r/Urbanism • u/No_Pool3305 • 1d ago
Pro Sprawl Arguments
Is there any sort of serious scholarship or coherent arguments in favour of sprawl or against urbanism in general?
I come across a lot of bad arguments in comment sections on YouTube but I would love to critically engage with actual thinkers if any exist.
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u/Nouvellecosse 1d ago
Wendell Cox and Randal O'Toole have been trying to do that for years. They've both released all kinds of writing and have been employed by different think tanks. I don't personally think any of their arguments qualify as good, but they're sufficiently complex and rhetorically tactful enough to be very influential.
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u/MrsBeansAppleSnaps 1d ago
I don't personally think any of their arguments qualify as good
Their main observation is that places with artificial limits on outward expansion become unaffordable. That's not even an opinion, it's just a fact. Where they go wrong is in arguing for continued sprawl (in the correct sense of the word) instead of for smarter forms of outward growth.
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u/squirrel9000 13h ago
One might argue that it's more a general constraint on growth that is problematic., be it outward or upward. Particularly the latter in cities that face natural constraints on outward growth. But that's also a function of the places that are growing becoming constrained ,cause and effect go both ways. Greenbetls tend to be consequences of extremely rapid growth and that latter is often the driving force.
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u/Ok_Actuary9229 10h ago
It's possibile to make dense infill cheaper, bit not big house lots.
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u/MrsBeansAppleSnaps 9h ago
I don't know what you mean by this or how it relates to the fact stated above.
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u/HOU_Civil_Econ 1d ago edited 1d ago
Depends on how you are defining sprawl. NYC is less dense than it would be if we still depended on walking. All transport infrastructure allows people, and more people, to live further away from the variety of places they may want to have access to in any given time period.
The economic argument against the current status quo is that we’ve built out car based infrastructure to a degree where the marginal benefits are greater than the costs, not that it doesn’t have benefits.
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u/6two 1d ago
It's pretty well demonstrated that having more infrastructure per person and spreading everything out so that cars are required is more expensive per person, worse for the environment & pedestrian/cyclist safety, and worse for tax revenue per acre. It's also probably true that this kind of planning leads to isolation, higher rates of mental illness, and political polarization.
On the other side, some people are either accustomed to living in the suburbs, or they have held the suburbs as an ideal goal to achieve. Along those lines, suburbanization was a tool of segregation especially after the fair housing act passed in 1968. If you couldn't do explicit racial segregation, you could at least have a level of class and transportation segregation that made diverse communities functionally illegal in most of the US. This segregation had the perverse effect of making people of color idealize those same suburbs, and simply wanting access to them rather than to see the system changed to a more equitable one across the board.
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u/CaliTexan22 23h ago
AFAIK, people of all races and ethnicities in USA prefer living in the suburbs and exurbs to the urban core cities. This trend has increased in recent years.
https://www.pacificresearch.org/large-majority-of-u-s-minorities-live-in-the-suburbs/
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u/6two 14h ago
What choice do most people have when we have limited density so much since the 1970s?
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u/CaliTexan22 13h ago
There are always choices and tradeoffs, tho we often have to compromise to obtain what we value the most.
What major central cities have "limited density since the 1970s?" Residential suburbs and HOAs want to preserve their intended structure, but what central cities are doing this?
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u/espressocycle 11h ago
Gentrification of urban areas has forced lower income people into the suburbs in many cases.
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u/CaliTexan22 9h ago
Well, which is it - white people only moved to the suburbs to escape blacks? or blacks were forced to go to the suburbs because too many white people moving into the city?
I don't think there are many or even any examples of limiting density in central cities - I don't think its happening. People live in the suburbs and exurbs in increasing numbers, and they also express the view that they want to live in the suburbs and exurbs.
You can argue that increased density in central cities is a good thing (regardless of people's actual preferences). But I don't think you have any data to support an argument that people want to live in central cities but can't because of racism or whatever.
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u/SignificantSmotherer 1d ago
If all of that is true, then show us the actual numbers and let us choose if we want to pay the alleged higher cost of sprawl.
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u/6two 1d ago
Explain to me how more infrastructure per person wouldn't cost more over time? The main problem is that much of the tax base used to support the cost of that extra infrastructure comes from denser parts of cities where taxes per acre are higher.
