To sprawl or not to sprawl

But is that really the question?

As many of you know, I am an urbanist, by profession and passion. I write quite a bit about housing, planning and urban issues and plan to share some of my thoughts with you here, beginning with this piece. This piece appeared about a month ago in Planetizen, an outstanding platform for all things planning.

---

A few months ago, a piece entitled “Why America Should Sprawl” by reporter Conor Daugherty was prominently featured in the New York Times[i]. While a lot of it read like a puff piece for a bunch of Texas developers, the fact that it appeared in the august Times ensured that it would get attention, arguably more than it deserved on its merits. As a provocation and a challenge to a lot of the conversation on the subject of housing supply, however, it hit the mark. Given the title, there’s little doubt that the provocation was intended; after all, a piece entitled “Why America should carefully extend urban infrastructure to accommodate growth” might work for

the Congress for the New Urbanism, but wouldn’t generate much buzz.

Last month a rejoinder to Daugherty’s piece appeared with the title “Sprawl is Still Not the Answer” by four authors associated with the Rocky Mountain Institute and the World Resources Institute.[ii] It didn’t make the Times, but appeared in Bloomberg City Lab, which is also fairly widely read. Part of their piece is devoted to the environmental case against consuming forests and farmland, which is important to acknowledge. But the guts of the piece are their argument that by reforming local land use regulations we can create almost infinite amounts of housing within the existing built footprint of our central cities. This “we can have our cake and eat it too” proposition is the guts of the environmental argument against greenfield development. Rather than simply accepting or dismissing it, however, I think it’s important to take a close look at their rationale and their evidence.

They start with the general and well-known proposition that most American cities have been developed at much lower densities than European cities like Paris or Barcelona, which is certainly true. This leads to their next argument that “by modestly increasing housing density – adding just five homes per acre – we could increase housing availability in built-up areas by 15% to 56% across nine states.” Like the density argument, this may well be technically correct. And yes, it’s also true that Baron Haussmann rebuilt Paris in the 19^th century with six story apartment buildings covering well over half of each building lot at a time when most American cities were being developed with blocks of single family houses, as we can see in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1: Urban Densities in Paris and Cleveland

Late 19th century Paris

Late 19th century/early 20th century Cleveland

But both factors are utterly irrelevant. Urban areas are not a clean slate for developers. They are intensively developed places which have been subdivided into thousands of separate properties or lots, each one of which usually already has a house or other building on it, each one usually owned by a different individual, couple or business entity. And it is the feasibility of assembling urban sites, not their underlying density, which determines whether urban redevelopment happens.

Now, it is true that developers acquire already-developed urban sites and redevelop them at higher density. No city is ever, as some people like to say, “fully developed”. But when looking at development in cities, it is critical to distinguish what actually takes place from what doesn’t. And that is dictated not by what planners and environmentalists would want, but by what makes business sense for developers and property owners. That means finding property owners willing to sell at prices that make redevelopment feasible, and buyers or renters for the end product who are willing and able to pay what it costs the developer to create it and make a fair profit on the outcome.

Development is expensive, and property owners – particularly homeowners, whose motivations are complex and far from exclusively financial – are unpredictable. The way older residential areas in cities like Cleveland have been subdivided, for example, means that to acquire even a small buildable parcel – say, two acres – a developer may have to successfully negotiate with twelve or fifteen separate landowners, any one of whom can prevent the project from happening. In some cities, it can be even worse. One city block I looked at in North Philadelphia contains nearly seventy separate rowhouse properties in less than two acres. Not to mention that the number of people who are willing to pay Center City rents to live in an apartment building plopped down in a typical Cleveland or Philadelphia neighborhood are few and far between.

What that means in the real world, is (1) large-scale urban redevelopment takes place only in (a) hot market cities like San Francisco or Austin or (b) those relatively small parts of other cities like Minneapolis or Cleveland where people who both have money and want to live in high-density housing concentrate; and (2) redevelopment almost exclusively takes place in currently commercial or industrial areas in those cities, because that’s where developers find large parcels in single ownership and owners willing to sell. And usually only in those areas that are also close enough to downtown, a major university, or some other amenity to ensure strong demand for the project. That’s what’s happening in Minneapolis, where nearly all the new housing being built is in large apartment buildings close to downtown and the University of Minnesota.

Figure 2: New apartment buildings near the University of Minnesota

Where large-scale redevelopment does not take place, even after cities rezone those areas, are the vast stretches of the central cities occupied by single family homes, as Minneapolis found after they famously upzoned their single-family neighborhoods. Yes, there are exceptions to this proposition, but they are few and far between. The cost, time and brain damage to would-be developers to assemble enough properties in those areas is rarely proportionate to the potential return. It is not scalable.

If we are to be remotely serious about housing production, we need to let a fundamental proposition guide our thinking, namely, no strategy to address America’s housing shortage is worth taking seriously unless it is scalable. Piecemeal redevelopment of scattered parcels in single family residential areas in cities is not scalable. Up to a point, construction of large multifamily buildings in well-located commercial or industrial areas is scalable in many cities, and, perhaps counter-intuitively, development of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) appears to be scalable – ADUs currently make up 15% to 30% of all new housing units in a number of West Coast cities – but probably only in strong market cities and neighborhoods. Neither, separately or together, will come close to meeting America’s housing needs.

Back to the Rocky Mountain Institute piece. After rather fatuously accusing Daugherty and his ilk of “learned helplessness,” the authors then assert that some American cities are already solving their housing problems, citing Minneapolis and Austin as “the emerging proof.” Minneapolis and Austin are doing well compared to many other American cities, but pointing to them as proof that central cities can solve their housing problems by themselves is like arguing that you can end a nationwide drought by handing out bottles of Perrier. Let’s start with Austin.

