Both verb and noun, the term “sprawl” was used in the mid-20th century by the urban critic Lewis Mumford to describe landscapes that devour space and time, “increasing friction and frustration.” It is still the most evocative word we have for the awkward, ugly, automobile-centric places that blanket America today. 

Sprawl, Mumford observed, “denies the possibility of easy meetings and encounters by scattering the fragments of a city at random over a whole region.” Over half a century later, we are experiencing a loneliness epidemic, one of several public health crises exacerbated by our way of life within careless expanses of subdivisions, parking lots, drive-throughs, big-box stores, and fast-food chains. The U.S. is now lousy with the landscapes of “compulsory mobility” Mumford warned about, ones in which people have little choice but to drive everywhere, for longer distances, in increasing congestion. 

Even if you’re lucky enough to enjoy short distances between home and your destinations, you likely lack safe and pleasant bicycling, walking, and transit infrastructure, which means that a congested and more time-consuming trip ensconced inside a giant metal box—that’s what cars are—is still the more rational choice, albeit an increasingly expensive one that’s often inaccessible to those with lower incomes or disabilities. 

Since Mumford, writers have strained to describe sprawl in ever more evocative terms. To the architectural critic Peter Blake, sprawl was less the American Dream than “God’s own junkyard.” To Houston-based journalist Muizz Akhtar, sprawl keeps us “forever trapped in iron cages / on roads paved towards oblivion.” Loneliness, once an epidemic, Akhtar writes, “is now a massacre.”

America's (and the Left's) Sprawl Problem

Recently, three planning colleagues separately told me that the left doesn’t care about sprawl anymore. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, progressive leaders couldn’t stop talking about it. Social demographer and former Minnesota state legislator Myron Orfield, in his 1997 book Metropolitics, showed how sprawl fuels social inequality as whiter, richer Americans sort themselves into suburbs, leaving behind increasingly poor inner cities and exacerbating an uneven distribution of public goods like housing, schools, and access to jobs and services. Labor advocates showed how sprawl hurts the labor movement by thinning out union density, making it harder to collectively organize. The solution, a broad anti-sprawl coalition argued, was a strong regional planning system that could pool resources across metropolitan areas and manage growth.

But the promise of 1990s and early 2000s regionalism never fully materialized. A range of factors beyond the scope of this piece—including the 2008 financial meltdown—precipitated the decline of key organizations behind the progressive anti-sprawl movement (like the National Growth Management Leadership Project) and fueled a resurgent far right, which increasingly embroiled the left in culture wars.

A Sprawl (and Climate) Emergency

Fast forward to 2024, and there is broad agreement that sprawl, while challenging to measure, is accelerating despite its known connection to ongoing climate breakdown and deepening inequality. When I asked Myron Orfield whether we’re still building sprawl, he pointed to President Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) as “a major engine of sprawl.” Enabled by the IIJA—which was hailed as a significant step toward climate resiliency—most states are now spending enormous sums on expanding highways, a useless exercise that research has consistently shown only induces more demand for driving and increases congestion and sprawl. States are free to pursue this recklessness because, as a recent Transportation for America report explains, Congress failed to include guardrails to prevent it, opting instead to leave the law’s implementation “flexible.” Alarmingly, the report states, “these spending choices [...] are directly undoing the emissions reduction impact of other climate focused investments.”

Illustration by Nick Sirotich

Meanwhile, widespread single-family zoning districts preserve needlessly low densities, preventing infill development (building on vacant land within established urban areas) and shunting new construction to urban edges, generating more pavement and more driving. Such neighborhoods feature little community space and instead crawl with private lawns that are costly to our health and the environment. We’ve made progress on zoning reform, but we are now facing an incoming federal government that will likely be actively hostile to it.  

It’s past time for the U.S. to catch up with other enviable places like Paris, Medellín, Singapore, and Vancouver B.C. (or, if you prefer less density, Oosterwold or Vauban) and transform its deeply inefficient (and uniquely deadly and polluting) infrastructure. While people need cars, plenty of us would live closer together, drive less, and opt for fewer private and more shared spaces if we could. We need to make it easier for people to do so by investing less in car infrastructure and more in creating denser, more walkable, bikeable, transit-connected places with affordable housing that is located near jobs and services. This requires decommodifying more of our housing and treating transit less like an afterthought for the poor and more like a vital public utility for all.    