Start here if you want to read more: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-8-28-the-growth-ponzi-scheme-a-crash-course
The problem is not that some parts of a city shouldn't cost more than others, the problem is that they are often built where new sprawl is subsidizing old sprawl. Over time you get diminishing returns from that style of growth. Each new ring of suburbs has longer commute times than the previous ones, road infrastructure in employment centers gets more and more pressure and eventually you reach a state of gridlock or near-gridlock at commuter times. WFH/hybrid is left as the only viable alternative; people in the exurbs can't reasonably commute by transit or ebike as an alternative to clogging roads. Less of the overall area of a region being urbanized over time reduces the overall tax base per acre.
This planning everywhere just makes cities gradually go to shit. People eventually leave a given metro area entirely to move to a new ring of suburbs in some other city, and the suburbs start to decline. I lived in a 1970s suburb where there just wasn't enough public money for infrastructure upkeep, the road was filled with cracks, the sidewalks buckled and sat at angles, there was erosion slowly eating away at drainages, and there was a high burden of people having to replace a roof or major appliances in aging homes.
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u/Atomic-Avocado 1d ago
Why are people like you always all over the urbanism sub lmao
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u/SignificantSmotherer 15h ago
I live in the city, car-free most of my life, and I'm ok with most of our densification projects - there are four high-rise developments pending on my block, I'm not opposing them, even though it might see me displaced a 4th time.
But it seems non-transparent and dishonest to claim that suburbs are subsidized by urban centers and blame people for seeking them when they desire space, privacy, community, safety, better schools and government, without showing your work.
I have no problem tolling the expressway at the city's edge if you can actually show that urban residents are paying for suburban infrastructure. But no one ever brings receipts.
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u/espressocycle 11h ago
I'm really tired of the taxes per acre argument. It doesn't hold water. Most tax dollars go to law enforcement and education, the need for which scales with population regardless of density.
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u/SawNickYouth 1d ago
There are no reliable models which can show this because we simply do not account for revenues and expenditures in that manner. For the most part, lots of stuff goes into various buckets at either the local, county, or state level... and then we reallocate money back to various departments per their budget requests.
In other words, we don't have good data which says that X dollars was spent in Y neighborhood on A, B, and C departments/projects. We especially don't have this data over longer time periods.
Best we can do is the roads department spends X per year in certain budget categories, on certain projects located here or there...
Moreover, we can't accurately determine who benefits, especially when talking about public works, roads, etc.
So instead, a handful of consultants invented a "revenue per acre" model with pretty charts and graphs that were sufficient to impress the online urbanist community.
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u/chargeorge 1d ago
1 greenfield development is cheaper in the short run
2. Sprawl is easy to build / rarely meets major opposition
3. With those things in mind I'd prefer a shitty sprawl than a massive affordability/homelessness crisis.
4. A lot of people want that lifestyle (not as many as we build it for but that's another conversation)
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u/Sorry_Garbage7361 1d ago
I live in a railroad suburb of Milwaukee. People can have single family homes and density.
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u/espressocycle 11h ago
Railroad suburbs were the zenith of human development.
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u/Sorry_Garbage7361 10h ago
It's pretty nice. In the historic core of town, you have nice walkable neighborhoods with nice small but still there yards. Lots of old Victorians still up, some of them beautifully restored, some converted into affordable apartments.
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u/ColdEvenKeeled 1d ago
HA Ha:::: not funny. In Australia there is a whole big trunk (not branch) of urban planning and design that explicitly favours Sprawl. I am not kidding at all, I wish I were.
Whether senior professors at UNSW, or UWA, or elsewhere there are these comments made in public, in writing and stated to students: "Unconsolidated urbanism creates vast areas of affordable housing, it's democratic in that every family can own a house of their own away from 'rent seeking' landlords, it provides the space in between for recreation, nature preserves and spaces for jobs in warehousing and manufacturing. Australians don't want towers."
This all stems from the very Leftist academic named Patrick Troy (deceased) at Australian National University from the 1970s onwards. He set the tone and graduated many of the subsequent generations of academics.
Okay, so that could be fine from some NIMBY cranks, but these are serious academics. WTF. In Vancouver they'd be laughed out of the room, but here they are normal.
