Oh Great, More Subsidized Housing (No, Not That Kind)
Sarasota County, Florida, where I lived until last year, subsidizes a huge amount of housing. This might be surprising to you for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a place that has experienced dramatically escalating housing costs, including some of the highest rent increases in the nation during the pandemic. Second, it’s a red-leaning county in a red state: not the kind of place that has the political reputation for being all-in on low-income housi- oh, wait, you thought I was talking about low-income housing?
No, I’m not. The number of subsidized low-income units in that area is in the hundreds, maybe low thousands at best, in a county of 425,000 people.
No, I’m talking about a different kind of subsidized housing, one which doesn’t usually get slapped with that label but deserves to. May I present to you a couple of images from a recent presentation before the Sarasota County Planning Commission:
First, we have a concept illustration for 3H Ranch — a master-planned development consisting of more than 6,500 homes, 250,000 square feet of commercial space, 120,000 square feet of office space, and more than 400 acres of “green space” (whatever that means). Many if not all of its 14 neighborhoods will be gated communities; the retail and commercial component, as well as some apartments from what I can tell, will be in the two areas marked “village center.”
Scale can be deceptive on maps like this. This area shown here, although it looks much smaller, is about three miles from end to end. That’s a 20-minute bike ride or an hour’s walk, for perspective. (It’s safe to assume almost everyone who lives here will drive for almost every trip.)
3H Ranch is proposed by Pat Neal, one of the region’s most prominent suburban homebuilders. If it is approved, it will replace what is currently 2,700 acres (4.2 square miles) of cattle pasture on Sarasota’s exurban outskirts by the year 2040. The Planning Commission green-lit the project on April 18, and it will go before the County Commission in June.
This is only one of several comparable mega-projects slated to carve up rural eastern Sarasota County.
Alright, here’s Figure 2. This is a map of the intended future road network, taken from the county’s comprehensive plan. I’ve added a scale in miles to communicate the massive size of this area. In the mostly rural area east of Interstate 75, you are looking at hundreds of millions of dollars of planned road infrastructure.
Three projects in particular are crucial to the viability of 3H Ranch. I’ve marked them with stars. First (Star #1), the recent expansion of Clark Road to four or six lanes, depending on where you are. Second (Star #2), the planned extension of Lorraine Road as a four-lane suburban boulevard. And third (Star #3), the planned major expansion of a freeway interchange with State Route 681. Freeway interchanges around Sarasota have been costing in the tens of millions of dollars (our infamous diverging diamond cost the Florida Department of Transportation $80 million), and I have no doubt this one will be in the same ballpark.
That’s where the subsidy conversation comes in. On paper, these projects are not part of the 3H Ranch development proposal. They are public projects, undertaken by the county government and the state Department of Transportation. They are funded in part by a penny sales tax applied county-wide. They are planned in anticipation of general future growth; they are not being built specifically at the behest of developer Pat Neal.
Wink wink, nudge nudge.
In practice, there would be no need for these road projects if not for the mega-developments planned in the area, which will principally be bedroom communities for tens of thousands of commuters. The current traffic in these semi-rural areas doesn’t come close to justifying them. These projects are nothing other than a public subsidy to induce new private development. The county just won’t ever call them that.
It is no exaggeration to say that 3H Ranch could not be built as planned without these projects. It would otherwise only be connected to the rest of the county by Ibis Road, a two-lane road with a rural character that is already plagued with speeding and safety issues, according to nearby residents. There would be no way to accommodate the vast amount of traffic that a place like 3H Ranch will generate.
An already-completed section of Lorraine Road.
“This is the most aggressive road building in support of an overall network that’s ever happened in Sarasota County,” an engineer working on the projects is quoted by the Sarasota News Leader as saying at the April 18 planning commission hearing. “In support of an overall network” sounds a lot more like something plausibly in the general public interest than “in support of a bunch of new gated communities.”
There will be other sources of infrastructural subsidy for 3H Ranch and similar developments, too. The road network is just indicative of the scale of it.