These changes will take resources and political will. They will also take planning. By “planning,” I mean the act of securing the future—for all Americans, not just the wealthiest. By urban planning, I mean, as Capital City author Sam Stein writes, “the way we shape space over time.” Unfortunately, “urban planning” in the U.S. is something of a misnomer in the sense that it often involves little foresight or planning. This must change: whether it’s for weddings, retirement, vacations, or the future of the places we inhabit, planning is commonsense and essential to our quality of life. 

A Shrinking Debate

Unfortunately, today the sprawl debate is dominated by libertarian, free-market types whose rhetoric does little to advance (and may undermine) the vital project of building broad public support for public planning. These folks aren’t new to the conversation: one effect of the progressive proposals at the turn of the millennium was to draw them into urban planning debates. Back then, a cohort of free-market conservatives argued against regional growth management on grounds that it would trample on private choice. This group, the “market suburbanists,” continues to defend America’s vast suburban landscapes as an economic good and a product of consumer demand. 

What’s changed is that, rather than debating progressives, the market suburbanists now tangle with an ambitious group that has taken the progressives’ place: the market urbanists. Like the turn-of-the-century progressives, market urbanists are staunchly anti-sprawl. But rather than arguing for a strong government role in managing growth, as the progressive anti-sprawl movement did, market urbanists emphasize the need to constrain government in order to curtail sprawl. Sprawl, they assert, is less a problem of private interests run amok than of “runaway statism.” 

Market urbanists lambast sprawl as “not a market outcome, but the result of government policies that destroyed cities and propped up suburbs.” This group ranges from publicly practicing planners and small-scale developers to academics, journalists, and policy wonks. And while their overall politics tend to be a hodgepodge of left and right (and therefore less straightforwardly conservative than the market suburbanists’), the market urbanists share with the market suburbanists a strong faith in the private market to solve problems and a discomfort with, if not outright hostility to, higher levels of government. 

Trump, the Market Suburbanist President

While market urbanists’ perspectives have come to dominate in recent years, market suburbanists are poised for a comeback, if the 2024 presidential election is any indication. Democrats talked up market urbanist priorities like reforming outdated regulations, and Kamala Harris herself campaigned on policies designed to spur a private housing construction boom. In contrast, Donald Trump played the market suburbanist, calling for “saving the suburban lifestyle dream.” As president, he plans to solve the housing crisis by opening up federal land for homebuilding—a recipe for more sprawl—and launching a deeply inhumane mass deportation effort that he claims will lower housing costs by increasing vacancy.

Trump may try to concentrate power in his own hands, but he won’t use it to combat sprawl by building modern public transit systems, despite some market urbanists’ (facetious?) fantasies about “Trump Trains.” Instead, he’ll expand car culture and single-family homes, all while claiming that this is simply what Americans want. 

But even if we got Trump trains, we’d still be living with a system that requires us, as Vulture Capitalism author Grace Blakeley writes, “to sacrifice our freedom to billionaires who can tell us what to do, rather than engaging in collective decision-making processes where we can all have an input.” (Vulture Capitalism isn’t about urban planning per se, but its larger examination of what it means to truly plan is relevant to urbanist movements.) But while benevolent authoritarianism isn’t the answer, neither can we accept status quo institutions that refuse to undertake real public planning. We need to develop alternatives. To that end, it’s worth unpacking the myths at the heart of the discourse between market urbanists and market suburbanists to see what lies beyond. For while these two factions disagree, they are, in important ways, two sides of the same ideological coin. 

Discourses of Delusion

Market suburbanists and market urbanists both emphasize the power of free markets to meet essential human needs. At the same time, they disagree about whether sprawl is good or bad and what caused it. Market suburbanists look at sprawl and see free markets at work: sprawl is, to them, “shaped by popular desires for a better life,” and the single-family homes that characterize it are a “legitimate housing preference.” Market urbanists look at sprawl and see “socialism”: to them, sprawl is an “enemy of a free market” and “the most destructive and costly central planning exercise in human history.”

At the heart of these disagreements is a common tendency to frame every planning problem as a great battle between markets and states. These debates take on a variety of framings: some pit “free markets” against “centralized planning,” for example, while others set “decentralized planning” against “centralized planning” (the former being more conducive to free markets, while the latter is hostile to them). 