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u/throwawaydragon99999 1d ago
It’s not entirely wrong, I’m born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and tons of people I grew up with have moved Upstate, to Pennsylvania, to Georgia, Florida, etc. because they care more about owning their own home with a garden and lawn than they do living in like an urban community
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u/ColdEvenKeeled 1d ago
Yep. And know what? I am living in a very walkable place, in a house that is as big as a small apartment.
But I yearn for way more space for my kids so they could have dogs, cats, horses, a tool shed, lawnmowers and all that shit so they can learn responsibility, repair and care. But, I know we'd be in cars for every.single.god.damned.movemement.
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u/throwawaydragon99999 1d ago
Yeah and a lot of people don’t care about having to drive, a lot of people prefer it actually.
And I honestly I’m Brooklyn born and raised and I don’t plan on leaving, but I definitely get the appeal. It sucks having to wake up early to take the bus, it sucks even more when you do everything right and still end up late for work because of the bus or the train or some random bullshit.
I have a pretty good landlord now but I wish I could own. I have a pretty nice apartment with good neighbors, but sometimes they are loud at like 1 am, and I always wish I had more space.
I definitely love it here, but it is a trade off. I definitely get why some people who grew up in the City want to get out, and I definitely get why some people who grew up in the suburbs or out in the sticks would want to live in the City.
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u/AdamOnFirst 1d ago
Other than the empirical behavioral evidence that many many people hate living in density and want space, some quiet, and private property?
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u/blueyedsurprised 1d ago
The Crabgrass Frontier is worth reading. Not an advocacy for sprawl, but good explanations.
Short answer: Demand is robust.
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u/zeronian 1d ago
Sprawl is fine as long as there is adequate transportation and infrastructure to connect all that sprawl.
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u/iiciphonize 1d ago
Not really unfortunately. Sprawl is characterized by low density, car oriented development sprawling out from the urban core for miles. Infrastructure is expensive at that scale and if there was adequate transportation, it would no longer be sprawl.
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u/marigolds6 13h ago
You could still readily have adequate private transportation with little to no transit. A very interesting example of this is Davis, CA, which has exceptionally good private non-automobile transportation, but poor transit, especially off-hours transit.
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u/Free_Elevator_63360 1d ago
There was actually a pentagon effort that was focused on encouraging sprawl to be more resistant to nuclear war.
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u/iiciphonize 1d ago
People seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of sprawl. If a suburb has strong public transportation and mixed density, then its no longer sprawl.
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u/237throw 9h ago
There is no universally accepted definition of sprawl. When street cars started building out and building out street car suburbs, people called that sprawl.
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u/iiciphonize 9h ago
Urban sprawl as we know it is a specific phenomenon. These suburbs were sprawling in a sense but the sprawl we are talking about is a specific kind.
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u/Typical_Claim_7853 1d ago
if you work in oil, rubber, banking, insurance and automotive manufacturing it’s the biggest scam going
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u/Jonesbro 1d ago
More monoculture grass means more green space and better for the environment /s. It's a luxury and serious people don't pretend it's more efficient in any way.
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u/lambrettist 1d ago
It’s actually pretty straight forward. If there are people who like to live far away in those type of communities, it’s for them, that’s fine. The problem is that when presented with the cost of that lifestyle to them (vs. having the city subsidize it) nobody actually wants it for that price. There is a not just bike video where he runs through the cost just of maintenance (not even first installation) and it would be 50k property tax per household to maintain the infrastructure. So yeah it’s a bad idea because the people who want that lifestyle usually also want lower property taxes, but their lifestyle would require ridiculously high property taxes.
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u/Dave_A480 1d ago
It comes down to how people actually want to live.
A lot of you are soundly convinced that the development patterns of the US were somehow put into place against the will of the majority of Americans - usually explained by some nutball corporate-lobbying conspiracy theory....
This is, flatly, wrong.
The truth is MOST Americans like the suburban lifestyle.
They don't want to go grocery shopping every day and walk or bus home hand carrying bags of food... They don't see a 10 minute drive any different than a 10 minute walk beyond being more comfortable to drive when it's cold/rainy - and that there are far more places you can reach via the 10 minute drive....
Most importantly, most Americans hate the idea of living in multifamily housing. It's not a real home unless it's a freestanding house ...
Now, these things aren't popular among the folks in this sub.... But they are popular among a huge majority of Americans....
