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Think of what the typical American city looks like today: its hollowed-out core dotted with parking lots, its run-down inner-city neighborhoods, its sprawl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How did this happen? Cities weren\u2019t like this a hundred years ago. They were real cities in the sense in which most people would understand the word, with jobs, businesses, houses, churches, and every other institution related to daily life concentrated around a dense center. Today, cities are almost the inverse of that, with a large population settled out in sprawl, and a hollowed-out center where far fewer people live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conversations about this transformation typically collapse into a focus on attitudes about cars. On one extreme, urbanists blame an American fetish for SUVs and highway construction for our lack of charming walkable neighborhoods and the destruction of areas that might have developed into such places. On the other extreme, suburbanists view urbanists as anti-car fanatics who want to use government policy to choke off the low-density single-family housing development that has characterized America since World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What they both tend to overlook is that almost all Americans today have spent their entire lives under a set of federal laws and rules that have helped hollow out the cores of our cities. Uncle Sam played a decisive role in creating the distinctive sprawling pattern we all now take for granted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes, the rise of mass-produced cars is a big reason cities today sprawl. But it can\u2019t explain why European cities developed so differently, given that their residents adopted the automobile around the same time as Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The explanation lies elsewhere: in the unintended consequences of a set of well-meaning choices by federal lawmakers in the 1930s and 1940s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first choice was an ambitious, even utopian, initiative meant to transform American cities for the age of the automobile and suburbanization. An example of a kind of central planning rarely seen in the United States, these bills were meant to make housing in the city affordable, clean, and safe, and to limit urban blight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second legislative choice was a series of bills initially passed to meet the needs of home borrowers during the Great Depression and the aftermath of World War II. Those subsidies, granted at the individual level and thus decentralized, would help build out the suburbs, and come to be the defining characteristic of U.S. housing policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Within a generation, the first of the two \u2014 the urban renewal and public housing effort \u2014 would be abandoned. But the second one \u2014 the subsidies for mortgages and private housing \u2014 would remain in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Americans are now three generations into a set of policies that, on the one hand, provide open-ended subsidies for sprawl and, on the other, do little to ameliorate the problems of the urban core \u2014 and maybe even aggravate them. Over time, this has come to seem like an unalterable fact of life and the work of the invisible hand of the market. But in this case, the hand is being nudged by Uncle Sam.<\/p>\n\n\n