Rents have indeed gone down in the past two years in Austin. But, as figure 3 shows, they are still on the high end among Texas peer cities. The big difference is that Austin’s rents rose faster than in the other cities from 2019 to 2022, which suggests that the decline is more likely a correction, rather than the harbinger of a long-term trend. Meanwhile, sales prices in Austin have been going up steadily (+61% from 2017 to 2023), making the city only an average performer among large American cities on that metric.

Figure 3: Zillow Rental Index for Major Texas Cities 2015-2025

But what’s even more relevant about Austin is that the city’s suburbs are building much more housing than the city itself. Between 2015 and 2024, 60% of the building permits issued in the Austin metro were in the suburbs, including 80% of the metro’s single family homes. As every serious student of urban development knows, although perhaps not the folks at the Rocky Mountain Institute, metros are a single housing market, where what happens in one area affects the others. One of the major reasons why housing is so expensive in New York City is because so little housing is being built in its suburbs, particularly on Long Island and in Westchester County. To the extent that housing costs have moderated in Austin, it’s the result of the sum of urban and suburban production, not Austin’s growth alone.

The same is true in Minneapolis. Minneapolis has built a decent amount of housing over the past decade – although no more than many other cities – and both rental and sales price growth has been moderate by national standards. But here, even more than in Austin, all of the growth has been in multifamily housing – and nearly all in large apartment projects, not (as the authors claim) small buildings. Furthermore, after a dramatic spurt in permits a few years ago, housing production in Minneapolis has tailed off sharply since peaking in 2019. Austin’s pattern has been similar, but less dramatic (figure 4), which may also reflect overbuilding of a particular type of highly expensive housing; there just may not be that many people who can both afford to and want to live in a high-rise rental apartment building in downtown Austin. In a market economy like the United States, flat or declining rents are a double-edged sword, since, along with rising development costs, they reduce profitability and discourage developers from starting new projects.

More significantly, suburban growth is as big a factor in Minneapolis as it is for Austin. 59% of the building permits issued in Hennepin County from 2015 to 2024 were in the suburbs, including 94% of the permits issued for single family homes. [iii]

Figure 4: Building permits by year in Austin and Minneapolis relative to 2015 baseline

NOTE: Since the numbers are so different in the two cities, a graph showing absolute numbers would be unreadable. Instead, I show permits for each year as a ratio of the number of permits issued in 2015.

This brings out another important reality of urban development: nearly all those moving into the new apartment buildings in the cities are singles or childless couples. 80% of all the households added in Minneapolis between 2013 and 2023, and 85% in Austin, have been 1 or 2 person households. By contrast, almost 2/3 of the growth in Richardson, Texas, a fast-growing suburb of Dallas, over the same period was in family households with three or more members. Those households are not looking to live in small apartments in five story or taller buildings.

The suburban growth in the Sunbelt may be “sprawl,” if one is going to use that term to describe any and all development outside already built-up cities, but as Figure 5 from Princeton, Texas (a city featured in Daugherty’s article) shows, it is very compact sprawl. The homes shown in the image are built at a gross density including streets, playgrounds and such, of roughly five units per acre, and a net density in each block with 6250 square foot lots, of seven units per acre. Not quite downtown apartment densities, to be sure, but if one accepts that there is a continued demand for single family homes, a highly efficient use of land, and comparable to the densities of older single family neighborhoods in cities like Cleveland.

Figure 5: New Subdivisions in Princeton, Texas

In the final analysis, it’s not an either/or question of whether to build in the cities or in the suburbs, but one of how to do both properly. Daugherty points out that “Even if all the regulatory restraints were removed tomorrow, developers couldn’t find enough land to satisfy America’s housing needs inside established areas.” He’s right, because the constraint on building isn’t the number of square miles inside a city, but the feasibility of assembling and redeveloping the land, and the ability to not only build the number of homes people need, but the diversity of home types they want. It is ironic that – as the numbers for Austin and Minneapolis show – that a future, however implausible, in which housing needs are met entirely in central cities would replace the much-deplored tyranny of the single family home with a new tyranny of apartment living.

But such a future is indeed implausible. In the final analysis, the argument that the Rocky Mountain Institute folks are making is little more than a smokescreen for preserving the status quo. Yes, they’re saying, let’s continue to allow the suburbs to zone out the people they don’t like, because we can pretend they’ll all find homes in the central cities. And if they don’t, well, it’s the cities’ fault.

A strategy of both/and should not, however, and need not, be a mindless one or one destructive of the environment. As I and others have pointed out, the suburbs of America’s cities offer greater opportunities for adding housing to existing built areas than the cities themselves. Larger suburban lots offer ample room for ADUs, while miles of half-empty shopping centers and parking lots along arterial roads, shopping malls and office parks offer vast opportunities for large-scale development of every kind of housing. Thoughtful planning and environmental management can preserve stream corridors, wetlands, forests and high productivity farmland, while ensuring that the necessary infrastructure and amenities are in place for future development.

A facile “sprawl bad, urban infill good” mantra is no more meaningful than saying “we need more sprawl.” We do need to fill in, but we also need to grow out. What we need is more productive conversations about how to do both well, instead of more pointless examples of people talking past one another.

---

[i] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/magazine/suburban-sprawl-texas.html

[ii] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-27/sprawl-is-not-the-answer-to-the-us-housing-crisis

[iii] To compare metro totals to city totals in the case of Minneapolis would be misleading, because the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro is multipolar, compared to the unipolar Austin metro. In all likelihood, though, the suburban share of metro development as a whole is probably even larger.

---