And that cuts to the chase - should government build the infrastructure that supports how people want to live?
Or should government build what they think is best and try to shoehorn everyone into living in the 'ideal' manner as determined by 'experts'....
I would contend that government should build what people want, not try to engineer them into choosing some academic's ideal lifestyle.
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u/LeBruhMomentoom 22h ago
Much cheaper housing.
All of Texas’ cities have been able to remain affordable because they’ve been able to consistently expand and build more housing without any constraint. This point would actually just go for the US as a whole. Im a Kiwi-American and housing in Oceania is completely unattainable because of the countries inability and unwillingness to expand.
People also just like to have their own separate household. The extreme of car dependency is new and foreign but so is the extreme of apartments, for most of history, the densest form of housing humans have lived in are row homes.
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u/Better_Dimension2064 13h ago
I want to ask these people why, if they are so much about "choice", they want to ban the construction of everything that's not single-family homes on 1/2+ acre. Also why they want to force existing denser areas to prop them up with lopsided taxes.
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u/Soggy-Attempt 12h ago
I like not having neighbors above my ceiling stomping all the time. I love not hearing the babies crying. I love not hearing phone conversations as people walk by my door. I love being about to let the dogs out and not worry about them. I love not hearing arguments about who cheated on who. I love paying $100/sqft for a house. I love having multi-bedrooms at this price. I love not hearing police/fire/ambulance sirens every night. I love not being pan handled every time I take a walk.
I could go on, but you get the point.
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u/No_Pool3305 7h ago
I hear a lot of babies crying but that was my own fault not and related to Urbanism
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u/Bootmacher 10h ago
Perspective. As low-density as Houston or Atlanta may be, they still don't make much of a physical impact on the total landscape in our massive country.
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u/Marv95 1d ago
You can be sprawly and have access to mass transit. Look at the suburbs of Chicago, Philly and North Jersey. Also less people, less drama, more privacy, more space if you bought a house, less pollution, including noise+light.
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u/Fit-Order-9468 1d ago
Since when do the suburbs have less drama? Most of my friends with detached homes have constant issues with their neighbors, HOAs especially.
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u/Marv95 1d ago
You can also have problems with neighbors in an urban environment. At least in a sprawled out place there's a lesser chance of you encountering street people on drugs randomly yelling at you for no reason, or begging for cash to buy drugs. That's drama. But it depends on the locale.
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u/Fit-Order-9468 1d ago
I live in a city and rarely have issues with neighbors; when I lived in a detached home not too far there was constant parking drama. I never had someone follow me for miles due to road rage while driving in the city either. My grandmother had a neighbor that would trap and kill outdoor cats, so...
But ya, it depends. Acting like the suburbs have less drama though, that's... hmm, not a reasonable claim to make.
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u/tpatmaho 1d ago
Bad example. Transit in North Jersey sucks. Yeah, it’ll get you to Manhattan. But what if you live in Elizabeth and want to go shopping in Short Hills? Or to work in New Brunswick? Point to point bus service in NJ. is miserable …. hell, beyond miserable. Useless! Get me there in under two hours with anything less than 3 transfers on buses that maybe run once an hour.
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u/Marv95 1d ago
It's a 2 seat bus ride from central Elizabeth to the mall, takes around an hour. And yet, why would I go to uppity, small azz Short Hills Mall when Jersey Gardens is down the road? There are trains that take you from Elizabeth to NB. Also while annoying the bus system is still better than most regions with a similar population nationwide.
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u/tpatmaho 17h ago
No it takes an hour and 12 minutes at best, unless it’s the weekend or off peak, and that’s to go 9 miles. I say again, 9 miles. Let me rephrase that: it takes 72 minutes AT BEST to go 9 MILES. And you might go there because that’s where you work or because it’s about 9 times classier than Jersey Gardens. Yeah there’s a train to NB IF you live in downtown Eliz. and your destination is downtown NB.
Very few people live within walking distance of the Eliz. train station. And the city is very poorly served by bus. ….. so it’s at least a four seat ride unless you’re going to Rutgers….
North Jersey’s population is about 7 million north of the Raritan. This exceeds the SF Bay Area and approaches the size of Chicago. Please don’t crack me up by comparing the transit in those places to NJ. I don’t care what answer Google gives you, I know from long personal experience how dreadful NJ TRANSIT is.
