Over the past few decades, the cry of “urban sprawl” was popular for activists who favored using government fiat to force Americans to live in dense neighborhoods within the largest metropolitan areas. Whether motivated by environmental politics or self-serving not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) motives related to traffic or other issues, attacking the suburban single-family neighborhood has been a popular tactic for academics, journalists, and think-tankers who sought to use government power to overrule market preferences for housing.
Please note my emphasis on government mandates for density. Where the market seeks denser housing in the form of multifamily rental or medium-density townhouse construction, government planners should also step out of the way and avoid the other regulatory error of exclusionary zoning.
However, the attack on newly built housing as “sprawl” was motivated by attempts to stop new construction or to force more people to live in hyper-dense metropolitan environments, where homeownership and car ownership would be out of reach or not practical for a larger number of households. Among the motivating ideas for these policies was the image of the “creative class” and other groups reducing their transportation costs by living in close proximity to similar populations.
Even before the start of the COVID-19 crisis, this thesis was flawed. Zoning rules that exclude single-family homeownership opportunities price out households from benefiting from the wealth effects of homeownership. Moreover, planners and anti-housing advocates have made building higher density housing more expensive, leading to declines in housing affordability for most renting and homeowning households.
Ironically, one line of attack among the urban sprawl crowd was the claim that lower density, single-family neighborhoods were less “healthy” than more urban environments because of their reliance on the car.
Yet one of the unavoidable conclusions of the current COVID-19 pandemic is that higher density regions are much more strongly affected in terms of per capita deaths. According to my calculations of Census data and Johns Hopkins virus data, I’ve found there is a strong correlation between state-level population density and per capita virus-related deaths.
In other words, the lower density, suburban, single-family neighborhood seems to offer a refuge during such a public health emergency because of its lower reliance on public transportation and other crowding—requirements associated with high-density living, including supposedly healthier sidewalk commuting. The fact that suburban, single-family neighborhoods appear to be more resilient during this coronavirus pandemic will have clear impacts on near-term housing demand. Demand for newly built single-family housing, townhouses, and multifamily construction with less than 50 units will increase.
The question going forward is whether long-standing, vociferous advocates of hyper-dense community design will take notice and acknowledge the obvious limitations of their prior criticism of how most American families want to live?