These false dichotomies obfuscate how things actually work, preventing us from honestly reckoning with American urban planning history and the forces that led to sprawl. As Blakeley writes, “markets and states are not separate domains of power.” But Americans are immersed in propaganda designed to convince them of the opposite. Indeed, the media and culture war apparatus fueling Trumpism is fundamentally a project to portray billionaire oligarchs like Donald Trump and Elon Musk as self-made, bootstrapping products of free-market capitalism, even though neither man’s massive wealth would be possible without government support. The more we buy into this “free market” myth, the more easily we can be coaxed into accepting trickle-down economics (the idea that some of the riches of the wealthiest will eventually make it down to the rest of us) as a replacement for real social democracy. Better urban planning for all requires rejecting the former and building the latter. 

In truth, states and markets are embedded in each other in a variety of complex ways that shape landscapes and distribute the balance of power in society. In America, where, as historian Gail Radford explains in Modern Housing for America, urban planning is often the sum of a series of disconnected private decisions, sprawl came to dominate in part because the U.S. federal government is so permeable to the interests of the real estate and automobile industries. This can hardly be called “central planning,” but neither is it quite a free-market system, because the U.S. state plays a crucial role in absorbing risk on the private sector’s behalf. Contrast this with social democracies like the Netherlands where, as Sonia Hirt explains in Zoned in the USA, the state relies less on the vicissitudes of the private market in the provision of essential goods like housing and transportation. The private sector still plays an important role, but it is more subordinate to public planning objectives set by the national government.

The problem with American urban planning is not so much that it thwarts free markets or that it’s too centralized or decentralized but that it prioritizes the needs of private capital over those of ordinary people. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t debate the merits and drawbacks of centralization versus decentralization or the proper role of government versus the private market—we should, and there are countless debates to be had hashing all of this out.

Highly centralized states, for example, may produce one-size-fits-all plans that ignore local contexts. But they can also deliver broad public benefits like excellent mass transit and prevent lower levels of government from undermining the public interest. Recall that a majority of U.S. states are using funding from Biden’s infrastructure bill to increase driving, sprawl, and greenhouse gas emissions—a perfect case study of the perils of decentralization and why the U.S. arguably needs more central planning, not less.

Decentralized planning, on the other hand, may foster innovation and local solutions to local problems. But, as Blakeley notes, some of the most successful examples of decentralized planning are enabled by links “forged between local and national planning processes.” Radford documents concrete examples of this: the New Deal financed successful experiments in working- and middle-class housing, the design of which local communities were empowered to shape according to their needs. This idea—that central governments can support and build on local experimentation—is a good example of the kind of nuance that debates between market suburbanists and market urbanists often fail to capture.

But while questions of whether planning should be centralized or decentralized and where markets fit in are important, they can only take us so far, because any configuration of public and private or centralized and decentralized can still be designed to either enrich a bunch of oligarchs or ensure the provision of public goods over private profit. (The former resembles the current U.S. situation, but we saw glimmers of the latter in the popular campaigns of Bernie Sanders.) This is why today’s sprawl debate, to which we now turn, is so limiting.  

Sprawl: Beautiful Chaos or Planned Monstrosity?

The exchange below is a prime example of “free-markets-versus-centralized-planning” discourse. As increasingly many people get their information from social media, we have to take what happens on these platforms seriously. 

Joshua Reed Eakle isn’t a planner—he’s president and co-founder of Project Liberal, a Super PAC dedicated to “advocat[ing] for the cause of a free and open society” and battling “authoritarianism”—but Charles Marohn is a prominent one, and his organization, Strong Towns, about which I’ve written critically, is nevertheless doing some good work to combat sprawl. 

In this exchange, Eakle (the market suburbanist) and Marohn (the market urbanist) disagree about whether the landscape in the photo—a classic example of sprawl—is a product of the “beautiful chaos of markets” or a monstrosity of “central planning.” This conflict makes intuitive sense: to the average person, sprawl seems disordered and random, like a “free-market” process. At the same time, it appears so monotonously standardized across locales from California to Maine that it seems the product of a central plan. It is this paradox that makes American landscapes, as the urban sociologist Mark Gottdiener acknowledged in his 1977 book Planned Sprawl, “difficult to explain.”

Gottdiener observes how the chain-riddled strips about which Marohn and Eakle are arguing “seem to just happen” despite the existence of an extensive public-planning apparatus, including planning boards, public hearings, and traffic departments. To explain this contradiction, he homes in on exactly the question Eakle and Marohn’s exchange raises: Is sprawl planned? And, if so, how and by whom?

Highways to Hell

The “stroad” in Eakle’s and Marohn’s photo is likely a state road adjacent to an interstate highway. It is lined with familiar corporate chains like Exxon, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Starbucks. Every American will recognize this landscape: every place in the country has a version of it.

