How the War on Sprawl screwed up America, California, and Silicon Valley

 
 

For decades, New Urbanist orthodoxies in Santa Clara County railed against single-family-home suburban development and enforced a densification orthodoxy. The result: massive social inequities, skyrocketing homelessness, and a massive population exodus to more enlightened states. Even The NYT acknowledges the mistake.

Since the mid-20th century, critics have blamed sprawl for many of the country’s deepest and most lasting problems.

Anti-sprawl legislation has successfully limited or prohibited this sort of growth in much of the country. 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. {Editors’ note: see SJ Urban Growth Boundary legislation.}

Similar laws throughout the country have slowed the pace of construction and made housing far more expensive, contributing to one of the worst affordable housing crises in the nation’s history. After two decades of underbuilding, economists estimate the country’s housing shortage at somewhere between four million and eight million units. Last year was among the most difficult on record to buy a home; a quarter of tenants now spend more than half their income on rent and utilities; and the most recent homeless count, at about 770,000, was up nearly 20 percent from the previous year.

Go Deeper:

The second-order effects of the housing crisis are also enormous. The rising cost of rent has become one of the main drivers of inflation, which was a defining issue in the 2024 presidential election. Housing costs have made businesses less productive by preventing people from moving to the job markets most in need of workers.

For all the focus on billionaires and stock prices, it’s home values that are a primary source of wealth inequality and the root of a generational schism between the housing-rich baby boomers and young adults today. According to Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard, the housing crisis has become “a huge hindrance on the quest for well-being and the pursuit of happiness.”

The solution is to build more. That’s not controversial — housing is one of the few remaining areas of bipartisan agreement. The rub, as always, is where and how to get it done. 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.

That shift is important, especially in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles that have little chance of lowering housing costs or reducing their homeless populations without building up. But cities are difficult and expensive places to build because they lack open land. Adding density to already-bustling places is crucial for keeping up with demand and preventing the housing crisis from getting worse. It will not, however, add the millions of new units America needs. The only way to do that is to move out — in other words, to sprawl.

“The attack on suburbs in the U.S. didn’t really become a dominant motif among the chattering classes until after World War II,” author of Sprawl William 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.

California and other states have spent much of the past decade trying to get out of this predicament by undoing single-family zoning laws and streamlining permitting for apartments, backyard cottages and other higher-density housing. These attempts to make it easier to fill in nearby suburbs where prices are highest — to fill in the previous generation’s sprawl — is the same process maturing cities have gone through for centuries. But density is gradual and takes decades to be effective. “Infill” — housing built in populated areas — is difficult and expensive. For all the vitriol this has caused in City Council meetings and legislatures, the overall pace of building has barely budged.

Even if all the regulatory restraints were removed tomorrow, developers couldn’t find enough land to satisfy America’s housing needs inside established areas. Consequently, much of the nation’s housing growth has moved to states in the South and Southwest, where a surplus of open land and willingness to sprawl has turned the Sun Belt into a kind of national sponge that sops up housing demand from higher-cost cities. The largest metro areas there have about 20 percent of the nation’s population, but over the past five years they have built 42 percent of the nation’s new single-family homes, according to a recent report by Cullum Clark, an economist at the George W. Bush Institute, a research center in Dallas.

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