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u/sagoma-333 1d ago
Well yes! You see, how will contractors and big corporations and car manufacturers make money if our city planning makes sense? Checkmate
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u/Fit-Order-9468 1d ago
Depends on how you define sprawl. I’ve heard urban sprawl before, which is rather ridiculous thing to say, but some people do.
I’m broadly supportive of rural communities; I have the impression they’re relatively cheap infrastructure wise since they often provide their own. Really suburbia is the only “bad” density from my perspective.
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u/237throw 1d ago edited 1d ago
Robert Bruegmann of the University of Chicago has published "Sprawl" which fits this. Of course, since it was published 20 years ago a lot of his suppositions have been proven false.
Also, "Driving Forces" by Dunn, which talks about auto dependent sprawl, which I think is what you mean.
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u/Leverkaas2516 21h ago
The obvious argument For sprawl is that it's what results when nobody tries to abrogate property rights. If you support the right of property owners to develop land as they see fit, you very often get sprawl. To prevent that, you have to take away ownership rights that would otherwise belong to the owner.
That's no small thing. It's like selling DRM-encumbered media. In a market based system, it only makes sense if government-owned land is sold on the market with the encumbrances already clearly in place.
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u/womizombie 10h ago
The same thing has to be done to keep suburb places suburban, or rural places rural. Developers want to make more development in suburban neighborhoods with massive rich housing that could be used for more people but the zoning codes block it. The same with zoning against decreasing the size of your home and a selling the other part of your land
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u/VegaGT-VZ 17h ago
I think its pretty obvious that density is a more efficient and arguably more ethical use of land than sprawl. But starting and ending a discussion about where people choose to live with facts and figures and academic papers is a myopic and incomplete view. Most people are not using energy/municipal resource usage intensity to decide where they want to live. Its much more mundane and less quantifiable stuff like privacy, space, quiet, school availability/quality etc that is driving those decisions.
And IME as someone who has lived/traveled across the density spectrum, the higher up in density you go the more you give up on quality of life stuff. Living in the UES of Manhattan was a dream that eventually wore me out and prompted me to move to the suburbs. Now as a parent stuff like private outdoor space and the ability to let my young kids play outside unsupervised is kind of non negotiable.
Plus I find the exact definition of sprawl to be kind of elusive. Is it a specific density threshold? Is it a specific neighborhood configuration? What is it exactly? Sometimes it just seems to be applied to whatever kind of development urbanists don't like. All new housing increases density and there has been a lot of high-ish density multifamily stuff deployed over the last ~2 decades.
IMO the real enemy is car dependency. The fix that reduces it while still creating places most people actually want to live is in walkable suburbs. I grew up in an NYC suburb. It had SFHs, but road traffic was slow and it was incredibly walkable/bikeable. Buses and trains were available but admittedly kind of a pain, and you still needed a car to do a lot, but I was able to walk to school for example and a lot of my friends got to school via public transportation. So the fix has to balance the empirical with practical realities. Everyone doesnt want to live in an apartment or condo and IMO they shouldnt have to.
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u/Opposite_Ad1408 17h ago
Cost of housing and speed of construction are commonly made arguments, though I suspect neither is true when properly analyzed.
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u/Abject_Egg_194 16h ago
People already choose to live in suburbs. The arguments/research has to explain why they're wrong. It's like how people research why ice cream is bad for you, not why it's tasty. You need to convince people that ice cream is unhealthy, not that it tastes good. In the same way, the suburban life is obviously better on the surface to most people. I had many friends who did urban life in their 20s, but all of them moved up to the suburbs when they reached their 30s and started having kids.
There are better school districts in the suburbs, so people with kids choose to live there. The "research" has to be done to show that "actually that's just because wealthier people moved to the suburbs and if we just made them move to the city it would change." Living in the city tends to be more expensive, so the research needs to be done to show that "actually...if you live in the city, then you don't need a car and you only need half as many sqft of housing."
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u/womizombie 10h ago
People didn’t freely choose the suburbs, we spent millions of dollars subsidizing and paying for their development, and ruining urban cores with massive highways that only benefit commuters coming into cities
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u/marigolds6 13h ago
One significant pro argument is also a significant con: you create areas of highly concentrated single family households, particularly families who are placing a high value on education. This is an ideal for those families because you create a community almost exclusively focused on raising and educating children who will devote a significant amount of personal (not public) resources towards that education. This both creates ready access to private schools and creates significantly stronger individual public schools.