The federal government did subsidize our vast road infrastructure, and policies like the 1956 Interstate Highway Act were important inducements to sprawl. But these were policies for which powerful automobile interests aggressively fought. In Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, historian Peter Norton shows how groups with a financial stake in automotive transportation—dubbed, at the time, “motordom”—were “among the first to conceive of and promote an automotive city.” Motordom was a formidable coalition of private interests that included the automobile, asphalt, concrete, and rubber industries as well as automobile clubs. The first highway proposals originated not with the government but, as Norton explained to me, in 1918, “within the ranks of motordom,” which exerted “imaginative and relentless pressure” to move these proposals forward.

Norton documents how pro-highway and pro-automobile groups characterized the demand for roads as “the free choice of a free people” and accused automobile critics like Mumford of distrusting democracy. But these claims were undercut by the hard work motordom did to legitimize the car in the city—sponsoring sustained public relations campaigns tying the automotive city to “freedom” and producing “films, booklets, and other publicity to sell a major national highway program to the general public.” (At one point, motordom even successfully quashed an attempt by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover himself to warn Americans that the automobile was a “tremendous and deadly instrument of power.”) The strategy succeeded, and motordom forged a powerful partnership with the Bureau of Public Roads (a precursor to the Federal Highway Administration), as well as with state highway departments, to coordinate road building.

Those who attribute America’s sprawling road infrastructure to either government planning or free markets aren’t exactly wrong. But it’s more accurate to say that highway building programs constituted a capitalist support system for a broad coalition of automobile interests. As urban historian and Building Suburbia author Dolores Hayden told me, “the federal government intervened very effectively on behalf of business from the 1920s on” and was “very pro-money making” for these groups, which were “doing precious little on behalf of citizens.” At best, this arrangement might be called quasi-centralized planning, but Hayden’s term for it—“stealth planning”—is more apt.

What about the fast-food restaurants and gas stations lining the stroad in Eakle’s and Marohn’s photo? Government highway planners built roads (and attended to safety concerns), but they played little role in shaping the types of development that sprang up around them. To understand this, we need to talk about one of the hottest topics among urbanists today: zoning.

The Zoning Wars

These days, debates about sprawl can often be debates about zoning, and no subject brings out the free-markets-versus-centralized planning discourse more than zoning. Zoning codes regulate neighborhood density—for example, building height and lot size—and permissible uses, whether residential, commercial, or industrial. As currently practiced, American zoning (especially of the ubiquitous single-family variety) promotes wastefully low densities, even in urban centers. The result is a surplus of what planners call “underutilized” land that could host badly needed housing, retail, services, or public parks. Filling these gaps in the urban fabric might lower housing costs, and the added density would encourage walking and bicycling and make running public transportation more financially viable. But with the zoning status quo, construction that might occur in already established cities just gets pushed outward, further expanding sprawl.

Market suburbanists acknowledge that the federal government played a role in institutionalizing zoning, but they tend to portray it as a “bottom-up institution” and a “product of popular government” that functions to protect private property rights and preserve the right of localities to economically exclude. Market urbanists, on the other hand, tend to emphasize zoning’s federal origins, portraying it a distorter of markets and a prime example of the government boot on Americans’ necks. They often point out, for example, that Hoover’s Department of Commerce “developed” zoning and encouraged states to adopt it via the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, or that the Supreme Court “normalized centralized planning” in its 1926 decision, Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., which affirmed the constitutionality of zoning. While both groups’ assertions contain truth, they ultimately flatten the complexity of the historical record, which shows that zoning, like the highway system, emerged from the efforts of a formidable coalition of public and private interests. 

Of Strip Zoning and Speculators

Marohn may have had zoning, among other things, in mind when claiming that the sprawl scene above, clearly zoned as a commercial strip, is the result of “central planning.” But the kinds of environments that typify commercial sprawl first evolved as a business response to America’s growing car culture. Car culture abetted road building, and vice versa, and businesses needed new built forms to capture consumers where they increasingly were—in their cars. Strip zoning, with its large setbacks, ample parking, and drive-throughs, emerged from these shifting trends. State leaders did little to control the spread of roadside strips, leaving it to localities.

