networks are even bigger factors than zoning. Land use laws are changing, but streets are very hard to change. And traffic engineers continue to favor disconnected, automobile-oriented street patterns. It is all based on pseudo-science. 

A few other points need clarifying in Dougherty’s confused take on sprawl. “Over the past decade, dozens of cities and states have tried to spur construction by passing laws that aim to make neighborhoods denser: removing single-family zoning rules, reducing permitting times and exempting housing in established neighborhoods from environmental rules,” he writes.

This is harder to do, but not impossible, in conventional suburbs. Peter Calthorpe and others have pointed out the vast potential for housing on low-density commercial corridors. Eventually, that will take place to some degree. In the meantime, Dougherty is wrong that development on the fringe is the same thing as new cities:

“Even Alan Durning, founder of the Sightline Institute, a think tank that advocates for dense housing and renewable energy, says he has come to the conclusion that new cities are likely to be part of the solution to America’s housing shortage. Those cities are already being built, right in plain sight, the same way they always have been: on the edges of the cities we already have.”

Durning is talking about something different—not sprawl, but real new cities, like Daybreak in South Jordan, Utah. Many have been proposed, such as California Forever, which has been bogged down in the current over-regulated Golden State land-use system. Others are in the works.

New cities can be built incrementally, if we go back to how cities were designed before 1950. That means connected networks of streets and zoning codes based on mixed-use neighborhoods. Missing from The New York Times piece is the perspective that sprawl has contributed to the lack of affordability. The ring of sprawl around every city uses massive amounts of urban land, ten or more times as big as the historic cities. This makes new development more difficult and drives up the price of buildable land while it raises household costs for transportation. It also imposes costs on health and sustainability. We can change that reality, but it will require a new mindset from those who plan and build streets—in addition to continued zoning reform.

Dougherty is right that we need outward expansion—we just don’t need sprawl. We used to have new development that was efficient, connected directly to previous neighborhoods, and more sustainable (though that wasn’t even a word back then). We can and must do that again.