Ryan, thanks for your great summary of the still salient story told in Crabgrass Frontier. I don’t agree with Morgan’s take on it. I have not read the planet of cities piece. I grew up in the suburbs and traveled to cities around the globe. That experience and the data contradicts the idea that horizontal, low-density, single family urbanization (i.e. suburbanization) like that still dominating urban growth in the US is inevitable as countries develop is just not true. And the “bias that density is better than dispersion” is not a bias and greatly oversimplifies the issue. A vast body of research shows that density done the right way along with mixed land use, transit, parks pedestrian-safe streets provides huge benefits: better health, land conservation, and energy efficiency. The US sprawling urbanization pattern is one important contributor to the US lagging most other high-income countries on health metrics like obesity, traffic fatalities (especially among pedestrians) and life expectancy. Also untrue: that gas taxes now fully fund highway maintenance and construction. And buses, are only really as useful as streetcars in cities if provided enough dedicated lanes and other priority treatments.
I assume that I am the person who you identified as "Morgan." I did not claim that "horizontal, low-density, single-family urbanization (i.e. suburbanization) like that still dominating urban growth in the US is inevitable."
My claim is that the lessening of density of metro areas is a global-wide phenomenon so it is very unlikely to be due to unique government policy enacted in the United States. I further claim that government attempts to stop sprawl are a key driving force in unaffordable housing.
I agree that the federal government subsidizes homeowners, but not specifically the suburbs. Homeowners could have chosen to live in the central cities, but they voluntarily chose to look for homes in the suburbs. They largely still do.
The research that you are referring to starts by assuming that density is a moral good and sprawl is a moral bad. If you start with that assumption, it is easy to find statistics to back it up. Personally, I am more concerned about housing unaffordability and allowing people to choose.
My guess is that in your travels, you did not explore the outskirts of metro areas where tourists rarely go (which I sometimes do). That is like going to NYC and thinking that is representative of the entire United States. If you did, I think that you would be surprised by the number of single-family residences. For example, I once had a long stay in suburb of Paris, and it was nothing but single-family residences.
I grew up in the suburbs of London but when I left the Navy at 22, I swore I would forever live in either completely urban or completely rural. In the next few years, I managed the East End of London, The Barbican in Plymouth, Downtown Manhattan and then Palo Alto. I was in Urban Heaven.
After that, by an accident of employment, I spent the next 20 years among the dreary strip malls of Silicon Valley. When we first arrived in Mountain View we went for a walk along El Camino but there were no sidewalks and we had to turn around and walk home. Cars Only! In Almaden Valley, we had a three mile drive to the nearest pub until they put a bar inside Whole Foods. My kids never left the house unless I was driving.
We are finally back in the Urbs of Bristol and we are in Urban Heaven once more. There are 100 pubs within walking distance and I talk to a stranger every time I sit at the bar. We get asked all the time why anyone would trade California for Bristol but it sure is nice going for a walk and making friends.
One thing I have noticed coming back home is that all those almost-inner-city neighbourhoods around Central London were absolutely shit 25 years ago — filled with rubbish and graffiti and poor people who couldn't afford the suburbs. But now they are all delightful and filled with glorious inner city pubs and lovely little ethnic restaurants. No cars required. Anyone would give an arm to live there if they could afford it.
I think England must've had the same government thumb on the suburban scale that yours had but I think they have finally remembered that the inner city is quite lovely, actually. We should build more of it.
And imagine what the cities could do if we undid our great historical error and re-decentralized and brought far more of the cities fiscal powers, both the amount of the local money *they* tax AND the control over that pending, along with restoring their ability to engage in economic policy spheres that several decades ago we made the sole purview of the Federal government...
Such an important, and honestly, sometimes weird history — ex in the Color of Law, Mitt Romney’s dad makes an appearance as a champion for racial progressivism as ….HUD Sec, I think?
Yeah, I agree with the "weirdness." That's why I started this series with the cultural/moralistic aspect of it (https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/the-suburban-lifestyle-dream). We can't really understand why things evolved as they did (i.e., weirdly) without that piece of the puzzle.