Hayden explains how strip businesses first evolved from the humble gas station by absorbing its lessons on how to attract and serve the driving customer. Roadside strips then boomed in the wake of huge postwar federal tax write-offs instituted by Republicans who “very much wanted to use government to help business.” These write-offs—which Marohn may also have had in mind—produced windfalls for developers of new, cheap real estate and incentivized the replacement of mom-and-pop operations with large corporate chains like the ones in Eakle’s and Marohn’s sprawl scene. But while commercial sprawl was indeed abetted by federal (or “centralized”)  government policy, it was about private profit, not planning, as Harry J. Sonneborn, Ray Kroc’s partner in franchising McDonald’s, once admitted. As Eric Schlosser reported in his 2001 book Fast Food Nation, Sonneborn told a group of Wall Street investors, “We are not basically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue from which our tenants can pay us our rent.”

Zoning as Eugenics

Eugenics seeks to improve a human population’s genetic profile and has historically included a range of practices from prenatal care (for certain people) to forced sterilization. Libertarians—and market urbanists—commonly invoke the specter of eugenics to discredit the federal government and policies they dislike. Take a recent X post by Geoff Graham, an Atlanta-based real estate developer, blogger, and proponent of New Urbanism, a design movement that promotes compact, walkable places. In his post, Graham argues that zoning is not pro-property-rights, as market suburbanists contend, but rather a form of “abusive government overreach” akin to “forced sterilization” (one of numerous eugenics practices, a full discussion of which is beyond the scope of this piece). 

Upping the ante, market urbanist and Southern Urbanism founder Aaron Lubeck asserts that zoning is forced sterilization.

It is fallacious (and absurd) to equate zoning with forced sterilization. It’s true that the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell upheld states’ right to forcibly sterilize institutionalized people. But this has nothing to do with the merits of zoning. This analogy is similar to the libertarian cry that “taxation is slavery.” No morally decent person today would defend forced sterilization. (For actual eugenics rhetoric and the intent to carry out ethnic cleansing via mass deportations, see Trump himself.) The purpose of these arguments is simply to be vaguely associative—to say that the federal government can't be right about something because it was wrong to embrace the practice of forced sterilization.

Graham’s statement that zoning resulted from “busybodies” telling people “what they can and can’t do with their land” conjures up Little House on the Prairie-worthy images of Ma, Pa, and the kids living on the frontier with no government assistance. Erased from the record are federal policies like the Homestead Acts, which distributed millions of acres of public land to American citizens, or that frontier land was made available to homesteaders only after the federal government perpetrated genocide on Native Americans, an omission that makes the concern about forced sterilization—which historically affected people of color in particular—seem less sincere.

Zoning as Social Engineering

More sophisticated market urbanists avoid such simplistic tirades but are not above throwing out vague references to eugenics in their discussions of zoning. In his 2022 book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke The American City And How To Fix It, urban planner Nolan Gray reminds us more than once that zoning, like eugenics and prohibition, were products of the Progressive Era. 

Gray is an urban planner, Senior Director of Legislation and Research for California YIMBY, and a former fellow of the Koch-brothers-funded Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank that “advances knowledge about how markets solve problems and help us lead happier, healthier, and richer lives.” Arbitrary Lines is a well-reasoned treatise that gets a lot right: Gray’s incisive recounting of zoning’s exclusionary legacy and its role in encouraging sprawl should galvanize anyone concerned with creating better cities. But while Gray doesn’t come across as a libertarian zealot, he sometimes obfuscates the reality that zoning, whatever its ills, was also a legitimate public response to very real problems. For example, he writes: 

Zoning is a mechanism of exclusion designed to inflate property values, slow the pace of new development, segregate cities by race and class, and enshrine the detached single-family house as the exclusive urban ideal—always has been.

Planning institutions that reinforce social discrimination are indeed bad, but Gray overstates his case. Zoning has often been “a mechanism of exclusion,” but it was also a response to crises engendered by unregulated capitalism. As historian and Bourgeois Utopias author Robert Fishman explained to me, in the laissez-faire context of the 19th and early 20th century, “houses and neighborhoods almost invariably declined in value as they were engulfed in the tumult of the growing city.” There was a genuine need for government to manage the effects of this trend on public health and safety. And although Gray is right that zoning became a tool to organize cities “around the needs and preferences of elites,” it was also aimed, to some extent, at the middle class. As Hirt explains, middle-class people, unlike the rich, could not easily escape into enclaves and needed ways to protect their homes from encroaching industry and pollution. Indeed, Progressive Era reformers saw zoning—which promised the equal application of strict principles of uniformity, to rich and poor alike—as a means of achieving greater, not lesser, social equality. 

