"Hey, young people, give up on that dream of a nice house with a garden."

"Californians need to give up on their dream of a “ranch-house lifestyle” and an “ample backyard” and the state should become “more like New York City..."

The Antiplanner reports the words of a Los Angeles columnist. We are so familiar with this sentiment, not always expressed this way but always the same - suburbia is 'urban sprawl' filled with nasty motor cars and boring people, what we need is dense walkable cities filled with happy smiling young folk. And this planning orthodoxy is supported enthusiastically by the rich older people who live in those parts of the city's margins that, without planners, would meet people's dreams of a house with a garden in a nice area.

The first response to this criticism is, of course, to say that modern young people don't want to live in suburbs, they don't want a boring house with a garden but something altogether more funky. Think again:

According to NAHB’s study, 66% of respondents who were born in 1977 or later said they would prefer to buy a home in an outlying suburb or close to a suburb, while only 24% preferred buying a house in a rural area and 10% would rather have a home in the center of a city.

Review after review, survey after survey tell us that people's preference is for suburbia. For sure people also want to live a short ride from work and have access to entertainment but compared to lower crime, good schools, more living space and a private outdoors these things soon become less important.

The problem (which is the point of The Antiplanner's piece) is that the planning system - in the UK as much as in California - makes it very difficult to meet home buyer's aspirations affordably. And that this system's defenders often base their argument on misinformation or misunderstanding - here The Antiplanner points out some surprising facts about "Urban Sprawl Central" or Los Angeles as we usually call it:

• Many consider it sprawl, yet it is the densest urban area in the United States: 7,000 people per square mile vs. 5,300 for the New York urban area (and a national average of 2,500), so to become more like New York it would have to add 350,000 acres to its land area.
• Many think it has been paved over with freeways, yet it has the fewest freeway miles per capita of any major urban area: about 53 miles per million residents vs. 68 in New York (and 122 for the national average urban area), so to be more like New York would require building 188 miles of new freeways.
• Many think that all it needs is to build more rail transit, yet for every new rail transit rider it has gained, it has lost five bus riders, meaning rail transit is more harmful to transit riders than even Uber and Lyft.

Our misperception about how much land is developed for housing ('concreted over' to use the CPRE-approved terminology) perhaps rests on the fact that most of us live in urban areas surrounded by housing. What we seldom do is look at an actual map:



Harrogate District Council (for those who don't know, Harrogate is a wealthy rural district in Yorkshire, North of Leeds and Bradford) expects that all of its housing growth can by met by development near the circles on this map. The rest of the district, well over 90%, is open countryside. You could double the total amount of homes in this district and it would still be overwhelmingly open, rural and beautiful.

The unholy alliance between planners who think suburbs are bad and NIMBYs who want to protect their rural idyll (plus the inflated house prices) acts to prevent other people from having the homes they want - homes that, in times past, were affordable on average wages. Instead millennials are told that they must carry on living in rabbit hutches piled on top of each other in those delightfully walkable, cycle-friendly cities (with their air pollution, knife crime and dangerous roads).

There is nothing wrong with suburbia yet we live in a planning culture that, for huge swathes of the country, prioritises golf courses, race courses and airstrips over building the homes that people want to live in. Surrey famously has more land given over to golf than to housing (although it's an urban myth that the whole country does this) - if just 20 of Surrey's 118 golf courses were developed for housing that would provide close to 20,000 lovely suburban homes for tomorrow's families.

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