I think that this article gives a very inaccurate summary of the reasons for the emergence of suburbs. I think a big part of the problem is that you rely far too heavily on Kenneth Jackson's "Crabgrass Frontier", which gives a very one-sided account of suburbanization. His analysis is laden with ideological bias some of which are in the quotes you listed.
I would suggest reading "Planet of Cities" by Shlomo Angel as a balance. Here is a summary:
The trends towards lower density, greater dispersion, and polycentric within metros is a global phenomenon regardless of public policy. As cities grow they naturally spread out and become less dense. This would have happened in the United States regardless of public policy.
Nor is it accurate to say the "government subsidized the suburbs." There has been massive federal, state, and local government for mass transit and other infrastructure in the urban centers for decades. Nor are there any financial subsidies to suburbs that exclude urban centers.
Street cars failed because they were not financially sustainable, which is why they disappeared everywhere. General Motors pushed for a shift to buses, which are much cheaper, more flexible and are perfectly useful in the central cities. Streetcars disappeared even in cities where there were no GM buses. And there is no reason why streetcar suburbs could not have functioned on buses.
How did Americans "tax and harrass public transportation?" There is no equivalent of gas taxes for public transportation.
The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 was not designed to "depopulate the urban core and disperse the population to low-density suburbs." Its original goal was to facilitate military transport between cities. Its biggest impact, however, was to facilitate intra-metro transport both within suburbs and the city center. If the suburb had no inherent advantage over the city center, then highways would not have caused a shift to suburbs. Highways gave Americans the choice of where to live, and they made their choice.
Gasoline taxes were not supposed to be divertible, but they in fact are. Gasoline taxes are a major source of funding for subsidies for mass transit.
FHA and other federal housing programs did subsidize home ownership, but they in no way differentiated between suburban housing and central city housing. Owners chose to live in suburbs because the houses there were bigger, cheaper more modern, and with private yards for kids. They also had the benefit of being less segregated than inner cities.
In reality, federal programs from 1930s through 1970s played a key role in encouraging housing construction everywhere. The suburbs were the focus of construction because that is where land is the cheapest. This in turn enabled more affordable housing and a higher material standard of living for the American working and middle class.
Supporters of Progress will never be able to advocate for affordable housing until we get over our bias that density is better than dispersion.
2) I think the rest of your points drop a lot of context and ignore a lot of history:
--The spatial growth of cities is dependent on the dominant type of transportation in the era of growth; suburbs that emerged in an auto-centric environment grew differently than those that emerged in an age of streetcars (see Queens vs Brooklyn). Minimum lot size requirements, setbacks, and exclusionary zoning—all popular tools of repression in the postwar era—made those new suburbs less dense, to say nothing of autocentric planning.
--The streetcars could not be financially sustainable if they were not allowed to raise their fares; they did not fail for no reason.
--The highways bulldozed whole sections of cities where people lived (usually minority populations) and blighted neighborhoods along them. Highways did not give the people displaced by highway construction a choice of where to live.
--The national defense rationale for the highways seems flimsy, at best. If you wanted to quickly move slow-rolling tanks and huge numbers of soldiers over large distances, a vast network of trains seems like a great way to do it.
--Regarding the FHA, I'd recommend "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein for a full account of the government's role in segregation outside the South. To say the suburbs of this era were less segregated than the inner cities is simply untrue. Supporting progress requires recognizing this history and not whitewashing it.
Many of your points are valid, but none give evidence to the main point of your article: that “the government subsidized the suburbs.”
I am not trying to be a troll. I respect your writing, but I think that you are starting from incorrect assumptions (as so many do in this field).
I believe that affordable housing on the outskirts of metro areas where land is cheap is essential for material progress and upward mobility for those who have less. A key barrier to achieving that is overcoming the very negative bias that intellectuals and urban designers have against suburbs, sprawl and a bias towards density. It permeates the entire literature and Crabgrass Frontier is a clear example. Progress researchers need to have the courage to question their previous assumptions, even when it is hard and unpopular.