Gray’s contention that zoning’s purpose was to “slow the pace of new development” obscures its origins as a tool to bring order and profit to the real estate industry. (Indeed, Gray mostly elides the role of the real estate industry even though it led the push for zoning in the early 20th century out of a need to stabilize real estate values.) As Fishman explained to me, zoning, especially in newly subdivided neighborhoods at the metropolis edge, was initially intended to speed—not slow—development by assuring potential investors and homebuyers that nothing offensive (like industry, retail, or apartments) would be built near their single-family homes. As historian Marc Weiss writes, realtors valued zoning for its ability to “boost property values and liquidity by stimulating the demand for real estate as an attractive and safe investment.” Only after neighborhoods were firmly established did zoning come to prevent new development and encourage sprawl, which is why I agree with Gray and other market urbanists that we need serious zoning reform. 

Zoning for Magical Markets

Unlike some market urbanists, Gray doesn’t appear to view statism or centralization as inherently threatening. But to the extent that he seems willing to assign problems to higher levels of government, it is out of a belief that doing so will better align urban planning with free markets. 

For example, Gray criticizes the U.S. federal government’s promotion of zoning, but he also seems genuinely disgusted by its failure to do more to define zoning’s broader social purpose. Concerned with giving local governments “maximum flexibility,” he writes, the federal government said “almost nothing about the content of the potential zoning.” Gray proposes Japan, which zones at the national level, as a better model. The simplicity and legibility of the Japanese zoning system, he asserts, which has only 12 zoning districts, “reduc[es] barriers to development.” This is the opposite of how things work in the U.S., where strict zoning codes discourage private innovation, keeping land “locked in amber” and driving up prices, a dynamic that market urbanists contend is at the root of America’s housing crisis. By smoothing the way for private building, Gray contends, Japanese zoning “has kept cities like Tokyo remarkably affordable.”

But this isn’t true. As planning scholar Andre Sorensen explained to me, Japan’s zoning system hasn’t changed substantially since 1968. The 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s saw rapid economic growth in Japan, and the resulting bubble economy precipitated one of the world’s worst housing crises. During this period, he said, “land in central Tokyo was so expensive that it was not profitable to develop even as super high rise housing.” These conditions existed under the same zoning system Gray credits for Tokyo’s affordability today. Things are different now not for any reason related to zoning but because of the 1990 collapse of Japan’s bubble economy and subsequent decades of economic stagnation. As Sorensen writes in his forthcoming book Messy Cities: Why We Can't Plan Everything, today, “over 20 percent of all Japanese housing units are vacant, including huge numbers of housing units in the Tokyo area. This excess housing supply is growing rapidly, and is probably the main factor suppressing housing costs, not weak development regulation.”

Gray also credits liberal zoning for Tokyo’s dense, dynamic urbanism, which, he writes, allows “the optimal degree of use mixture” to “emerge organically.” This results in a kind of spontaneous order. He’s not wrong, or alone, in recognizing Tokyo’s emergent urbanism, but, as Sorensen writes, “Japan operates one of the strictest zoning systems in the world,” resulting in what may look “messy” to the American eye but in reality is a “carefully regulated and logical order.” 

Ameyoko District near Ueno station, Tokyo. Courtesy Andre Sorensen

Beyond zoning, Gray neglects factors within the larger Japanese planning system that do more to enable the seemingly unplanned environment he appreciates. Take the massive subsidy the Japanese government pours into Tokyo’s transit system, without which the spontaneous order Gray celebrates—in which a population of 37 million must get around—would be impossible. It’s true, as Robert Cervero documents in his 1988 book The Transit Metropolis, that Tokyo’s transit system is comparatively “entrepreneurial,” allowing the private sector a large role. But this private success is made possible by “farsighted and pro-active land use planning” undergirded by clear public commitment to the idea that transit-oriented growth is “inherently efficient and socially optimal.” As Cervero writes, “besides directly sponsoring transit services, Japan’s central government further promotes transit riding through tax incentives. All Japanese workers receive a tax-free commuting allowance as high as $500 per month from their employers (that is fully deductible against corporate income taxes).”

It’s not merely that Gray fails to mention the Japanese transit system. Elsewhere in Arbitrary Lines, he suggests that walking, bicycling, and transit spontaneously arise once liberalized zoning (and free markets) have created sufficient urban density. “As a side effect of [...] density,” he writes, “cities naturally produce environments that give residents choice about how to get around.” But there is nothing “natural” about the immense public and, in Tokyo’s case, private planning that make good transit possible. As Cervero documents, while model transit systems in places like Tokyo, Stockholm, Singapore, and Copenhagen arise out of different balances of public and private planning, these outcomes are not “side effects” or mere good fortune but “the result of a clear, well-articulated vision of the future and dedicated individuals who see the vision through to implementation, without compromise.”

