The sprawl vs. density question will never be resolved, but it keeps coming up in a variety of guises and generates a debate that continues to consume ordinary residents as well as urban scholars. It’s a debate that has flared up in an especially striking way this year, with a much-discussed New York Times article defending sprawl published a few months before the passage of a California law aimed at boosting urban housing density.
The article, by Times journalist Conor Dougherty, appeared in April, and the whole urban planning community has been talking about it ever since. Dougherty pointed to the national housing shortage, estimated to be at least four million units, and argued that there was simply no way to fix it by imposing dense infill development in existing urban corridors. “Infill,” Dougherty wrote, “is difficult and expensive.”
At a time when a quarter of the nation’s tenants are “rent-burdened,” spending more than 30 percent of their income on monthly rental payments, the dwindling supply of affordable urban apartment units is causing a dangerous inflation problem. Workers whose jobs are in city centers can’t find places to live near where they work, or if they can find them they can’t come close to affording the rent. So Dougherty’s conclusion is that the affordable-housing dilemma can be resolved in only one way: by making it possible for struggling renters “to move out — in other words, to sprawl.”
Dougherty focuses much of his argument on Texas, and insists that most of its metro areas have achieved stable growth and affordable housing prices by simply letting developers build new subdivisions farther and farther out from the urban core. He believes sprawl is the main reason metros in the Southwest have boomed in recent years, and he cites Dallas, where suburbs have sprouted out from the city in every direction, as being a leading beneficiary of economic and population growth. He writes favorably of the new suburbs, far from the Dallas urban core, that have looked for ways to cultivate urban-style amenities without being anywhere near the city itself.
WHILE URBANISTS WERE DIGESTING DOUGHERTY’S ARGUMENTS, a state senator in California was working on a totally opposite solution: override local regulations to allow dense new residential developments in the vicinity of public transportation.
Sen. Scott Wiener has been trying to pass a density bill in Sacramento for the better part of a decade, even before Gov. Gavin Newsom won the governorship in 2018 promising to build 3.5 million homes in the state by 2025. That promise is nowhere close to fulfillment: In 2024, the state authorized only about 40,400 new multifamily residential units; by comparison, this year New York City alone is expected to complete more than 50,000 new units.
Wiener insisted that transit-related density was the way to accomplish Newsom’s goal, and introduced bills promoting it in 2018 and again in 2020. Both attracted substantial legislative support but ultimately failed to pass, in part because of opposition from the state’s powerful construction unions. This year, Wiener added some union-friendly hiring provisions to the bill and managed to squeeze his “Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act” through in a series of close votes.
So starting next July, California developers will for the most part be authorized to build nine-story residential towers adjacent to transit stations and smaller multifamily buildings within half a mile. “Housing near transit,” Newsom said in signing Wiener’s bill, “means shorter commutes, lower costs, and more time with family.”
The bill Newsom signed is not exactly what Wiener really wanted. He originally wrote the bill, SB 79, to include the state’s 32 largest counties; that eventually got whittled down to eight. The counties must have at least 16 transit stations to be included, meaning that the bulk of transit-adjacent construction is likely to take place in and around Los Angeles, San Francisco and a few other large cities. And cities can wiggle out of the new provisions by submitting their own plans and getting them approved by state regulators. There will also be exemptions for historic districts, areas deemed to have a higher-than-normal fire risk and, most importantly, for some low-income neighborhoods.
Contractors constructing new buildings taller than 85 feet will, in effect, be required to use union labor and pay union wages. “We all want construction workers to be part of the middle class,” Wiener insisted in defending his deal with the unions.
SB 79 WON’T IGNITE A REVOLUTION in California’s urban planning world. But how much difference will it make? And is imposing rigid state rules on communities that have long been accustomed to making planning decisions on their own the best way to get new housing built? Those will be open questions for a good long time.
Actually, one can argue that SB 79 isn’t entirely about density. It’s also a fight over local control. Since 1954, many California cities have been operating under what’s known as the Lakewood Plan, under which they can contract with the county or a nearby metropolis for such basics as waste management, fire protection and police services while maintaining local autonomy over planning and zoning decisions.
The Lakewood Plan has been a boon to small towns and suburbs for 70 years. The communities that sign up for it can get basic services from the big city or surrounding county while keeping control over what gets built and who can live where. Roughly a quarter of California’s municipalities operate under it.
SB 79 essentially rewrites the Lakewood Plan for the state’s eight largest counties. And it isn’t just suburbs and small towns that are angry about that. Los Angeles’ political leaders see it as a threat to their autonomy on all sorts of other matters. The L.A. City Council voted 8-5 to denounce it. One council member complained that “Sacramento keeps passing one-size-fits-all land use bills with political carve-outs to get votes.” She was referring to the exemption of wealthy Beverly Hills from the strictures of SB 79, while surrounding Los Angeles neighborhoods did not get one. Another said the bill would mean “stripping away neighborhood voices, ignoring safety and infrastructure and handing the key to private developers.”
THERE’S NO DOUBT that the new state law offers some juicy opportunities to developers. But even if you take the local-control dissidents seriously, it’s hard to imagine where they will build ample new housing if they can’t create multistory buildings along heavily traveled corridors. Local governments aren’t doing anything much to promote this kind of development.
It’s true that tall new buildings near transit stations will mostly provide market-rate, even luxury residences. But there will be set-asides for affordable units. And the available evidence suggests that new development of any quality, even luxury development, eventually expands the supply of places to rent for those further down the economic ladder.
Sprawling subdivisions 40 miles out from a big city may solve a problem for would-be homeowners in the short run. But they also saddle their exurban communities with higher utility costs, environmental stresses and the endless traffic jams that drive even the exurbanites themselves to distraction.
One might say of California's density experiment something like what Winston Churchill once said of democracy: He called it “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.”
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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