There is a uniqueness to the landscape of modern American cities that is one of the envies of the world and has been emulated in many other countries: the suburb. Most don’t remember that the modern suburb is a relatively contemporary concept that did not appear until after World War II.
The father of the modern suburb was Bill Levitt. In the 1940s, he began construction of his first successful housing development, which was located on almost 20 sq. miles of land in New York near Hempstead, Long Island, and was named Levittown.
An assembly line construction method enabled Levitt to build more efficiently than other developers at the time, with teams of specialized workers following each other from house to house to complete incremental steps in the construction. Emulating Henry Ford’s assembly line, he brought the same techniques adopted in automobile manufacturing decades before to the building of post-World War II housing.
Sprawl. There is much written in the popular press about the endlessly expanding suburb that has for decades been regarded by planners and environmentalists as a nightmare that needs to be slowed or stopped. The term of art became sprawl, a word that is used to deride edge city development, evoking lollipop-shaped cul-de-sacs lined with homes so similar they can be distinguished only by the cars parked in front.
Since the mid-20th century, critics have blamed sprawl for many of the country’s deepest and most lasting problems, accusing it of gobbling up farmland, emitting greenhouse gases and carving American cities into rings of monotonous neighborhoods whose residents suffer two-hour commutes.
Some anti-sprawl legislation successfully limited or prohibited this sort of growth in much of the country. There are laws throughout the nation passed decades ago that have slowed the pace of construction and made housing more expensive, contributing to one of the worst affordable housing crises in our history.
After two decades of underbuilding, economists estimate the country’s housing shortage at somewhere between four and eight million units. Last year was among the most difficult on record to buy a home; thus, a quarter of tenants now spend more than half their income on rent and utilities.
The rising cost of rent has become one of the main drivers of inflation, which was a defining issue in the 2024 presidential election. Housing costs have made businesses less productive by preventing people from moving to the job markets most in need of workers.
The Solution? With apologies to the anti-sprawl cohort, it’s build more houses. That is a simplistic answer, but the challenge is where and how to get it done. And after years of attempts to restrict sprawl, the pendulum is swinging the other way as dozens of cities and states have tried to spur construction by passing laws that aim to make neighborhoods denser by removing single-family zoning rules, reducing permitting times, and exempting housing in established neighborhoods from environmental rules, all adding to suburban sprawl.
Interestingly, the edges of large cities have looked like our sprawl for most of history. The fringes of ancient Rome were known as “suburbium,” meaning outside the walls. There, and in so many other large cities, growth has almost always pressed outward through a buffer zone that is neither fully urban nor rural. This wasn’t a permanent condition but rather the first step of growth, as over time, the buffers filled in and were often incorporated into the city core.
Putting aside the significant issues of affordability and high interest rates, there is no reason to believe that suburban growth will not continue in America for the next century or two just as it has for the last 80 years.
At a high level, it represents the only real solution to America’s ongoing housing needs. And as has been the case historically, strong, balanced new home construction is an important pull-though of aggregates.
Pierre G. Villere serves as president and senior managing partner of Allen-Villere Partners, an investment banking firm with a national practice in the construction materials industry that specializes in mergers and acquisitions. He has a career spanning almost five decades, and volunteers his time to educate the industry as a regular columnist in publications and through presentations at numerous industry events. Contact Pierre via email at [email protected]. Follow him on X @allenvillere.