In a final example, Gray criticizes the tie between U.S. public service provision and local wealth, which causes the quality of essential services like schools, parks, and public safety to vary dramatically between municipalities. In a progressive-sounding position, he praises Japan for “standardizing local public service provision.” No leftist alive would disagree with him that “decoupling [...] public service quality from local municipal boundaries is a no brainer.” But he goes on to say that the high marginal tax rates that help make the Japanese model possible are “highly suspect” and undesirable in the U.S. (in fact, U.S. tax rates are criminally low). He advocates instead for a system of school vouchers, or “school choice.” 

This is a red flag. Plenty has been written on how school choice (or vouchers) subjects American education to the whims of the private marketplace and worsens segregation and inequality. Indeed, a recent ProPublica report found that in Arizona—“the nation’s school choice capital”—“the poorer the ZIP code, the less often vouchers are being used.” School choice policies also cut against the very urbanism Gray champions because they encourage more driving and more car culture. The same report found that Arizona’s lower-income families aren’t taking advantage of the state’s voucher program because of the high cost of transportation to voucher-accepting private schools. One mother who couldn’t drive her son to school, for example, reported that her third-grader “would have to take two public buses on his own to get to school,” a 40-minute trip each way. Plenty of other parents still choose to drive these distances to private schools. A system of universally funded neighborhood schools like those in other highly developed countries would better align with good urbanism.

Zoning for a Libertarian Utopia

If market urbanists believe that zoning distorts free markets, market suburbanists believe it delivers a “libertarian utopia,” as author Judge Glock puts it in “Two Cheers for Zoning,” a 2022 piece in the conservative journal American Affairs. “Zoning is common,” he writes, “because people want it.” Market urbanists (or YIMBYs, as he calls them) who attack zoning attack the very free market ideals they purport to uphold.

Glock is director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that works to “improve the quality of life in America's great cities by fostering competition, entrepreneurship, and fiscal responsibility.” In his piece, he argues that “those who ascribe [sic] to free market beliefs should not despise zoning” for fostering racial segregation or high home prices—social ills on which he says zoning has little impact—but should instead defend it as a tool that encourages fierce competition between local governments for residents, businesses, and voters.

America’s highly decentralized system of local governments, Glock reasons, compels municipalities to zone in ways that maximize their ability to compete against each other. This competition “approximate[s] a private marketplace for public goods such as roads, parks, schools, and public safety.” In this marketplace of municipalities, everyone is free to choose where to live based on their needs and desires. If you dislike your city, you can express your preferences “by choice and movement instead of collective votes”—an idea from the theories of economist Charles Mills Tiebout. In other words, if you’re unhappy, you can just move!

But not everyone can “vote with their feet.” People’s jobs often tie them to places, even if other local circumstances (such as high housing costs) present a hardship. To preserve employment, people may opt for housing that forces them into increasingly lengthy commutes, typically by car. This offsets savings on shelter, increases pollution, and steals time from other activities. Navigating this kind of spatial dislocation can get complicated as people attempt to meet their needs for all sorts of things beyond jobs and housing. For example, many people need to be near sick or aging relatives, have children with special needs, or simply want to be close to social networks. In Glock’s utopia, choices expand or contract as people move up and down the income ladder. If you’re stuck at the bottom, you probably deserve it. Remember, it’s just the free market doing its thing. 

Even if we accept Glock’s premise that zoning produces a marketplace among municipalities, zoning within cities, as market urbanists rightly point out, still constrains people’s choices by, for example, limiting what types of housing or other amenities can be built, and where. Most American cities feature wide swaths of single-family zoning—and a robust supply of sanctimonious NIMBYS to defend it—despite a rising demand for alternatives. And have you ever wondered why you never see corner convenience stores in American single-family neighborhoods? The rigid use separation mandated by U.S. zoning prohibits it!

Zoning and the Freedom to Exclude

Market suburbanists like Glock view zoning as essential to protecting what author Gene Slater calls—in his 2021 book of the same name—Americans’ “freedom to discriminate.” “Even passionate libertarians,” Glock writes, “would not deny the ability of people to form or join a local government with some say over their property. Most zoning in America is of such a local and consensual nature.”