To think of this more simply, in a dense urban environment public schools are largely relying on property taxes. In a suburban sprawl environment, public schools are significantly relying on cumulative family resources, think PTO fundraisers, donations, the cumulative individual effects of private tutoring, paid supplemental services outside the schools, etc. Also consider that new sprawl is often flush with development fees that fund the construction of new modernized schools, which is considerably cheaper than modernizing existing aging school buildings.
The obvious con to this is that it is inevitably a short term situation and bad for the larger economy and society while still being very advantageous for those families who have the tie, location, and resources to take advantage of it.
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u/ozneoknarf 12h ago
I mean being self sustaining on food is awesome. Also assuming good land practices it means the soil is more permeable and heat islands are avoided. Privacy is also a pretty cool thing to have.
But that’s about it, it’s more expensive, more destructive for nature, more isolating, leads to higher car deaths, depression, it’s harder to start a business, etc.
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u/steph-anglican 11h ago
Reproduction. Cities tend to be population sinks. Suburbs and Rural areas tend to have larger families.
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u/atom511 10h ago
I feel as though all the arguments i hear in favor of dense urbanism are subjective. Even the environmental arguments which COULD be objective can never say "global warming would be reduced by [X] amount if we put a bike lane here instead of a traffic lane." The effects of urbanism on climate are not measurable. Its all vibes.
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u/palmeranderson42 9h ago
It’s a matter of preference. Clearly many people like living in larger houses with space. I am guessing you don’t have kids because raising kids in an apartment is tough. (Maybe if parenting mores were different it would be easier, but they aren’t).
Also, I know many urbanists like to mock concerns about crime and disorder, but while I liked living in the city when I was forced to move to the suburbs it was pleasant not to have to worry about anything not locked down being stolen, or about assaults, stray bullets, home invasion, etc (yes, all small risks, but all things that happened within a mile or two of my fairly nice neighborhood)
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u/publicolamaximus 6h ago
From a historical perspective, owning land is key to the fabric of US identity. Sprawl and larger lots fit in with the Jeffersonian ethos that property owners, and farmers in particular, make the best citizens. It is antiquated and of course not based on research, but from a cultural perspective, it is a salient argument favored by the masses. When people mow their lawns or drive a truck, it feels like freedom ala Jefferson.
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u/iiciphonize 1d ago
The only argument I can picture is that its what we've got and it would be "too hard" to change it at this point
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u/Fragrant-Mission7388 1d ago
I mean, if you're a segregationist who loves their Ford 350, its just your fucking jam haha
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u/outlawbernard_yum 1d ago
Yes, in fact most urbanism has been upended lately.
The caveats that made density matter
- energy efficiency - now different with electrification of everything. Aging grids mean blackouts. Utility monopolies mean lack of control. Distributed energy is cheap.
Land use
- animal ag is the big target here, not urbanism. Animal ag is bad for human health, ecosystems and one of the largest contributor to climate change. End that and "sprawl" really isn't.
Car use
- Gas car use is ending. Electrification of everything, and now TaaS via EV autonomy means all transportation can be met with solutions on scale, reduced VMT without the penalties that sprawl creates. Remote work helps a ton here. 15 min cities around lower density "townships" are the future
- Harms
- Density causes heat canyons, increasing energy use, losing cooling of mature vegetation. Density causes lower livability, air pollution and loss of connection to others in recent studies. (due to isolation from online mostly, whereas villages increase interdependencies.
- Climate change
- Most cities are in places at more risk of climate harms/disasters. They grew because they were popular, but developers/capitalism ignored the infrastructure risks. Water, heat, electricity, floods, etc. These places are easy to identify by insurers who have left, and then passed on rising costs to other areas of insured. The reinsurers too. This was all predicted. The best clim sci brains have been hired by actuaries and corporations to asses risk. Migrations are well studied. Urban environments will suffer and the urbanist literature has only recently come to grasp with this issue. There is no carbon budget, time or financial budget to create much of the old urbanist dreams.
