If you ask people what they think of sprawl — just the single word “sprawl” — nearly all of them will tell you they don’t like it. They envision sterile subdivisions crammed with cookie-cutter houses, strung carelessly along highway corridors, with endless commutes, little or no public transportation and nothing to walk to. It’s not their idea of residential perfection.
But as all of us know, this happens to be a rough description of the way we have built the typical American suburb over the last generation and are still building it in many parts of the country.
If this is a serious societal problem, whose fault is it? The simplest answer is that sterile suburbia is the creation of rapacious developers who are interested only in the bottom line and couldn’t care less about the aesthetics of what they create. It’s the simplest answer, but it’s not really the right one. All the subdivisions that get plopped down in the suburbs require the enabling, or at least the permission, of state or local governments, often both.
You can make the case that it’s the states, and particularly state transportation departments, that have made suburban sprawl not only possible but almost inevitable by their near-obsession with widening the highways around major cities and making the cookie-cutter, auto-dependent enclaves ubiquitous.
Certainly the evidence for this proposition is not difficult to find. Some state transportation agencies continue to demand bigger, wider highways in an attempt to ease traffic congestion, despite overwhelming evidence that this never accomplishes its purpose. Most of this is being done in the face of aggressive local opposition.
The state of Texas is planning to widen Interstate 35 in burgeoning metropolitan Austin over the objections of a group of local opponents who have gone to federal court with their claim that the state is ignoring environmental concerns and failing to consider less disruptive alternatives. State transportation officials in Oklahoma are moving ahead with another I-35 expansion, despite the claims of local citizens’ groups that the expansion would threaten residential neighborhoods, break up communities and prioritize toll collection against the wishes of locals in the area.
SO THE STATES, AT LEAST MANY OF THEM, have a lot to answer for. But the issue is more complicated than it seems. Sometimes the states and their local governments can work together against sprawl. At other times they find themselves in sprawl-related conflict that can last for decades.
Oregon may be the best example. In the 1970s, an urbanist government in the city of Portland succeeded in blocking a state-sponsored freeway through the southeast quadrant of the city that would have forced the demolition of more than 1,000 homes. A popular waterfront park was eventually created in much of the territory. At the same time, the state leadership turned to urbanist values and enacted a growth boundary restricting new development on the outskirts of the city. The growth boundary, by most accounts, achieved its stated purpose of fostering a downtown revival. Other jurisdictions have copied it.
Now, however, the state transportation department and the city of Portland are fighting over plans for a highway expansion of 1.5 miles centered in the city’s Rose Quarter. It’s been called the second most expensive highway project in the nation, mile for mile. The state agency is moving ahead with the expansion even though the project is way over budget and is leaving it far short of the funding it needs for other projects.
But it would be a mistake to absolve urban regimes from sprawl promotion. The paradigm example is New York City and its environs decades ago, when the urban planner Robert Moses facilitated haphazard suburban growth by ramming highways through the bucolic precincts of Long Island and the outer city boroughs. Moses is the textbook culprit, but there are similar if less dramatic cases in metro areas all over the country. Cities and counties have been willing partners of states in the promotion of haphazard suburban growth.
IN THE END, APPORTIONING RESPONSIBILITY FOR SPRAWL requires a careful assessment of actions at both the state and local levels. John D. Landis, a planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent years working on that assessment. In a recent study examining what he calls the “uneven performance” of both states and localities, he offers some compelling facts about who is doing what to whom. He evaluates state and local governments on criteria such as land conservation, urban transit, and energy and water usage.
Landis doesn’t hesitate to offer careful praise to states that have been proactive on the anti-sprawl front. His primary positive example is Maryland, which has followed the dictates of a state growth act passed back in 1992. He notes that since 2000 Maryland has been successful at minimizing suburban land consumption, making room for more than a million new residents while using up only 0.11 acres of undeveloped land for each of them. Landis finds local governments in Maryland acting in concert with the state. The city of Annapolis (population about 40,000) has one of the strongest growth-control laws in the nation.
On the negative side, Landis points to California, where the well-intentioned Environmental Quality Act has blocked infill development in many places, and as a result enabled the creation of sprawling exurban subdivisions in diverse areas of the state. In the past few years, the Legislature has tried to rein in the expansion by passing a series of laws aimed at focusing new development along urban transit corridors. This may help in the fight against sprawl; it’s too soon to come to any definitive conclusions. At the local level, he gives a high grade to the city of San Diego for striving successfully to maintain the level of its transit ridership and generating the construction of new housing in the vicinity of existing transit stations.
What’s equally interesting is the disparity Landis found among sprawl-control results in different cities within a single state. He cites Florida as his prime example. Careful planning in Orlando has effected a decline of 2 percent in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) since 2000 even as the area’s population was increasing by 50 percent. The Miami region has been similarly successful: Thanks to major investments in transit, it has recorded the lowest per-capita VMT rate, 17.4 miles, of any of the state’s four largest metro areas.
But things are entirely different in Jacksonville and Tampa. Jacksonville, despite a consolidated city-county government, has failed to establish a viable transit system and, as Landis reports elsewhere, that led by 2024 to an uncomfortably high VMT rate of 20.2 miles per capita. It is just now seeking to remedy the situation. Tampa, after undertaking a highway construction binge in the 1990s, saw its VMT rate increase by 17 percent over the ensuing two decades.
IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE to treat these numbers as proof of anything, but they do suggest that cities and counties aren’t prisoners of the state when it comes to planning and sprawl control. Florida’s state government has been friendly to highway expansion and sprawling growth for decades, but that hasn’t stopped cities that want to control sprawl from finding ways to do it.
Landis doesn’t deal in any length with the gradually shifting political demographics of states and localities, but they are and will continue to be an important element in the process. For most of the past century, local governments have been the preserve of commercial and real estate interests bent on growth at almost any price. But in recent decades progressives have won elections and gained influence in local governments, and their politics have tilted many cities and counties (though far from all) toward regimes bent on growth control. State transportation departments have traditionally been enthusiastic about highway expansion, tolerant of the resulting residential sprawl and dismissive of proposed transit solutions, but the political balance of many state agencies has also been edging closer to a growth-control model.
So who’s to blame for the cookie-cutter subdivisions that clutter the landscape of suburban America? Landis’ research makes it clear that there’s no simple answer. States have been responsible for a lot of it, perhaps most of it. But localities have been generally weak at doing anything about it. Either side can plan responsibly if they can muster the political will to do it.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.