America Should Sprawl? Not If We Want Strong Towns
There’s been a lot of buzz around Conor Dougherty’s recent New York Times piece, “Why America Should Sprawl.” The article argues that the country’s housing crisis is so severe—and infill development so insufficient—that we need to embrace aggressive outward expansion of our metro regions, what many would call sprawl, to build the millions of homes America needs. It’s a compelling, well-written piece, and it’s struck a chord with a lot of readers.
But from a Strong Towns perspective, the core argument is fatally flawed. Because sprawl doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It is the underlying problem.
Sprawl Doesn’t Build Wealth. It Consumes It.
Let’s start with the reality that this style of development works extremely well for a specific type of private developer. As Dougherty’s article illustrates, developers like Ross Perot Jr. are masters of the assembly-line approach: secure cheap land on the fringe, install infrastructure, and build tract housing as quickly as possible. At this scale, the profits are enormous, and the risks are low. The federal government provides generous support through mortgage guarantees, tax preferences, and highway spending, and buyers keep lining up for new homes.
But while the private sector gets the cash, local governments get the bill. Sprawling developments create long-term infrastructure liabilities—roads, water lines, sewer systems, schools, fire protection—that far exceed the revenue they generate. Local governments, which are really just collections of us acting together, are left trying to maintain and operate systems that are fundamentally unaffordable.
The Strong Towns movement has documented over and over again how these patterns of development fail the basic math of local finance. They produce an initial sugar high of economic activity, but they leave cities hollowed out and fragile. Infrastructure costs rise over time, but the tax base does not—because it's designed not to.
The suburban development model is built on the premise of stasis. Homes and neighborhoods are constructed to a finished state and then expected to remain unchanged for decades. That static approach locks in a fixed level of tax revenue, even as maintenance costs inevitably grow. It's not a bug. It's a feature.
And it’s why so many of these places become financially insolvent over time. First-ring suburbs built in the 1970s and 80s are now facing decline with no path to reinvestment because their low-density, auto-centric layout doesn’t create the underlying land value to support renewal.
Dougherty suggests that critics of sprawl are hung up on aesthetics—strip malls, cul-de-sacs, long commutes. But that misses the point. The real problem with sprawl isn’t how it looks. It’s that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t generate enough wealth to sustain itself. And when cities and regions aggressively build out instead of maturing from within, they commit themselves to unpayable liabilities that only get worse with time.
Texas Isn’t the Future. It’s Just a Slow Starter.
The article highlights booming Sun Belt metro areas like Dallas-Fort Worth as examples of how sprawl is already happening, like it or not. But Texas isn’t disproving the critics of sprawl—it’s just a few decades behind California.
California boomed with outward growth in the mid-20th century. Then it hit the wall. Infrastructure couldn’t keep up. Local governments faced budget crises. Anti-tax revolts and anti-growth regulations followed. Now California is trying, painfully, to retrofit its cities with mandated infill housing and top-town transit investments, but the process is slow and contentious.
Texas today is merely copying California’s approach—it’s just earlier in the process. What California experienced in the late 20th century, Texas is beginning to feel now: a flood of growth, a boom in low-density housing, and the eventual reckoning with infrastructure shortfalls, fiscal imbalances, and political backlash.
As Mayor Eugene Escobar of Princeton, Texas, put it, his town boomed with affordable homes, but now it’s struggling with traffic, overburdened infrastructure, and a lack of basic amenities. The city’s leadership is trying to build a real downtown, attract jobs, and create public spaces—but they’re doing it after the fact. That’s not planning. That’s triage.
The Land Value Disconnect
The article leans on architectural historian Robert Bruegmann to argue that sprawl has always been with us—that cities like ancient Rome and 19th-century New York grew outward through buffer zones of low-density housing. But those historic suburbs were connected to strong urban cores and had development patterns based on rising land values. People bought on the edge knowing the city would grow around them, and that growth would mature their neighborhood and increase their land’s value over time.
Today’s suburbs are different. Highways and zoning have broken the feedback loop between location and value. These developments are typically built to a fixed, finished state and then locked down through zoning codes that discourage or prohibit change. There’s no natural process of maturing or intensification. No organic evolution. Just a one-time buildout, followed by stagnation and decline.
That’s the fundamental disconnect missed by many single-focus housing advocates: adding more housing is important, but if the development pattern itself is fiscally unsustainable, building more of it won’t solve the problem—it will deepen it. Suburban sprawl can temporarily make housing cheaper, but it comes at the cost of long-term fragility. And because the land value doesn’t rise and invite reinvestment, these neighborhoods don’t mature—they rot. The result is a mounting liability for local governments and a widening gap between our housing supply and our civic solvency.
If we’re serious about housing affordability, we can’t just count units. We have to care about where and how we build. We need places that invite growth, intensification, and reinvestment—not disposable neighborhoods that burn bright and fade fast.
This Isn’t About Culture. It’s About Math.
Dougherty hints that much of the resistance to sprawl comes from cultural aesthetics or class snobbery. There is some truth to that in the public discourse, and it’s unbecoming. But from a Strong Towns perspective, the critique is rooted in math, not morals. We need development patterns that actually pay for themselves—places that grow stronger over time, not more fragile and dependent.
When you sprawl outward, every new house adds more to the public obligation to maintain. More pipes, more roads, more services. But there’s no corresponding bump in tax productivity. Instead, you create what we call a "bad party"—a place where every new resident consumes more than they contribute. It may start out exciting, but eventually the party falls apart because the community is stretched too thin.
A Strong Town, by contrast, is a good party. It’s the kind of place where every new person who shows up brings something that adds to the whole—more productivity, more capacity, more resilience. It’s a feedback loop where neighborhoods mature and improve over time, where reinvestment is welcomed, and where the math of growth works in everyone’s favor.
The real path forward isn't to pretend a retreat into endless outward expansion is possible—it's a return to building places that grow stronger over time. That means building incrementally. It means creating neighborhoods that can evolve and adapt, where each new investment reinforces the ones that came before it.
This is the only approach that allows us to respond quickly to housing shortages without locking communities into long-term insolvency. It’s the only model that scales without collapse. Instead of burning through land and public budgets, we invest in places that can grow more valuable over time. We need to invest in people and in place. Focus on land value—not just unit counts. Make sure every new development builds capacity by adding more strength, not more fragility.
Yes, we need more housing. But we don’t just need more units. We need better places. And those places don’t emerge from assembly-line development on the edge. They come from communities that are built to rapidly adapt, mature, and endure. America doesn’t need to sprawl. America needs Strong Towns.
Charles Marohn (known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues) is the founder and president of Strong Towns and the bestselling author of “Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous. He spreads the Strong Towns message through in-person presentations, the Strong Towns Podcast, and his books and articles. In recognition of his efforts and impact, Planetizen named him one of the 15 Most Influential Urbanists of all time in 2017 and 2023.