I say that to say this- I didn’t move way out here to get away from some ethnic group or to some other insidious reason. I moved here because I have a large (blended) family and we wanted to own land. It’s a popular narrative to blame sprawl on racism or living above your means. I think the real reason is way more boring than that. Move away from a population center and things get cheaper. Gas is cheaper. Groceries are cheaper. Price per square foot is much cheaper. Those who are upper middle class can live well in the sprawl so of course they do. I have neighbors of every race religion and culture here. They all want the same thing- decent schools elbow room and some fresh air...
And what do you get when you have a huge number of people looking to buy brand-new houses? Urban sprawl, there's not really any way to avoid it.
The problem is this is a fundamentally unsustainable proposition. The US is hitting those problems now and it's not pretty. It's not just gridlock but problem that once things stabilize, maintaining sprawl costs more than maintaining a compact city[1]. The roads and the schools in the suburbs are often good only when they're new - once they age, the problem become visible (California is harbinger for the rest of sprawl land, this state has the older sprawl, remember). Poor services can cause an area of sprawl to become undesirable and then it's hard to recover - public transit is hard to add when distances are large but you can still wind-up poor people lacking vehicles in the hinterlands.
[1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
What could that possibly be? I don't know of anything even on the horizon. Rails and steel wheels are more energy efficient but far more costly to build and maintain. Other nations use rail well by ... not having sprawl. Suburban sprawl essentially rests on the private automobile. As the gp essentially said, the draw of sprawl is a big house and a car, which can be nice 'till your whole planet is on fire and you're choking in rubble (I live in California, can you tell - But Texas will notce climate change too, if they haven't). A road is a just a flat piece of ground, it's pretty hard to find something simpler. Freeways are cheaper to build than railways. But the cost of rebuilding gets huge.
So basically, there are not solutions to these problems. We've basically hit Decline of the Roman Empire levels here. That empire took hundred of years to fall. I'm hoping things last past my lifetime.
Also kudos for not being a racist...
But you might want to take a look at history. The US government actively encouraged urban sprawl with low-cost loans and redlining starting with Roosevelt and the New Deal.
"Beginning in 1934, the Federal Housing Administration (HOLC) included in the FHA Underwriting Handbook “residential security maps” used to help the government decide which neighborhoods would make secure investments and which should be off-limits for issuing mortgages[...] Green areas were were explicitly homogenous, lacking “a single foreigner or Negro.”
SOURCES:
- https://www.thoughtco.com/redlining-definition-4157858
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen...
- https://www.businessinsider.com/how-redlining-kept-black-ame...
I've heard that before, but the DOT claims evacuation was a minor factor. From https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/interstatemyths.cfm#ques...
President Eisenhower supported the Interstate System because he wanted a way of evacuating cities if the United States was attacked by an atomic bomb.
President Eisenhower’s support was based largely on civilian needs—support for economic development, improved highway safety, and congestion relief, as well as reduction of motor vehicle-related lawsuits. He understood the military value of the Interstate System, as well as its use in evacuations, but they were only part of the reason for his support.
Defense was the primary reason for the Interstate System.
The primary justifications for the Interstate System were civilian in nature. In the midst of the Cold War, the Department of Defense supported the Interstate System and Congress added the words “and Defense” to its official name in 1956 (“National System of Interstate and Defense Highways”). However, the program was so popular for its civilian benefits that the legislation would have passed even if defense had not been a factor.
So I sort of suspect that evacuation was a bigger factor than the government admits, but that's purely speculative. Just like suburbanization there are definitely a lot of reasons the interstates happened.
>It is hereby declared to be essential to the national interest to provide for the early completion of the "National System of Interstate Highways", as authorized and designated in accordance with section 7 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944. It is the intent of the Congress that the Interstate System be completed as nearly as practicable over a thirteen-year period and that the entire System in all the States be brought to simultaneous completion. Because of its primary importance to the national defense, the name of such system is hereby changed to the "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways". Such National System of Interstate and Defense Highways is hereinafter in this Act referred to as the "Interstate System".
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-70/pdf/STATUTE-7...
There were also non-government actors pushing this - banks redlining the suburbs in order to achieve soft segregation in areas without formal Jim Crow laws on the books, for example.
The legacy of this is the most segregated city in the US, Milwaukee, is in the north, and a major cause was redlining.
It is true that decentralization was viewed as a major component of nuclear survivability, particularly in the earlier part of the cold war. This was the time period during which the FEMA (today's name) crisis relocation program was being devised, for example, and the high cost and complexity of crisis relocation (which, in an earlier form, was a major motivation for the Eisenhower freeway system, to the extent that it's probably fair to say that it was the main motivation with materiel movement as a second) served to highlight the inherent vulnerability of dense cities and keep it very much in the minds of government planners. Decentralized cities had an inherent advantage to planners in that money could be saved on crisis relocation efforts. Of course the crisis relocation program was never fully implemented, but the way of thinking was fairly influential.
The federal government had an enormous role in suburbanization of US cities in many, many ways, which is actually part of what makes it hard to address this point. Support for suburbanization was not coming just (or even primarily) from FEMA, all kinds of federal agencies had a hand. Much of the urban renewal work of the 20th century took the effective form of relocating poor people to the suburbs and replacing their inner-city housing with industrial/commercial/transport, for example the Model Cities program of the late '60s. This was in part a result of the general feeling that the inner city was where poor people lived and so improving their economic situation required getting them out of it, part of it was merely the practical issue that substantially improving a dense area is a lot more expensive than razing it and build something new there. I don't know if these programs were strongly influenced by crisis planning, they probably were at least in part, but it seems unlikely that crisis planning was a much bigger influence in federal advocacy of suburbanization than the more organic trends of white flight and urban decay that came out of a set of race and class relations, in a potent combination with some simple budget and timeline considerations.
My point is that nuclear planning was a factor, but the massive suburbanization of the postwar decades originated from many factors out of which nuclear crisis planning was only one, and I'm not convinced that it was one of the bigger ones in the end. Yes, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists very openly advocated for suburbanization of cities and that view was influential, but at the same time so much of suburbanization was motivated by a new vision of the American dream that came out of the peculiarities of post-war economics and demographics, racism, the radical popularity of the automobile (which not only enabled low-density areas but often required the destruction of high-density areas to provide freeway access to business districts), and probably at least a few other things.
Any claim that "urban sprawl is a result of x" where X isn't a list of things is probably pretty hard to defend. A complete change in not just urban planning but people's patterns of life tends to require a confluence of factors.