Fortunately, affordable housing on the outskirts of metro area where land is cheap does not require subsidies as your argument implies. It requires government to get out of the way, which they largely did before 1970. The massive growth of suburbs were essential for the upward mobility for the working and middle class in the past-war era. Suburbs are a key foundation of affordable housing, but current government policies sharply regulate and often outright prohibit home construction there. That is the root cause of unaffordable housing.
Rather than subsidies, American suburbs likely emerged for the same reasons that they did in every other nation. I think a much more plausible explanation for the differences between American suburbs and suburbs in other nations is that Americans are richer and have more land per capita.
I never said anything about race. Race is not the only dimension for segregation, nor is it related to subsidies. Post-war suburbs were actually far less ethnically segregated than the central cities, which were heavily segregated based on ethnicity. Previously, there were Irish neighborhoods, Polish neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, WASP neighborhoods, etc. Those did not exist in the suburbs.
I go into more detail on desegregation towards the bottom of this article:
Most cities are tax sinks. As a simple example, my old city of Baltimore required massive subsidies from the state to run its schools and other services. Subsidies from the state government is basically taxes from the middle class suburbs.
People talk about GDP in cities, but this is like saying Ireland is an economic powerhouse because companies have a PO Box there to dodge taxes. Many companies located in Baltimore for tax breaks but none of the people working there actually lived in the city. They all commuted in from the burbs, to the extent that actually business was even being done.
Federal subsidies tend to flow to cities as well. The huge medicaid underclass in many cities are subsidized by the feds, whose revenue comes from taxing suburbanites.
Overall, its the cities who need us suburbanites not the other way around.
Ryan, thanks for your great summary of the still salient story told in Crabgrass Frontier. I don’t agree with Morgan’s take on it. I have not read the planet of cities piece. I grew up in the suburbs and traveled to cities around the globe. That experience and the data contradicts the idea that horizontal, low-density, single family urbanization (i.e. suburbanization) like that still dominating urban growth in the US is inevitable as countries develop is just not true. And the “bias that density is better than dispersion” is not a bias and greatly oversimplifies the issue. A vast body of research shows that density done the right way along with mixed land use, transit, parks pedestrian-safe streets provides huge benefits: better health, land conservation, and energy efficiency. The US sprawling urbanization pattern is one important contributor to the US lagging most other high-income countries on health metrics like obesity, traffic fatalities (especially among pedestrians) and life expectancy. Also untrue: that gas taxes now fully fund highway maintenance and construction. And buses, are only really as useful as streetcars in cities if provided enough dedicated lanes and other priority treatments.
Thanks for your comments, Tom!
I assume that I am the person who you identified as "Morgan." I did not claim that "horizontal, low-density, single-family urbanization (i.e. suburbanization) like that still dominating urban growth in the US is inevitable."
My claim is that the lessening of density of metro areas is a global-wide phenomenon so it is very unlikely to be due to unique government policy enacted in the United States. I further claim that government attempts to stop sprawl are a key driving force in unaffordable housing.
I agree that the federal government subsidizes homeowners, but not specifically the suburbs. Homeowners could have chosen to live in the central cities, but they voluntarily chose to look for homes in the suburbs. They largely still do.
The research that you are referring to starts by assuming that density is a moral good and sprawl is a moral bad. If you start with that assumption, it is easy to find statistics to back it up. Personally, I am more concerned about housing unaffordability and allowing people to choose.
My guess is that in your travels, you did not explore the outskirts of metro areas where tourists rarely go (which I sometimes do). That is like going to NYC and thinking that is representative of the entire United States. If you did, I think that you would be surprised by the number of single-family residences. For example, I once had a long stay in suburb of Paris, and it was nothing but single-family residences.
I grew up in the suburbs of London but when I left the Navy at 22, I swore I would forever live in either completely urban or completely rural. In the next few years, I managed the East End of London, The Barbican in Plymouth, Downtown Manhattan and then Palo Alto. I was in Urban Heaven.
After that, by an accident of employment, I spent the next 20 years among the dreary strip malls of Silicon Valley. When we first arrived in Mountain View we went for a walk along El Camino but there were no sidewalks and we had to turn around and walk home. Cars Only! In Almaden Valley, we had a three mile drive to the nearest pub until they put a bar inside Whole Foods. My kids never left the house unless I was driving.