Glock’s characterization of zoning as a localized policy tool is a corrective to market urbanists’ claims that it is a form of “centralized planning.” But his assertion that zoning—and here he means exclusionary single-family zoning in particular—was motivated by voters who simply wanted a say over their private property is misleading. Realtors built support for exclusionary neighborhoods (which zoning helps preserve) by first altering Americans’ longstanding, commonly held definitions of freedom. As Slater documents in Freedom to Discriminate, realtors mounted concerted rhetorical campaigns to convince Americans that property values were contingent not just upon encroaching nuisances like factories but also upon who lived next door. These campaigns helped persuade white, affluent homeowners that their ability to exclude people from their communities, particularly on the basis of race, was fundamental to their liberty. They also attacked efforts to eliminate housing discrimination as government coercion, portraying the segregated housing they helped to institutionalize as a natural, inevitable result of the free market.

Will the Real Free Marketeers Please Stand Up? 

If market urbanists were truly concerned about home prices (and committed to free markets), writes Glock, they would attack not just zoning but also regulations that restrict sprawl. Insofar as American cities are affordable, he argues, it’s because they encourage greenfield development, which means to build on previously undeveloped land. “The foremost goal of a pro-housing policy,” Glock writes, “should be to open more new land for development.”

But Glock doesn’t call for any of this new greenfield development to be denser than the ridiculously sparse variety in American exurbs, because he isn’t concerned with planning, only with “align[ing] the incentives of local governments toward growth”—in other words, letting the private market produce more sprawl. This position reduces the provision of affordable housing to a zero-sum game in which the price of shelter is longer commutes, increasingly expensive car maintenance, and intensified isolation—to say nothing of the environmental impact of increasing sprawl, including disappearing agricultural land and wildlife habitat destruction. At least we can stop worrying about the “supposed climate dangers of sprawl,” Glock writes, since everyone will be driving electric vehicles!

Market suburbanist-urbanist debates efface the complexity of U.S. zoning history, which is rife with paradox. Zoning was a public response to the chaotic conditions of unregulated capitalism, but, at the same time, it was designed to constrain public power. As Hirt writes, "as much as the zoning rules restrained the actions of private parties, they were also crafted to ensure that public authorities would have tightly defined and limited freedom of judgment.” Indeed, this is why market suburbanists like Glock defend zoning as a pro-free-market tool, because for an acceptable price, it limits government and protects private property values. 

Market urbanists respond by correctly pointing out that U.S. zoning has become counterproductive by worsening pollution and harming nature and public health, and their claims that zoning reform would free up markets to address these harms may have some validity. But their calls for zoning reform—or in Gray’s case, abolition—are rarely accompanied by calls to  systemically strengthen American planning. As Hirt explained to me, other countries “do not have zoning like ours because they have much more powerful planning mechanisms”—in other words, U.S. zoning is strong because U.S. planning is weak. Zoning reform that is not also coupled with a commitment to strong public planning at all levels of government will likely just create the need for new public interventions, all while ensuring that those interventions remain relatively frail, fueling the inaccurate and dangerous perception that what is failing us is the public sector. It is this vicious cycle that must end.

Not States Versus Markets, but People-Powered Planning

Fixing sprawl requires abandoning discourse that offers us a false choice between overbearing states and liberatory markets. The debate should instead be about how to create an urban planning system that rejects the prioritization of private wealth accumulation, is genuinely responsive to public needs, and values the participation of ordinary people. (And by “participation,” I don’t mean the hollow exercise in which the wealthiest people with the most free time show up at public hearings to oppose everything.) While market suburbanists are probably a lost cause, some market urbanists do seem to care about solving big problems and about responsive, democratic planning. But their binary, obfuscatory framings are unhelpful. 

As for the left, it's not clear who the urbanists are anymore. Perhaps a new anti-sprawl coalition can emerge. If it does, it must move beyond cynicism about centralization and fetishes for markets and recognize that fixing the vast amounts of sprawl we’ve built—especially given its dire effects on the climate and on public health—requires some centralized coordination, but from a government equipped to protect the public good over the whims of rapacious plutocrats who are busier than ever dismantling our public institutions and cheapening what scraps of American public life still remain. Fortunately, as the real-world examples in Vulture Capitalism demonstrate, centralization need not be antithetical to democratic or “people-powered” planning. This is not to romanticize things—as Stein puts it, there is currently a “severe disjuncture” between what our urban planning system does and what we need it to do. And it will take a lot of work to restore a common commitment to true governance organized around, as Blakeley writes, “the human capacity to cooperate in pursuit of collective goals.” But we have no choice. The health and well-being of communities and the natural world hang in the balance, as does our obligation to bequeath to future generations a built environment that is not so damn ugly.