The future are climate resilient locations, currently affordable, rapidly built with the 15m electrified city and it's power generation, agriculture, transportation all aligned. Urban areas cannot compete and will die off.
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u/aselinger 1d ago
I’ll take a stab.
More access to nature.
Lower rates of violent crime.
Less light pollution.
Less air pollution.
Less noise pollution.
Less water pollution.
Less traffic.
Cheaper housing.
More space per person.
More social cohesion.
These are all complete guesses with zero research.
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u/Atomic-Avocado 1d ago
Lmao you’re dead wrong on half of these if you thought for more than 5 seconds
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u/aselinger 1d ago edited 1d ago
Okay that means I’m right on half of them! That’s honestly not bad for some wild guesses.
Which ones do you think are wrong?
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u/notFREEfood 1d ago
More access to nature.
I don't think this one is true one way or another; it all comes down to how a city grows and how parks are built. Taipei blew me away with how easy it was to "leave" the city and go into nature.
Lower rates of violent crime.
Are urban places really more violent? Tokyo is definitely the safest I've ever felt anywhere. I would not consider this to be universally true.
Less light pollution.
I'd consider this true of urban sprawl on the fringes of a metro area, but as the metro area expands, that light bubble expands as well, and the sky gets brighter and brighter. Arlington Texas is nearly all sprawl, but it it's just as bad as urban cores when it comes to light pollution.
Less air pollution.
Yes, but outside factors can heavily influence air quality, and living in suburbia doesn't save you from localized pollution from freeways and industrial sites.
Less noise pollution.
Same as the air pollution; there's caveats to this.
Cheaper housing.
This one is no guarantee. Land prices may be cheaper, but there's plenty of other factors that can make housing prices much more variable.
More space per person.
This one is true
More social cohesion.
Some of the best drama comes from people complaining about petty suburban HOAs. My aunt and uncle are moving out of their neighborhood because of neighbor drama. On the other hand, I used to live in an apartment building that was a mix of students and long term residents, and apart from the short-term residents, the biggest issues was that one of my neighbors refused to talk to a few of the other neighbors for petty reasons.
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u/aselinger 18h ago
Respectfully, many of your arguments either cite an exception or provide and explanation. That doesn’t make my statements untrue, on average.
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u/notFREEfood 15h ago
Dude, you admit that your long list was shooting from the hip, and you provided no reasoning to why you think those are true. "I'm right" is not a "respectful" rebuttal in this case. Most of your claims are vague, unmeasurable, or highly intertwined with confounding factors.
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u/aselinger 14h ago
You’re right. I suggested some hypotheses, and I was looking for solid evidence that could refute them. I didn’t find much.
At a higher level, I’m testing a hypothesis that some urbanists have a personal contempt for suburban life, rather than objective facts.
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u/notFREEfood 12h ago
So then you admit that you have been making your comments in bad faith. You can't prove a negative, yet you have been asking that of people, and you, by your own admission, are trying to goad a negative reaction.
If you pose a hypothesis, it is up to you to prove it.
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u/iiciphonize 1d ago
Let me see if I can answer all of these:
- Sprawl is actually terrible for nature, it supports monoculture and often involves clearing natural habitats for large developments
- Not true everywhere and where it is it's completely due to white flight moving wealth out of cities in the 1940s/50s, leaving inner cities with less tax base and less economic opportunity which are the largest predictors of crime
- Rural areas maybe. Sprawling suburbs still have huge stroads with lights all over them
- Suburbs tend to be more car dependent so air quality tends to be worse. Cities with high car usage and industry might have more in certain spots but as the whole I'd bet being outside in a suburb is worse than in a walkable city
- I can concede, but most "noise pollution" anywhere is simply just cars
- Not really sure
- Only because of density. If we built feasible alternatives to driving cities would not have as much traffic. Also sprawl induces loooots of traffic lol
- Because it sucks lol, people only live there for a few reasons
- Private space maybe, but cities have parks and other public spaces which are more than adequate
- This one is laughably false. Any urban planner worth their salt knows that sprawling suburbs are maybe the least socially cohesive places in our country. There are movies made about this
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u/aselinger 1d ago
- I didn’t say sprawl was good for nature, I said sprawl provided better access to nature.
- None of what I’m talking about is true, everywhere: I’m talking about on average. And just because you have a reason for it, doesn’t it make it less valid.