We are finally back in the Urbs of Bristol and we are in Urban Heaven once more. There are 100 pubs within walking distance and I talk to a stranger every time I sit at the bar. We get asked all the time why anyone would trade California for Bristol but it sure is nice going for a walk and making friends.
I wrote more about it here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/urbs-vs-suburbs
One thing I have noticed coming back home is that all those almost-inner-city neighbourhoods around Central London were absolutely shit 25 years ago — filled with rubbish and graffiti and poor people who couldn't afford the suburbs. But now they are all delightful and filled with glorious inner city pubs and lovely little ethnic restaurants. No cars required. Anyone would give an arm to live there if they could afford it.
I think England must've had the same government thumb on the suburban scale that yours had but I think they have finally remembered that the inner city is quite lovely, actually. We should build more of it.
Thanks for sharing! Glad you found your way back to the urbs.
And imagine what the cities could do if we undid our great historical error and re-decentralized and brought far more of the cities fiscal powers, both the amount of the local money *they* tax AND the control over that pending, along with restoring their ability to engage in economic policy spheres that several decades ago we made the sole purview of the Federal government...
Such an important, and honestly, sometimes weird history — ex in the Color of Law, Mitt Romney’s dad makes an appearance as a champion for racial progressivism as ….HUD Sec, I think?
Yeah, I agree with the "weirdness." That's why I started this series with the cultural/moralistic aspect of it (https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/the-suburban-lifestyle-dream). We can't really understand why things evolved as they did (i.e., weirdly) without that piece of the puzzle.
Great read Ryan!
Thanks, Tom!
I think that this article gives a very inaccurate summary of the reasons for the emergence of suburbs. I think a big part of the problem is that you rely far too heavily on Kenneth Jackson's "Crabgrass Frontier", which gives a very one-sided account of suburbanization. His analysis is laden with ideological bias some of which are in the quotes you listed.
I would suggest reading "Planet of Cities" by Shlomo Angel as a balance. Here is a summary:
https://techratchet.com/2021/11/30/book-summary-planet-of-cities-by-shlomo-angel/
The trends towards lower density, greater dispersion, and polycentric within metros is a global phenomenon regardless of public policy. As cities grow they naturally spread out and become less dense. This would have happened in the United States regardless of public policy.
Nor is it accurate to say the "government subsidized the suburbs." There has been massive federal, state, and local government for mass transit and other infrastructure in the urban centers for decades. Nor are there any financial subsidies to suburbs that exclude urban centers.
Street cars failed because they were not financially sustainable, which is why they disappeared everywhere. General Motors pushed for a shift to buses, which are much cheaper, more flexible and are perfectly useful in the central cities. Streetcars disappeared even in cities where there were no GM buses. And there is no reason why streetcar suburbs could not have functioned on buses.
How did Americans "tax and harrass public transportation?" There is no equivalent of gas taxes for public transportation.
The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 was not designed to "depopulate the urban core and disperse the population to low-density suburbs." Its original goal was to facilitate military transport between cities. Its biggest impact, however, was to facilitate intra-metro transport both within suburbs and the city center. If the suburb had no inherent advantage over the city center, then highways would not have caused a shift to suburbs. Highways gave Americans the choice of where to live, and they made their choice.
Gasoline taxes were not supposed to be divertible, but they in fact are. Gasoline taxes are a major source of funding for subsidies for mass transit.
FHA and other federal housing programs did subsidize home ownership, but they in no way differentiated between suburban housing and central city housing. Owners chose to live in suburbs because the houses there were bigger, cheaper more modern, and with private yards for kids. They also had the benefit of being less segregated than inner cities.
In reality, federal programs from 1930s through 1970s played a key role in encouraging housing construction everywhere. The suburbs were the focus of construction because that is where land is the cheapest. This in turn enabled more affordable housing and a higher material standard of living for the American working and middle class.
Supporters of Progress will never be able to advocate for affordable housing until we get over our bias that density is better than dispersion.
