Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

Architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, designers of over three hundred neighborhood and community revitalization plans, and planning writer Jeff Speck argue that postwar American suburban development has produced a landscape largely devoid of places worth caring about. Drawing on two decades of professional experience, they contrast two models of urban growth: the traditional neighborhood, a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly form of settlement that served as the dominant pattern from colonial times through World War II, and suburban sprawl, an artificial system invented after the war. The book contends that sprawl fails financially, consumes land rapidly, generates worsening traffic, and deepens social isolation, while beloved older places like Charleston, South Carolina, and classic American main streets have been made effectively illegal by modern zoning codes.

The authors identify five strictly segregated components of sprawl: housing subdivisions, shopping centers, office and business parks, civic institutions surrounded by parking, and the roadways connecting them. This separation arose from specific government policies. Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) loan programs financed over eleven million new single-family suburban homes while discouraging renovation and urban housing types. A 41,000-mile interstate highway program subsidized automotive commuting. Shops followed customers to the suburbs as strip shopping centers, and corporations relocated offices closer to suburban workforces. The planning profession enforced these patterns through single-use zoning, extending the once-reasonable separation of industrial pollution from housing to an extreme segregation of every land use, sometimes motivated by economic discrimination or racism.

Examining sprawl at the street level, the authors show how its physical details produce daily frustrations. The suburban road system funnels all trips through a single collector road, the main road gathering traffic from subdivisions, concentrating congestion, while a traditional interconnected network disperses trips across many routes. Suburban codes require walls and buffers between adjacent land uses, so that a house fifty yards from a shopping center still demands a one-mile drive. The suburban convenience store, a flat-topped aluminum building in a parking lot, is rejected by neighbors not for what it sells but for its incompatible building type, while a traditional corner store sharing the two-story form of neighboring town houses is welcomed. Projects like Mizner Park in Boca Raton, Florida, and Mashpee Commons in Massachusetts demonstrate that retail organized as traditional main streets, with shops below offices and apartments and parking hidden behind, outperforms strip centers.

The authors turn to housing, observing that while American house interiors are unmatched globally in quality, the public realm outside is brutal. Suburban housing is segregated by minute gradations of income, with homeowners' associations enforcing strict price-point uniformity. Georgetown in Washington, D.C., offers the traditional alternative: A single block houses rental apartments, town homes, mansions, and garage apartments, with transitions occurring at mid-block so that all income levels share the same sidewalks and parks. The authors advocate reclaiming two currently illegal affordable housing types, the apartment above the store and the backyard outbuilding, and insist that affordable housing should look no different from market-rate housing and be distributed at roughly a one-in-ten ratio rather than concentrated in large projects. The middle-class housing crisis, they argue, stems significantly from mandatory car ownership: The cost of two cars equals a starter home in purchasing power.

A chapter on civic life contends that the suburban environment contributes directly to social decline. Community requires communal space, yet time in the suburban public realm is spent in automobiles, which function as isolation chambers. The authors identify four prerequisites for pedestrian street life: meaningful walking destinations, safe streets, comfortable streets, and interesting streets. Modern engineering standards produce none of these. Travel lanes have widened from nine to twelve feet, and a study in Longmont, Colorado, found wide streets approximately four times as dangerous for pedestrians as narrow ones. Pedestrian comfort depends on architectural enclosure, ideally a ratio of street width to building height no greater than 6:1. Streets lined with garage doors signal that cars, not people, live there; placing garages on rear alleys frees house fronts for porches and windows.

The transportation chapter argues that building more highways increases rather than decreases traffic, a phenomenon called "induced traffic." A University of California at Berkeley study found that for every 10 percent increase in roadway capacity, traffic increased 9 percent within four years. Conversely, when highways are removed, traffic partially disappears rather than simply relocating. Automobile use persists because it is massively subsidized: Government subsidies for highways and parking amount to 8 to 10 percent of gross national product, with approximately $5,000 per car per year in hidden costs passed to all citizens, including those too poor to drive.

The authors examine how the real estate development industry perpetuates sprawl. Market experts study only recently built product rather than pre-World War II neighborhoods that dramatically outperform it in value. Development financing compounds the problem, as banks require "comparables," evidence from similar past projects that lenders use to justify financing, and this evidence comes exclusively from conventional subdivisions. Yet good design can rival location in determining value: Two houses on the same Coral Gables street with similar specifications sold for $370,000 and $1.4 million in the same year, the difference being design quality alone.

Sprawl victimizes specific populations. Children become dependent on adults for all transportation, unable to walk anywhere independently. Mothers derail careers to serve as chauffeurs. Teenagers face boredom in a public realm without gathering places, and car crashes are their leading cause of death. The elderly lose their independence the moment they lose their driver's licenses. Middle-class commuters lose the equivalent of twelve work weeks per year to driving. Municipalities find that new sprawl costs more to service than it generates in taxes. The urban poor are hit hardest: Highway construction destroyed inner-city neighborhoods, corporate flight relocated jobs beyond the reach of those without cars, and public transportation cannot efficiently serve dispersed suburban employers.

Turning to solutions, the authors present an eight-step regional planning process beginning with admitting that growth will occur and establishing permanent countryside preserves based on environmental criteria. The process designates corridors for transit and greenways, establishes priority development sectors favoring urban infill (development within existing built-up areas rather than on undeveloped fringe land), and creates proactive permitting that makes neighborhood projects faster to approve than sprawl. They cite Portland, Oregon, as a model for regional planning and Atlanta as a cautionary tale of unplanned growth. For new communities, the authors outline core design principles: Each neighborhood should be sized around a five-minute walk from center to edge, include a corner store and mixed uses, connect to surrounding developments, and support transit through sufficient density.

For inner cities, the authors argue that urban leaders must treat their cities as competitors against suburbs. Cities should cultivate their greatest advantage, a vibrant pedestrian public realm, by reversing decades of automobile accommodation. They recommend eliminating on-site parking requirements, which they identify as the single greatest killer of urban vitality, and creating master plans that regulate building form and street relationships rather than only land use.

The final chapter issues a call to action at every level. Municipal governments should replace sprawl-generating zoning with codes like the Traditional Neighborhood Development Ordinance. State governments should combine regional and transportation planning, redirect affordable housing funding toward neighborhood infill, and tie state funding to smart-growth practices, meaning policies that favor compact, walkable, transit-supportive development. The federal government should reverse postwar policies that emptied cities into suburbs and balance highway subsidies with transit support. Architects should accept that design affects behavior and reengage with communities. Citizens should become informed participants in planning, demanding neighborhoods over sprawl and recognizing that growth cannot be stopped but can be shaped into something worth caring about.