With a severe lack of insight, the government felt that land would always increase in value, and it wouldn’t matter how many suburbs you built since the property values should be able to sustain all the roads, infrastructure, police, fire, and other essential city services. Today, people are questioning whether or not suburban home prices will ever rebound within our lifetimes or at all.

At the same time big government is putting out the racist propaganda to favor single family suburban homes, two more things were happening: war profiteering national security interests felt that keeping American automobile factories strong was vital as a means of national defense; and people got the idea that raising their kids in the suburbs where they could play in a big yard with a golden retriever while dad smokes his pipe and reads the paper while mom fixes dinner was in fact the pinnacle of human settlement.

The Ranch house: The pinnacle of American Civil Engineering.

The 50s Ranch house

So cars it was, the idea was a car in every garage. Maybe even two! You can buy your house in the suburbs with your government created loan package and take the federally subsidized (by subsidized, I mean 90% with 10% funds coming from the state) highway into the city every day for work in your American made automobile rolled off the line by a worker who was forced to join a labor union and works in a factory that the federal government has a war interest in keeping open.

Tell me what part of this is supposed to be the free market capitalism this country was built upon. Somehow I keep missing it.

To top it off, the idea of the crabgrass frontier spread like wildfire through advertising and word of mouth. People were sold this dream and they bought into it. Truth be told, it was an easy sell. You could escape the big bad noisy city for something quiet, pleasant, and most of all, keep the kids in a safe environment. People fell in love with the manufactured American dream, and customs followed suit. The new cool was to be able to cruise your ride up and down the boulevard and, unlike previous generations, as soon as you turned 18 you left the nest and went out to found a family on your own. Just like that, life was different.

  • Great article. There was a recent study done out of Asheville, NC by Joe Minicozzi that shows infill development and historic rehabilitation projects contribute substantially more tax revenue and jobs compared to less dense suburban development. This goes beyond politics, and shows that if more city leaders did some simple math, sprawl would be reduced, downtowns would be in much better condition, and preserved open space would surround denser cities.

  • “However this dream of land and home ownership wasn’t the result of market forces occurring naturally, it was the result of government intervention and social engineering.”

    It’s good to see a growing number of planners/economists tackling the sprawl=free market myth.