Sustainable Suburbs and the American Dream

The refrain is endless and supposedly beyond debate. Suburban sprawl is a dangerous blight on the land. The conventional wisdom is unequivocal. The titles in prestigious academic journals don’t hide their bias. “Ending Suburban Sprawl As A Climate Solution.” “Cities Versus Suburbs: The Environmental Impact.” “The Suburban Street Design That’s Been Driving Emissions Since WWII.”

Sprawl. Cities vs. Suburbs. “Driving emissions.” Oh no! Save the planet. Stack and pack.

All of this is demonstrably false, and worse, much worse, it denies younger generations of Americans and recently arrived immigrants access to the American dream. It also reflects a profound lack of faith in technology and innovation and a grossly flawed economic model. The politics and policies that reflect these false premises can change. There is no reason that private developers cannot again make a profit without subsidies, building subdivisions that people making moderate wages can afford to buy.

The first premise that has to change is the size of the house. The average home in America today is 2,400 square feet; the median is 2,200 square feet. As an average, this is ridiculous. Bear in mind that garages, which are easily converted to livable space, typically add at least another 400 square feet. Also note that many new homes are two stories, with significant lost potential square footage because they have two-story living rooms and foyers.

All of this is excessive. It might be fine if all that extra floor space didn’t double the cost. Half the size won’t quite halve the price, but it will help a lot. I grew up in a 1,200-square-foot home. It had three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The home included a kitchen that opened to a formal dining room as well as a casual eating area. The front door opened up into a living room that was connected to the dining room, the casual eating area, and a hallway to the bathrooms and bedrooms. Our family of four lived in that house for decades and never felt the least bit cramped. Many of my neighbors, in houses of the same size, were families of five or six, or more. How did we do it?

One reason was that my parents’ generation had lower expectations. Most had grown up in apartments, and a home with a yard was an incredible improvement. These expectations were transmitted to us, and kids in large families shared rooms equipped with bunk beds or twin beds, and nobody felt deprived.

Another reason we could live so well in a 1,200-square-foot house was that the absurd amenities considered necessities in today’s homes were absent. There wasn’t a “great hall” of completely non-functional space. There weren’t walk-in closets, and bathrooms were functional instead of the spacious paeans to narcissism that we see today. By reducing the entry hall, the closets, and the bathrooms to modest dimensions, the “livable space” was magnified.

We also enjoyed our modest homes because we had ample yards. A 1,200-square-foot home with a 400-square-foot garage only occupies 26 percent of a 6,000-square-foot lot. And a 60-by-100-foot lot meant that every home had room for an 8-foot-wide alley on both sides of it and a backyard big enough for gardens, trees, lawns, and play areas.

Fly over most American cities, and you will easily recognize these suburbs. They’re the ones with so many trees you can’t see the homes. These are the beautiful legacy neighborhoods we grew up in. Compare that to the supposedly obligatory McMansions that typify suburbs built in more recent decades. A sea of rooftops, jammed so close together you can reach out a side window and touch the exterior wall of your neighbor’s house. No room for trees. Yards so small you can barely cram a patio into the backyard space. And residents are choking on their mortgages as much as they’re choking on the fact that they’re piled on top of each other.

This is no exaggeration. In California, “low-density” zoning, taking into account accessory dwelling units, frequently allows up to 14 units per acre, making two stories mandatory. A private yard with trees in such a “low-density” environment is not possible. In California, low-density is high-density.

But how horrible would it be for Americans to reembrace genuinely low-density housing? What would the geographic impact be of building homes again on 6,000-square-foot lots?

As it turns out, not much. Consider the City of San Jose, where the average home sells for $1.4 million, and the average rental is $3,300 per month. There’s plenty of open land within San Jose’s city limits, but its “urban service boundary” prevents development. Within the southern city limits is the 7,400-acre Coyote Valley, some of it valuable farmland, most of it grazing land. If that valley were developed with homes on 6,000-square-foot lots, with an equal amount of land dedicated to roads, parks, schools, and commercial and industrial areas, and occupied by families of four, it would accommodate 107,000 people. And if those homes were 1,200 square feet, single-story homes, instead of 2,400-square-foot homes, they would cost far less.

But no. The entire Coyote Valley, along with literally hundreds of thousands of acres of endless surrounding foothills, is off limits to development. Imagine if it had been like this 50 or 100 years ago. Nothing would have been built.

Here is where the holistic misanthropy of anti-suburban politics and policies comes into full focus. It isn’t just the permits and “impact fees” that can cost developers over $100,000 per home. It isn’t just the building codes that will mandate some or all of the following: EV charging, heat pump, solar panels, whole-house battery, air sealing for the entire structure, etc.—that can easily add another $100,000 to the construction cost. And it isn’t just the mandatory set-asides for low-income housing that force up the price on the remaining percentage of homes that can be sold at a market price. It’s also the regulatory war that California’s state legislature has waged on infrastructure.

This war has been ongoing since the 1970s and escalates every year. To reduce it to the simplest terms possible: tax revenue that was once used to fund transportation, water, and energy projects now goes to social programs. But the reason these social benefits are needed is that at every turn, the political elite who run California’s one-party state have created scarcity—inadequate roads, rationed water, expensive energy, and a housing shortage. This has imposed punitive costs on households and businesses, creating the need for government benefits where none had previously existed.

This whole economic model is flawed and unsustainable. And one of the fundamental premises of this failing model is the idea that we don’t have enough land. California, of course, is a perfect example of how ridiculous it is to claim we are running out of room for suburbs.

Imagine a hypothetical case in which California’s population abruptly increased by 10 million people, and that all of these people lived in sprawling new suburbs in four-person households, with each home on a quarter-acre lot (12,000 square feet). If an equal amount of space were allocated for everything else—roads, parks, schools, retail, commercial, industrial, etc.—the total land area required would be less than 2,000 square miles.

This is an astonishing fact. If 10 million people moved into sprawling ultra-low-density (by today’s standards) suburbs, California’s urban footprint would grow from 5.0 percent of the state’s total land area to a whopping 6.3 percent.

If California were to merely reduce its regulatory environment to reasonable levels, it would attract private investment while lowering the share of government investment required for more water and transportation infrastructure. Energy development would require almost no government funding in a deregulated environment. Technologies only beginning to come to fruition in land and air transportation, fuels, power generation, water collection and treatment, and home construction would, if only they were encouraged instead of suppressed, usher in a new era of affordability.

These factors—modest-sized homes on decent-sized lots (allowing owners to add rooms in the future), deregulation, government spending redirected away from social programs and back to practical enabling infrastructure, and a policy environment that embraces new technologies and innovation—will bring back the suburbs that defined and delivered the American dream. It is absolutely possible and absolutely sustainable.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Edward Ring is the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013. Ring is the author of several books, including The Abundance Choice – Our Fight for More Water in California (2022), and The Analyst’s Cookbook: Making the Case for Abundance Using Numbers (2026).