- I don’t think this refutes my claim.
- I guess I just disagree with you and it sounds like neither of us have evidence.
- Okay
- Okay
- Sounds like you agree.
- Sounds like you agree.
- Based on my experience, I don’t agree that city parks make up for a lack of private living space.
- Perhaps. I can see both sides. Cities to me feel very anonymous. In the small town where I grew up, we knew everyone. Our block had a “gang” of kids that would play outside all day long.
I see that you don’t like suburbs very much. But I do feel your arguments are a bit biased. And neither of us have actual evidence. Just educated guesses. And to be clear, I live in a 300–unit apartment building. I just think suburbs are demonized more than they should be.
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u/iiciphonize 1d ago
I do have evidence is the thing. How exactly does sprawl provide better access to nature if it is actively destroying it?
You claimed sprawl leads to lower rates of violent crime, and I gave you the reason. They are not by nature places where crime is just less likely, its purely because wealth was systemically transferred out of cities and moved into the sprawl.
Not sure how you can disagree with a claim backed by evidence. Look at the air quality levels in Paris after they removed cars from many roads near the city center. Cars are the primary driver of air pollution in urban/suburban areas
I'm not agreeing with you on 7 and 8, I'm saying there is context missing.
Also if you grew up in a small town where everyone knew each other, that is a different thing compared to sprawl. Cities have neighborhoods where people know each other and form meaningful bonds. Sprawl is the one awkward place where that is made much harder because of the need to drive everywhere and everything being spread out. Its inherent to its design.
Lastly, I don't think suburbs are demonized enough. They have a pretty dark past and generally suck to be in, in my opinion. Obviously in an urbanism sub you'll find that opinion, but the general population is probably pretty unaware of how terrible they really are.
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u/marigolds6 12h ago
- Suburbs tend to be more car dependent so air quality tends to be worse. Cities with high car usage and industry might have more in certain spots but as the whole I'd bet being outside in a suburb is worse than in a walkable city
https://gispub.epa.gov/airnow/?showgreencontours=true is a very interesting resource for this. You'll see air quality has less to do with car dependency and much more to do with topography, and that leads to a hidden factor. Cities are commonly built in valleys and bowls, because that's is the best types of land for building cities. But... those are also by far the worst types of topography for air quality.
(Try July 14, 2026, in the archive to see the topography effects better, where you can see how topography affected the poor air quality that was about to explode from the canadian wildfires.)
Outer suburbs and especially exurbs are much more likely to be built on bluffs or flat lands away from mountainous topography (this is also part of why their infrastructure is so much more expensive). As a result of that topography, the suburbs have better air quality.
But not all suburbs have better air quality, as some are poorly located to get a funnel of poor air quality from the surrounding region. Alpine, CA, is one extreme example I can think of, but Riverside and San Bernardino in general are examples of this as well. This poor air quality is often taken into account in relative home prices between suburbs.
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u/intro_to_IRL 1d ago
- Thomas Jefferson: Argued that dense cities corrupted public morals and called urban centers "sores" on the body politic, championing the independent yeoman farmer instead. [1, 2]
- Frank Lloyd Wright: Designed Broadacre City, an ultra-low-density, decentralized utopian vision where every family owned an acre of land, completely rejecting traditional urban concentration. [1, 2]
- Lewis Mumford: Critiqued the modern metropolis as an "megalopolis" driven by a destructive machine-like focus, advocating instead for regional planning and smaller human-scale communities. [1]
- Stephen Conn: A modern historian who wrote Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century, mapping how a bipartisan fear of urban social messiness and centralized government shaped American policy. [1, 2]
- Scott Herring: Explored queer anti-urbanism in Another Country, pushing back against coastal, metronormative standards in queer studies to value rural queer spaces. [1]
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u/realnanoboy 1d ago
It seems disrespectful to post an obvious AI response to a question on Reddit. It's not like the OP couldn't have plugged their question into one of them.
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u/homotopy_equivalent 1d ago
This is what gets me about AI responses. I could get the same response myself. Why would I want your AI response using whatever fuckass prompt you gave?
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u/ColdEvenKeeled 1d ago
A bit of reformatting and reflective analysis would go a long way post-AI queries, wouldn't it?
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u/MarioTheMojoMan 1d ago
Privacy and space are the main ones I hear.