Growing up in suburban Ohio, I was used to seeing farmland and woods disappear to make room for new subdivisions, strip malls, and big box stores. I didn’t usually welcome the changes, but I assumed others did. If people didn’t want to live in sprawling suburbs, why did I see this kind of development everywhere I went?
But the situation is more complicated than it seems. Although sprawling development is still a familiar sight across the U.S., many experts in urban planning and housing believe this doesn’t occur because of a uniquely American passion for giant parking lots, but as a result of a dysfunctional market. Many people are hungry for denser, more walkable communities, they believe; there just aren’t enough of them to go around.
The question of what kind of communities Americans prefer has important implications for climate change. Suburban U.S. households have substantially higher emissions than their city-center counterparts, largely due to cars. Building more dense, walkable developments could significantly lower these emissions – assuming enough people would both choose to live in such communities and find suitable housing there.
How single-family zoning limits housing choices
Jonathan Levine, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, has been thinking about these issues for decades.
“What you thought, that we have sprawl because people want sprawl: That really was the dominant view around the turn of the 21st century,” he said.
His 2006 book called this idea into question. Its argument: Zoning has distorted the American real estate market, limiting housing options by making common elements of sprawl the only form of development allowed across much of the nation. In many cities, land-use regulations make it illegal to build town houses, duplexes, apartment buildings, granny flats, and the like – anything other than single-family homes – on around 75% of the land zoned for residential use. In some places, this figure rises above 90%.
“Some people say, ‘Americans want big houses on large lots,’” Levine said. But “if it were the case that all Americans wanted big houses on large lots and could afford big houses on large lots, would we need single-family zoning? Absolutely not … The very fact that we enact these zoning regulations in such an exclusionary fashion as we do in the United States is evidence that we’re defending against something. And that something is the desire of people – not all people; some people – to live closer in, accepting higher densities, maybe more urban living styles, etc.”
Nearly two decades later, this position is no longer controversial among his peers, Levine said. Greater awareness of the harmful impacts of land-use regulation, as well as soul-searching in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, has led to a dramatic shift in opinion.
“The [urban] planning profession, the economics profession, and academia are very much focused on the negative effects of zoning that constrain densities to overly low densities,” he said. “They see it as an impediment to the market providing the kinds of things that people want.”
What do surveys say?
As the downsides of sprawl have become increasingly clear in recent decades, advocacy groups have formed to push for alternative forms of development. One of them, the smart growth program at the National Association of Realtors, a trade association for real estate agents, was created in 2000 after agents noted that although their clients increasingly wanted properties in walkable areas, there weren’t enough available to satisfy the demand.
“The term ‘smart growth’ came about in the mid-90s, roughly, as a reaction to the 40 or 50 years of sprawl development that we’d had,” said Hugh Morris, who has led the National Association of Realtors program for the past six years. “It became clear that there were some negative consequences to that kind of development.”
One of the program’s goals is to provide information about Americans’ real estate preferences to help guide decision-making about development and policy. To this end, Morris has surveyed 2,000 people in the nation’s largest 50 metropolitan regions every two years for the past decade to understand which qualities they look for when deciding where to live, asking about factors ranging from home and yard size to highway access, sidewalks, crime, and school quality.
The results show that “the desire for walkability has been increasing steadily, really, since 2015, to the point where it exceeds the desire for single-family/drive-only locations to a degree that is beyond the margin of error,” he said. In the 2023 survey, 56% of respondents said that if they were to move, they would accept a smaller yard as a trade-off for a more walkable neighborhood. Asked to choose between a house in a car-dependent area and a town house or apartment offering a shorter commute and walkable shops and restaurants, 53% chose the latter (an 8% increase from 2015).
Not all questionnaires examining Americans’ housing preferences have reached the same conclusion, however. In a one-question survey on this topic conducted by Pew Research Center in 2023, 53% of 5,079 respondents drawn from across the nation said they would prefer to live in a community with houses that are larger and farther apart with schools, stores, and restaurants several miles away as opposed to one where homes are smaller and closer together with walkable schools, stores, and restaurants. Pew also conducted the same survey in 2021 and 2019, with similar results.
High prices indicate high demand
Michael Rodriguez, the director of research at Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Smart Growth America, believes that asking people to explain their housing preferences in the abstract isn’t the most effective way to gauge demand for business-as-usual suburbia versus walkable alternatives.
“Everybody wants a little more space in their house; this is not very surprising,” he said. “It’s always a trade-off between space in your home and a commute and job access and amenity access.”
Studying the number of different kinds of housing units sold also provides an imperfect gauge of what Americans want, he said. “People are buying a lot of homes in the suburbs? Well, we don’t build them anything else,” he said.
While this statement may be an exaggeration, it highlights a real concern. In a 2023 report, Rodriguez and coauthor Christopher Leinberger wrote that in the nation’s 35 largest metropolitan areas, walkable neighborhoods accounted for only 1.2% of the land, on average, and that only 11.6% of all non-rental housing was located in those neighborhoods.
“Drivable suburban housing takes up by far the largest amount of land in those 35 metros, approximately 90%, and the low-density zoning and NIMBY [Not in My Back Yard] opposition has not allowed the market to produce walkable urban product without years of legal and neighborhood battles,” the authors noted.
If survey responses and home sales don’t clearly tell us where Americans would most like to live, what can? The answer, according to Rodriguez, is money. His 2023 report showed that, across the country, people are willing to spend significantly more to buy homes and rent apartments and commercial spaces in walkable communities compared to car-dependent alternatives. In the 35 regions studied, 2021 home sale prices were an average of 34% higher in walkable areas, while rents for offices and multifamily housing in the same year were 44% and 41% higher, respectively, on average.
“That premium for walkable urbanism is a market indicator that tells us a lot of people really want this thing, but there’s not enough of it,” he said.
Jonathan Levine, who was not involved with the report, said that he agrees with its general findings.
“There’s no good reason why walkable urbanism should cost more than auto-oriented suburbia, especially since walkable neighborhoods use land more efficiently,” he wrote in an email. “But land-use regulations make it unnecessarily hard to build and expand walkable neighborhoods. As a result, the supply of these neighborhoods stays low, and households who prefer walkable neighborhoods are less likely to find (and afford) one that fits their preferences compared to those who prefer auto-oriented neighborhoods. This points to strong demand for walkable neighborhoods that could be met if regulations didn’t make their development so difficult.”
Density beyond downtown
It is possible to make car-centric areas more walkable, however, Rodriguez said, offering his own community of Tysons, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., as proof.
“You see what’s being built and the change that’s happened over the last 10 years – it is night and day.”
In recent years, the local government has invested heavily in making the area into what it describes as “a 24-hour urban center where people live, work and play” by 2050. As a result, land that was formerly devoted to parking lots now houses one of the tallest skyscrapers in the region, Rodriguez said, along with a performing arts venue that hosts traveling Broadway shows. “And now we have condos and apartment buildings right off the Metro [subway stop]. There’s a couple new hotels,” he said. “All that increases amenity, walkability, and gives people an option of somewhere to live near the Metro.”
This and similar projects demonstrate that it’s possible to achieve walkability outside of downtown areas, according to Rodriguez. “People want this form of living, and maybe they won’t want to be in the city center – that’s OK,” he said. “Increasingly, there’s more demand for it in the other areas where they live, in the, quote, suburbs.”
