Is Suburban Sprawl on Its Way Back?

By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: September 14, 2013

THIRTY miles from downtown Minneapolis is the small city of Otsego, defined by its proximity to two highways and its investment in two wastewater treatment plants. Its one grocery store is a SuperTarget. Its walkability score, on a scale of 1 to 100, is 3.


And yet, as soon as the housing market showed signs of resuscitation, building began again, workers started assembling swatches of sod into lawns and suburban pioneers were, once again, happy to colonize a cul-de-sac, confident that others would follow.

It was as if one of the most despised bad actors of the boom years — urban sprawl — had been hiding out in earnest Otsego, with its low crime rate and free Tuesday kiddie concerts. It was easy for a visitor, standing there amid the bulldozers, to imagine that sprawl had put a finger to the wind and decided it was high time for a comeback.

But the details of this miniboom tell a more complicated story.

All of the land under development in Otsego was already slated for housing when the bust arrived, and the developers buying these surplus lots today are getting a better bargain because some of the work of planning and grading had already been completed. The cost difference has sweetened the deal for buyers who are willing to take on a longer commute for more house. But when it comes to breaking ground on new projects, developers are still focused on land closer to the city.

Some experts say it is only a matter of time before they work their way back out. But others, like Leigh Gallagher, the author of “The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving,” argue that the return of the housing market does not mean the return of sprawl. In her 272-page book, Ms. Gallagher marshals demographic, economic and anecdotal evidence.

Couples are marrying later and having smaller families — by 2025, she says, the majority of suburban households are expected to have no children. Teenagers are increasingly opting to go without driver’s licenses. Millennials, economically strapped and witness to the housing crisis, say they prefer to live in urban environments. Boomers are reconsidering their large houses and landscaped yards.

The price of sprawl has become increasingly undeniable. Moderate-income families have seen their transportation costs balloon to more than a quarter of their income. Cities have discovered that low-density developments fail to pay for their own infrastructure. More recently, a new study of economic mobility suggested that sprawl, and its accompanying lack of transportation options, prevented access to higher paying jobs.

Preferences do have a slow effect, Ms. Gallagher said. “We rebuild our environment every 50 years or so.”

But not completely. Single-family homes still define the American dream and prospective home buyers overwhelmingly prefer them.

“I think the death of sprawl was probably pronounced too soon,” said Taylor Anderson, an engineer in Atlanta, where at one point the 2010 census was expected to show that the metropolitan area had expanded into Alabama. Mr. Anderson used to work for a now-defunct company that extolled the virtues of the suburban lifestyle in a haiku-filled newsletter called Dirt. Mr. Anderson said that Atlanta was already too decentralized to be well served by public transportation but did not deny that habits would change. “The town center concept will ultimately be the answer,” he said. “Either people will choose to move closer to their job, or they’ll get a new job closer to where they live.”

Undoubtedly, cities have undergone a resurgence, bringing bike lanes and car-sharing, mixed-use rezoning and luxury rentals into vogue. But some question remains as to how sweeping the change has been. In 2011, the National Association of Home Builders’ members reported that they expected their customers’ ideal home size to shrink. But the median home size in the country has continued to rise, reaching a record high in 2012.

And reining in sprawl requires a delicate balancing act. In Minneapolis, the Metropolitan Council, which controls planning in a seven-county area, has set density goals for both new and already developed areas that some consider unrealistic. “It is politically not feasible and it is physically not feasible unless everybody is going to live in high-rise condominiums,” said Rick Packer, who acquires land for Centra Homes and has served on the council. Developers complain that limits on development drive up the cost of housing and encourage growth to leapfrog to far-flung suburbs like Otsego, which is outside the council’s jurisdiction.

Still, proponents of what is sometimes called “smart growth” point to market data as the ultimate proof that the mix of housing options is expanding.

Unlike in previous recessions, housing closer to the urban core retained more value in this bust than suburban homes. Large homebuilders like Toll Brothers have changed their product mix, building fewer large homes on large lots and more communities that promote walkability and efficiency as selling points. Cities like Dallas, Houston, Denver and Salt Lake have discovered that mass transit can spur high-end development. “The market isn’t all for smart growth, nor is it all for sprawl,” said Geoff Anderson, the president and chief executive of Smart Growth America. “The thing for the last 50, 60 years has been that we’ve done nothing but sprawl.”

Preferences for mass transit and smaller homes are not only a result of a poor economy. Some of the trends, like a decrease in driver’s licenses and commute times, began before the recession. When the American Farmland Trust looked at farmland lost during the boom, it found that the rate had slowed to 800,000 acres a year between 2002 and 2007, down almost a third from a decade earlier.

The only way to explain it, said Jennifer Dempsey, the director of the Farmland Information Center, is that at the height of the boom, sprawl had reached its limit. “We were," she said, “pleasantly surprised.”

Shaila Dewan is a national correspondent for The New York Times.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on September 15, 2013, on page SR7 of the New York edition with the headline: Is Suburban Sprawl On Its Way Back?.

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