Everyone Hates Density*

*Except for Those Who Don’t

The culture war makes everyone dumber. In a recent example, The Federalist has published a bonkers article relying on a lot of scaremongering, strawmanning, and smearing to claim that “‘New Urbanists’ want to bulldoze the suburban American dream.” I’m not sure why the authors, husband-and-trad-wife team Jonathan and Paige Bronitsky, targeted New Urbanists—surely the unmentioned YIMBY movement deserved a swipe or two?—but nevertheless the architects of famous hellholes like Seaside and Celebration became the punching bag for this anti-urban hack job. Here’s an example of the article’s internal illogic: the authors deny that we have a “housing crisis” (scare quotes theirs), arguing instead that we

have an artificial crisis created by politicians and developers who restrict supply to inflate costs and further solidify Democrat voting blocs. The answer is cutting red tape and unleashing the free market to build more homes where Americans actually want to live.

Um, yes?

Cutting red tape and unleashing the free market for housing is exactly what YIMBY urbanists have been advocating for years. So what’s the problem? That swipe against Democrats is the tell. This is a screed against certain people—loathsome urbanists—and because they’re bad, the same ideas that the Bronitskys allege to support must be bad when the bad guys support them. Ironically, echoing the same election-losing logic that led Democrats to believe that the color of one’s skin determines the content of one’s ideas, the Bronitskys wrongly believe that density turns people into Democrats. So the culture war therefore demands that they identify cities as the enemy.

In their view, cities embody a “high-density, corporatist nightmare,” while it’s America’s “spacious, family-friendly suburbs where liberty thrives.” Anybody who likes cities must be “doctrinaire libertarians, neoconservatives, and, yes, New Urbanists,” and urbanists fighting for zoning reform are actually mounting a “left-wing assault on property rights and personal mobility.” Are we radical leftists hellbent on forcing kids to read books about gay penguins, or are we rapacious developer shills bulldozing every church in suburbia to make a buck? The Bronitskys can’t decide.

The authors’ scattershot deployment of scare quotes around words like “walkability,” “human-scale,” and “public spaces” belies an ideological blindness to the basic building blocks of America’s historic small towns—a style of building that has been outlawed in our suburbs through oppressive zoning. Meanwhile, some people’s desire to live a car-free lifestyle (and not have highways plowed through their neighborhoods) is an assault on cars as such. But, we are told, the desire to have freedom of choice and the right to use our property is left-wing fanaticism.

This is hysterical, Orwellian projectionism: car dependency is freedom; one-size-fits-all zoning is choice; ignorance is strength; arbeit macht frei.

Only because I don’t want you to think I’m making any of this up, I’d advise you to read the whole thing.¹ Nevertheless, the Bronitskys do manage to get one thing right: a lot of people really do hate density—and the data backs that up.

Last October, Joseph Gyourko and Sean E. McCulloch published a working paper titled “The Distaste for Housing Density.” The authors measured how density affects suburban, single-family home values across municipal borders with differing lot-size requirements. They found that when there was a theoretical 1/2 unit per acre increase in density in the surrounding area (translating into 100 new units within a 500-meter radius of a particular home), the average loss per home was $9,500, reflecting buyer preferences for less density rather than objective declines in neighborhood quality. Interestingly, when that new density came from rental housing, the loss jumped to $56,000—two-thirds of which disappeared when factors like race, income, education, and family structure were considered. In other words, suburban people really dislike renters, but they dislike them less when they believe the renters are just like them. Overall, the study found that 65% of suburban homeowners suffer a loss from density increases, while 35% are indifferent or prefer more density. Generally, those who live in denser neighborhoods are more comfortable with increased density than those who don’t.

The upshot is that strict zoning, at least with respect to minimum lot sizes, keeps property prices artificially elevated. Which means the YIMBYs are right that reforming such policies lower housing costs—but it also means that suburban homeowners have little incentive to support building more homes in their neighborhoods. This also explains why zoning reform appears intractable in major cities that encompass suburban jurisdictions, like those in Texas, which grew by annexing large-lot, low-density sprawling suburbs quite different from their compact urban cores. This creates a natural tension between urban reformers who would like to make their cities more walkable and suburban homeowners within city limits who don’t want the character of their neighborhoods to change.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that many Americans do not like density, plenty still do. In a Pew survey from 2023, 42% of Americans said that they would prefer to live in a community where “houses are smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores and restaurants are within walking distance.” That’s not as high as the 47% who said they preferred walkability before the pandemic, which literally brought home the downsides of density—but that’s still 141 million Americans who would like to live in walkable communities. And walkable communities require more density of homes and uses than what is allowed in the typical sprawling suburb.

With only 31% of Americans living in the urban parts of metropolitan areas, the zoning reforms that big cities like New York and Austin are undertaking are a recognition that the demand for urban living is not being fully met. Of course, you don’t have to live in Megalopolis to walk to the grocery store: America’s many beloved historic small towns, college towns, and mid-size metros are filled with walkable neighborhoods—but restrictive zoning has made a lot of these places expensive, too. Even some of America’s most exclusive suburbs are realizing that they have created an “artificial crisis” and are cutting the red tape, while California Forever is offering to meet demand for walkable suburbs in the Bay Area. Still, for the many who don’t want to live in car-centric suburban sprawl, there are few good options.

If the Bronitskys have their way, there’ll be fewer.

The great thing for John and Paige is that they don’t have to live in a city or a New Urbanist community or a walkable small town. If they want to live in completely unwalkable neighborhoods, then they are free to strap themselves into a life of car dependency on government roads, inhaling the sweet smell of freedom from the exhaust of ethanol-mandated gas. I don’t know if they’re high on the fumes of their own exhausting rhetoric or if they really can’t tolerate a world in which people are allowed to have and act on preferences different from theirs, but if their worldview is so wonderful, why must it be imposed on everyone through exclusionary zoning everywhere? In a future America in which people are actually at liberty to build the types of communities they want, I have no doubt that there would be no shortage of cul-de-sacs and strip malls. Whether that’s good or bad for suburban people, I really don’t care; I spend my time trying to make cities great again.

In these pages, I have been critical of urbanists and YIMBYs who seek to impose their personal preferences on others in the name of reform, and I’ve been critical of urban policy that has made city life sometimes feel like the dystopian caricature the Bronitskys believe it to be. While the movement needs a greater appreciation for the importance of law and order in functioning cities, the general thrust of urbanism is to remove arbitrary restrictions on how people choose to build and live and to let the market cater to those preferences. Perhaps if we had better urban leaders—better urbanists—our cities would then have better defenders from the lazy culture warriors who care nothing about facts and even less about liberty.

Urbanists are not coming to bulldoze anybody’s suburbs—so suburbanites should not try to steamroll urbanist efforts to improve their own cities. It’s time to put the suburban-urban culture war to bed: whether you love urban bedrooms or bedroom communities, America is big enough for both.

1. Andy Boenau and Christian Britschgi have also offered excellent rebuttals.