Opinion: The Case for Ending the American Sprawl

          Maybe the last decade we truly cherish in American history is the 1990s. Pre-9/11, riding the bubble of the burgeoning tech industry, and noticeably less normalized political polarization in comparison to recent times, it’s no wonder so many now look back upon that time with such nostalgia. To me, someone born in the 2000s, I associate much of the decade now with dormant social crises that were either concealed from the public or only beginning to build, and what better way to sense this than through film. Classic movies like American Beauty, Edward Scissorhands and Election suggested that there existed below the surface a severe anxiety and darkness among America’s middle class. While these were not the only films displaying that zeitgeist, what I find most peculiar about these three are the settings: characters living in the quinntessential suburban home, in suburban neighborhoods surrounding our suburban metropolises. Despite this housing security, though, two of the films witness the main character almost commit pedophilia, while the third presents an entire town of nasty people, who view an admittedly weird Johnny Depp with fear and contempt. While these are just details from movies, I believe they present part of a larger crisis of American life, one that was felt even in the glorious 90s, that of the mass use and proliferation of the American suburb.

          Before continuing, it is important to establish two categories of American metro areas that have been negatively affected by our massive sprawl, those being the Eastern and Midwestern areas of decline and the newer, sun belt cities that were almost entirely built after the post-war craze for our subdivisions began, primarily Los Angeles metro area. While housing policy has affected them similarly, it should be emphasized that cities like New York and Philadelphia mostly had suburbs established after being built, while places like Los Angeles and Phoenix grew mostly in line with our current conception of how people should be housed. Regardless, we see the first issue of suburbs in this country, that being the direct line between suburban population shifts to cities permanently enforcing austerity onto those still within its limits. A prime example of this would be New York City, a place that started experiencing budget crises as early as the 1970s, and while the cause of their near bankruptcy cannot solely be laid at the feet of this one trend, suburbanization certainly played a huge role. On top of the traditional experience of people leaving a city and eroding the tax base, the availability of cheaper land and a less unionized workforce(in part because of the social alienation of living in a house detached from your fellow workers) led to a mass exodus of businesses and firms to the suburbs surrounding the city core, further exacerbating the lack of taxable funds the city could extract to pay for necessary social services and infrastructure. Multiply this across many of the older cities in this country, from St. Louis to Boston, Milwaukee to Baltimore, and it’s clear how much damage suburban development has wrought upon historic urban centers of this country. Of course, the brunt of the budget cut’s fall upon the African American population of inner cities, another scathing testament to the consequences of endless single family housing development. In the case of Detroit, the construction of highways literally funneled the white residents of the city out, leaving the inner core of the city to the black, industrial workforce. As deindustrialization strikes many of these centers of manufacturing, there grows a disproportionately black class of unemployed workers, while the incidental apartheid of the white outer ring suburbanites feel little solidarity with the people geographically removed from them, even if both are losing their jobs to outsourcing and automation. This sort of separation helps reinforce and exacerbate racial tensions, especially among the white groups, who simply due to owning a square of land and lawn perceive themselves superior to the immiserated black people of their downtown metro area. Los Angeles actually ties in with both of the former points, as its endless sprawl of single unit grids actually allow places clearly within the cities core to become an autonomous neighborhood, creating jagged and seemingly random city limits, all for the dual purpose of allowing homeowners to avoid paying city taxes and block the construction of multi-family housing or apartments that might attract the poorer residents (disproportionately people of color). On top of this, though, Los Angeles demonstrates another folly of endless horizontal housing development, the environmental cost. Due to the need to keep most of the land suburban, real estate developers looking to cash in on valuable SoCal land must encroach further and further into the dry deserts and chaparral miles from the city center, which have always been prone to burn. Thus, the seemingly recent uptick in California wildfires have directly destroyed so many homes because, surprisingly enough, building on historically blaze prone land will probably catch your buildings on fire. Flames aren’t the only way in which low density development precedes ecological disaster, though, as is the case with New Orleans. As with every American city, New Orleans experienced dramatic suburban development after World War Two, but unlike others this was only possible by building on below sea-level swamp land that normally helped assuage storms from the Gulf of Mexico. Seen through this lens, damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina can be traced directly back to outwards housing development, perhaps more so than the unrepaired levees we usually point to as the culprit.

          Regardless of all of these reasons, perhaps one could defend the sprawl, primarily by denoting the level of comfort and community they provide. If the introductory film examples were any indication, this is a false comfort, built upon all of the historical vices and prejudices of this nation, just to spit out en masse millions of houses that leave homeowners alienated, detached from community and beholden to the property market. To finish with a quote from Mike Davis describing the culture of Los Angeles homeowners,

“Los Angeles homeowners, like the Sicilians in Prizzi’s Honor, love their children, but they love their property values more.” (Davis, 2006)

Works Cited

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz. Verso Books, 2006.

Davis, Mike. “Letting Malibu Burn.” Jacobin, 12 Feb. 2018, www.jacobinmag.com/2018/12/california-fires-let-malibu-burn-mike-davis-interview. 

Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. Simon & Schuster, 1994. 

Lemann, Nicholas. “Why Hurricane Katrina Was Not a Natural Disaster.” The New Yorker, 26 Aug. 2020, www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/why-hurricane-katrina-was-not-a-natural-disaster. 

Phillips-Fein, Kim. Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. Picador, 2018.