No New Outward Expansion?
In "Escaping the Housing Trap," my new book with Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn, we say that cities — even those in need of more housing — should not subsidize the building of new single-family homes on their periphery. It’s important to recognize that the kind of “subsidy” we’re talking about does not consist of cutting a check to the developer. It consists most often of paying for infrastructure to make development viable when the development itself would not generate enough revenue to support that infrastructure.
No city needs to do this, and it is almost always done at a financial loss. Every North American metro area and smaller city has ample room for new housing in the gaps (unbuilt and underbuilt land) that can be found within its existing urbanized area.
I’m on record as a defender of pretty hard urban growth boundaries. That is, I think there are many cases where a city, or regional government, should draw a line on a map and say, “We will not expand urban services outside this line.” No new sewer lines, no new water hookups, no new roads. This is not to say the line can never move — a political process could result in redrawing it. But I think it’s useful, as a direct response to decades of North America’s Suburban Experiment, to have a line. It’s a politically viable way of, in practice, putting the lid on subsidies.
My experience in Florida has pushed me toward this position because I have watched for years as run-of-the-mill suburbia — an extremely car-dependent and resource-intensive development pattern that a lot of evidence suggests is financially insolvent — is laundered through complex planning frameworks and sold to the public as producing “managed growth” or “smart growth.” This is the case in Sarasota, as I’ve written about at length. It is the case elsewhere in Florida, too: In 2021 I did an in-depth case study of a development very similar to 3H Ranch in Collier County, and how clever accounting painted the project as paying its own way when, in reality, tens of millions of dollars in effective public subsidy were necessary to make it viable.
The suburban development pattern has tremendous momentum, and I’m not sure how better to stop it than to simply stop it. This would, of course, need to be accompanied by significant relaxation of zoning and other restrictions on building within the existing growth boundary, so that development can meaningfully shift to those locations.
This is a controversial viewpoint, and it’s one that honestly doesn’t sit easily with me either.
A central idea in a lot of writing here at Strong Towns over the years is that, left to market forces, cities tend to grow incrementally out (horizontally) as they grow incrementally denser and taller in the center. This produces a gradient of both development intensity and land value that looks like the following:
Horizontal expansion is a feature of cities all over the world, and a hard limit on such expansion is at odds with some basic ideas of urban economics.
It’s important, though, to realize how little the pure economic model of “incrementally out” has in common with what happens in places like Florida, Texas or Arizona today. Historically (and even to this day in much of the Global South), the edge of the city was where the cheap land was, where you could build something ad-hoc with few resources and little regulation. Over time, these neighborhoods would mature into something more prosperous and permanent.
That pattern is gone. It was killed by the Suburban Experiment. No one is building ad-hoc, cheap housing on the edges of a place like Sarasota. (And we wouldn’t like it if they were; it would be an affront to most Americans’ sense of orderly and forward-thinking planning.) The edge is the most regulated development environment of all: Essentially all the undeveloped land is in the hands of developers and speculators, and when anything is built, it is on a massive scale, targeted at the high end of the market, and accompanied by hundreds of millions of dollars in public spending intended to ensure the residents have a comfortable suburban level of services on Day 1, and so they don’t have to sit in gridlock in their cars.
If we want the edge of town to once again serve its function of being cheap land for cheap housing, then what we actually have to do is aggressively allow and encourage infill development. Saturate the market with new units built at comparatively low price points — backyard cottages and basement apartments (ADUs), spare bedrooms converted to efficiency units, mixed-use infill on old strip malls, and apartments on the sites of old parking lots and gas stations. Tank the market for developments like 3H Ranch, and at the same time, refuse to subsidize it to artificially create the market for it.
Do that for a couple of good decades, and maybe cities will start to once again hit the point where building on the edge (in the historic way, as an outward extension of the existing urban fabric, not a leapfrog commuter enclave) makes a lot of sense and is a financial winner. Right now, we’re just really far from that. And I don’t want to pay for well-to-do suburbanites’ subsidized housing anymore.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.