Have you ever wondered, with the deficit we have in the number of housing units compared to the demand, where are we going to put all those needed new units?  There’s been so much action around allowing for smaller lots, more units on each lot, higher densities in existing communities, ADUs, and so on. But will that really get us to the numbers that are needed, in any kind of reasonable timeframe?

A recent piece in the New York Times takes on this issue.  The writer’s conclusion?  The title says it all – Why America Should Sprawl.  The subtitle explains further: The word has become an epithet for garish, reckless growth — but to fix the housing crisis, the country needs more of it.

NY Times stories are often paywalled, but you may be able to get to it as they usually allow a couple of free stories up front.  But let me quote liberally from what the author, Conor Dougherty, who writes on these issues and published a book in 2020, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, has to say about the crisis and that sprawl, in case you can’t get to the story.

Dougherty writes from the perspective of the rapid development taking place in the exurbs of Dallas.  His book, on the other hand, tells the story of what happened in the California Bay Area, arguably the most expensive housing market in the nation.

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. 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.

Doughety goes on to explain:

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.

Trying to shoehorn all that needed new housing into existing communities just isn’t going to work, he says.  There’s not enough room, for one thing.  And the cost to build in already-built-up areas is often way high (I can attest to some of that from my experience when I was SLC’s Planning Director).

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.

So how to deal with that, and stay true to the anti-sprawl ethic that most current-day planning practice endorses?

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.

So are we destined to just continue to sprawl, something many in this planning profession have been trying energetically to curtail?

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.

Dougherty, however, does not advocate for the stereotypical image of suburbs and sprawl.  He acknowledges that to really make this work, these new “edge cities” must develop more like small, self-contained communities.

Developers like Hillwood usually make sure to secure a water supply and build enough infrastructure to make growth feasible over the long term, designing “total communities” around a denser core with walkable streets, rowhouses, grocery stores, parks and other spaces for gatherings like concerts and fairs. Other developers, often those who cater to a lower-income demographic, simply build houses, which, if they multiply too fast, can turn a town into a disjointed collection of subdivisions and test a city’s ability to maintain infrastructure. That puts the onus on the local government and mayors like Escobar to create a more complete place with things to do and places to shop.

This same theme has been picked up by Bill Fulton in his Substack Newsletter The Future of Where.  He too saw Dougherty’s NY Times piece and wrote about it in a post of his own titled Is Sprawl Necessary? Most cities are going to grow both “up” and “out”. How can we make the “out” part of that growth as beneficial as possible?

Sprawl, in the classic definition, is low-density, unplanned, discontiguous, auto-oriented development.

Not all new suburban development has to fit that definition, but a lot of people who dislike sprawl paint all outward urban expansion with the sprawl brush.

Yet even in California, which like Oregon has been at the forefront of trying to curtail outward urban expansion, there’s been some rethinking. As I mentioned in a Substack post a few months ago, the proposed California Forever new town has highlighted the fact that a lot of new development in California is, in fact, “greenfield” development – sprawl to some people – and maybe the best (option) is to make it better.

Fulton writes about how to make suburban communities more “urban,” or “urbane,” if you will.  He too acknowledges that if the housing crisis is to be adequately addressed, it will mean continuing to “spread out.”

I understand the impulse to try to completely eliminate outward suburban expansion. (After all, I used to be the mayor of a city with one of the tightest urban growth boundaries in the country.) But, realistically, most cities and suburbs in the United States are going to continue to grow out. So we need the suburbanization as good as possible and balance it out with as much good vertical development as we possibly can.

For us along the Wasatch Front, that mainly means growing north and south – can’t really grow to the east (except for some growth on the Wasatch Back), and to the west, well, we hit lake and desert pretty quickly.  Gotta make those good, complete communities!  Just how to do that?