By Judge Glock : thebreakthrough – excerpt

The Environmental Case for Suburbia

In the years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, the intelligentsia came to a consensus that sprawling, car-dominated cities were doomed. The future, they said, was in dense, transit-dependent metropolises. The seeming success of compact cities such as San Francisco, Boston, and New York gave this theory credence. And the supposed dangers of sprawl to the climate gave it urgency.

Yet the facts show that sprawling and car-dependent cities have grown more rapidly than dense ones for decades and are far more affordable. The pandemic, meanwhile, showed they will expand even more rapidly in the future. By contrast, the climate-driven demands for density and transit are just the most recent version of a solution that has long been searching for a problem. Advocates will continue to search. In reality, sprawling cities are more environmentally sound than their dense counterparts and will become even more so as technology evolves.

Instead of warring against sprawl and cars, planners and environmentalists should recognize how the green spaces of suburbia, allied to autonomous electric vehicles and green single-family homes, can provide both the affordability and sustainability most Americans crave.

The Long Triumph of Sprawl

There has been much discussion of the benefits of density, of which there are many. If there weren’t, nobody would live in Manhattan or San Francisco. These cities allow many people, especially young, high-productivity singles and those who work in business services like finance or law, to congregate and learn from each other. Economists call these benefits “agglomeration effects.”…

The Future Is Spread Out

Just like density, sprawl has costs as well as benefits. For instance, sprawl can result in the loss of species’ habitats and natural landscapes. But these problems can be accommodated. The fact that only 2 percent of the American landmass is urbanized, and that not even the most sprawling projections of the future would imagine that figure going over 5 percent, means Americans can protect species and environmentally sensitive areas as we expand. We can, as McHarg noted, design with nature.

Judge Glock is the senior director of policy and research at the Cicero Institute and the author of The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913–1939…(more)