President-elect Trump has “the opportunity to preside over a Great Wave of suburbanization and give another generation the opportunity to unlock the modern version of the American Dream,” says Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest magazine. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs at Bard College. While the Antiplanner appreciates Mead’s ambition, he greatly underestimates the barriers to such a vision.
Mead inaccurately claims that American suburbanization took place in two waves: one between World War II and the 1960s (which he associates with Eisenhower) and the second in the 1980s through the early 2000s (which he associates with Reagan). Since both of the previous waves, he says, were led by Republican presidents, its natural for Trump to lead a third wave.
In fact, suburbanization began in the 1840s and hardly slowed down at any time since then. Mead’s first wave saw a large amount of working-class suburbanization, but even that began in the 1920s. In any case, much of that wave took place under Truman, not Eisenhower, and contrary to popular belief, Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System had almost nothing to do with it.
Historical quibbles aside, the Antiplanner agrees with Mead that increased suburbanization would relieve the housing crises that have spread over the land, particularly in coastal states, and greatly stimulate the economy. However, Mead thinks that the way to do this is to create “the infrastructure for the third suburban wave–new highways, ring roads and the rest of it for another suburban expansion.”
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In fact, infrastructure isn’t the limiting factor: it is land-use regulation. In states on the West Coast, New England, and Florida, such regulation has been written specifically to prevent such a new wave of suburban growth.
The Antiplanner has argued that this regulation, by making housing more expensive, violates the Fair Housing Act under the disparate impact principle, which is supported by the Supreme Court. The Department of Housing and Urban Development could use this ruling to force states to repeal their land-use laws and local areas to get out of the way of suburban development. The question is whether Ben Carson, who has criticized Obama’s affirmatively furthering fair housing program, would be willing to use the same legal principles to promote housing affordability.
If he is, then the United States could truly have a new wave of suburbanization. One study found that eliminating land-use rules in just a few urban areas could add nearly 10 percent to the nation’s gross domestic product.
Without ending land-use regulation, no amount of new infrastructure will promote a new wave of suburbanization in states with such regulation. On the other hand, states without such land-use regulation are suburbanizing just fine, thank you, without any new federal infrastructure support. Rather than propose new infrastructure programs that are likely to be warped to anti-suburban interests, Trump would do best to get out of the way of local development.
I never did understand the claims that suburbs were caused by highways. Surely the spread of car ownership had a lot to do with it, but the highways followed the demand, not led it. And the Eisenhower interstate system was just that — between cities, not within cities.
Plus, each city has a different story of suburbanization, and especially western cities have a far different story than eastern cities.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development could use this ruling [TX Dept. of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project] to force states to repeal their land-use laws and local areas to get out of the way of suburban development.
Yuck. Better Congress gut the Fair Housing Act and/or eliminate HUD. At the very least Trump should nominate Supreme Court justices who will reverse that terrible ruling. Let the states who are intent on creating a real life Hunger Games scenario do it. People are fleeing those states anyway, to states with less restrictive land use laws.
We certainly don’t want to simply trade one tyrannical administration for another.