Thanks for the feedback, Michael. I'll add "Planet of Cities" to my (ever growing) list of books. A few thoughts in response:
1) Yes, "Crabgrass Frontier" is not the last word on the suburbs; nor is this my first word on this topic. I wrote about the long anti-urban bias in American culture in my first installment on the suburbs here: https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/the-suburban-lifestyle-dream; I then wrote about the evolution of the streetcar suburbs here: https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/a-streetcar-suburb-named-desire. And I've written much about land use policy elsewhere on this blog.
2) I think the rest of your points drop a lot of context and ignore a lot of history:
--The spatial growth of cities is dependent on the dominant type of transportation in the era of growth; suburbs that emerged in an auto-centric environment grew differently than those that emerged in an age of streetcars (see Queens vs Brooklyn). Minimum lot size requirements, setbacks, and exclusionary zoning—all popular tools of repression in the postwar era—made those new suburbs less dense, to say nothing of autocentric planning.
--The streetcars could not be financially sustainable if they were not allowed to raise their fares; they did not fail for no reason.
--The highways bulldozed whole sections of cities where people lived (usually minority populations) and blighted neighborhoods along them. Highways did not give the people displaced by highway construction a choice of where to live.
--The national defense rationale for the highways seems flimsy, at best. If you wanted to quickly move slow-rolling tanks and huge numbers of soldiers over large distances, a vast network of trains seems like a great way to do it.
--Regarding the FHA, I'd recommend "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein for a full account of the government's role in segregation outside the South. To say the suburbs of this era were less segregated than the inner cities is simply untrue. Supporting progress requires recognizing this history and not whitewashing it.
Many of your points are valid, but none give evidence to the main point of your article: that “the government subsidized the suburbs.”
I am not trying to be a troll. I respect your writing, but I think that you are starting from incorrect assumptions (as so many do in this field).
I believe that affordable housing on the outskirts of metro areas where land is cheap is essential for material progress and upward mobility for those who have less. A key barrier to achieving that is overcoming the very negative bias that intellectuals and urban designers have against suburbs, sprawl and a bias towards density. It permeates the entire literature and Crabgrass Frontier is a clear example. Progress researchers need to have the courage to question their previous assumptions, even when it is hard and unpopular.
Fortunately, affordable housing on the outskirts of metro area where land is cheap does not require subsidies as your argument implies. It requires government to get out of the way, which they largely did before 1970. The massive growth of suburbs were essential for the upward mobility for the working and middle class in the past-war era. Suburbs are a key foundation of affordable housing, but current government policies sharply regulate and often outright prohibit home construction there. That is the root cause of unaffordable housing.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/how-housing-became-unaffordable
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-yimbys-are-only-50-correct
Rather than subsidies, American suburbs likely emerged for the same reasons that they did in every other nation. I think a much more plausible explanation for the differences between American suburbs and suburbs in other nations is that Americans are richer and have more land per capita.
I never said anything about race. Race is not the only dimension for segregation, nor is it related to subsidies. Post-war suburbs were actually far less ethnically segregated than the central cities, which were heavily segregated based on ethnicity. Previously, there were Irish neighborhoods, Polish neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, WASP neighborhoods, etc. Those did not exist in the suburbs.
I go into more detail on desegregation towards the bottom of this article:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/upward-mobility-in-the-usa-1947-1965
This is obviously false.
Most cities are tax sinks. As a simple example, my old city of Baltimore required massive subsidies from the state to run its schools and other services. Subsidies from the state government is basically taxes from the middle class suburbs.
https://i0.wp.com/conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/screenshot-2016-04-26-10-42-31.png?fit=1317%2C838&ssl=1
People talk about GDP in cities, but this is like saying Ireland is an economic powerhouse because companies have a PO Box there to dodge taxes. Many companies located in Baltimore for tax breaks but none of the people working there actually lived in the city. They all commuted in from the burbs, to the extent that actually business was even being done.
Federal subsidies tend to flow to cities as well. The huge medicaid underclass in many cities are subsidized by the feds, whose revenue comes from taxing suburbanites.
Overall, its the cities who need us suburbanites not the other way around.