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Why have we done this? It seems to go back very far, at least to the 30s or so. The two leading explanations I've heard are:

(1) It's a jobs program in the form of a subsidy for the construction and automotive industries, both of whom are huge employers.

(2) It's to disperse the cities to make them less attractive bombing targets, especially for nuclear weapons.

The latter seems less likely if it goes back to the 30s but more likely as an explanation for Cold War era efforts to disperse cities.

Anyone have any other potential explanations?

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I have not specifically studied the policies stated in this piece to be 80 years old and credited to Herbert Hoover's administration, but those policies should date to the 1930's and the Great Depression. I know that one of the things they did during The Great Depression was just tried stuff, often crazy sounding stuff, and hoped something worked because things were so desperate. A lot of counterintuitive things did help, thus they stuck around. No one has really studied if some of those things were a good idea in that specific time and place versus were a good idea generally.

I have studied housing history in th US dating to about WW2. I have written a number of long comments in various places on the internet and injected a bit of that into some blog posts. I get tired of repeating myself (and being mostly ignored), but the nutshell version is that poor people went to war, savings rates during the war were as high as 50% for some parts of the war, and the soldiers came home with money in the bank and military benefits that helped them buy houses and go to college. So there was enormous and unprecedented housing demand and the nation as a whole rose up to meet it at impressive speed. The demand was for family detached homes and it gave birth to the modern suburb. Since then, our demographic has differentiated while our housing policies, ideals, and financing mechanisms have converged on this one standard that served the nuclear family well but does not serve our current population well.

Thank you for the explanation! Do you also have any insights into the US obsession with keeping different usage types separated in addition to low density? I just don't understand how anyone could see it as a bad thing to be able to walk to a cafe or small grocer. That and low density doesn't seem obviously mutually exclusive.

Off the top of my head: If you look at studies of sense of personal space, Americans and criminals generally claim more space as "theirs" than most people. So, we may like our homes to be away from other things because we get cranky and aggressive when anyone gets in our space.

I live without a car. I am still trying to figure out how to reconcile having stuff in walking distance with wanting to be left the hell alone. The result: My walking stamina has steadily increased since I got rid of my car. So the definition of "walking distance" has changed in my mind.

Before the 1930s there were the 1800s. Mines built entire cities and paid people in corporate dollars that could only be traded at corporate stores. Then there were the depressions at the start of the century. I could imagine outlawing mixed use development as a reaction to corporate abuses. Or, worse yet, a desire to minimize risk from natural disasters and fires. From the people I've known from the 30s, it could simply be personal preference. Oh and tract housing.

For so very close to all of the 20th Century, people really liked cars. The housing stocks dated to at the latest the 1920s. Land prices favored suburbanization. Two cars wasn't really a thing until the 1970s.

Places like New York City had urban blight because of peculiarities in the tax code. You could live in the 1950s and 1960s in NYC in a poor quality apartment cheaply - it wasn't until the 1970s that price started going up. As I've been told, people left larger cities in the '50s a lot because of drugs and because industry was vacating city centers. And there's always white flight.

The US has a lot of land and not everyone likes to be squeezed into a dense city.

" The US has a lot of land and not everyone likes to be squeezed into a dense city. "

Correct, but unfortunately this attitude has been used to justify preventing anyone _else_ from living in a city because Joe and Jane homeowner like living in a quiet country village right next to a major metropolis. See also: the massive hypocrisy in that is every city on the peninsula except SF. How can they claim to support affordable housing without supporting building housing, ideally near transit so people aren't burdened with the expense of a car?

I am one of those homeowners that just laughs at the accusations thrown our way. The gated community is only an evolution of the gated high rises, where you either have to be buzzed in or get past the door man. If anything they are more egalitarian than any high rise setup because your home is clearly visible from the street and neighbors.

With regards to cities, blame the NIMBYs and their political allies who uses all sorts of "livability studies, heritage laws, and more, to prevent affordable housing from being built. This is simply code for "we don't want THOSE people living here". The vast majority of housing laws are simply modern day redlining tarted up with feel good phrases and misdirection.

It's OK to have your gated community, but it's really frustrating when everyone in the gated community down the road makes it illegal for me to build the high rise (or even mid-rise) building I want on my own land.

Ok, but the question is why did the government feel it was important enough to push one way instead of just letting things sort themselves out, as they've always done?

I haven't read it yet, but this book might be insightful: http://amzn.to/2dQutwR ( Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation )

Other recommendations would be welcome. I'm tremendously interested in this issue.

Edit: I'll add this book, too: "Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation" - http://amzn.to/2dHphdJ - haven't read it yet but it looks quite informative.

I'll admit I haven't really looked into this possibility, but could there be a link between zoning regulations and segregation?

Certainly: http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/02/zonings-racist-roots-s...

I don't think that's the whole story though.

There is a huge, strong link between zoning regulations and segregation. It is one of the major factors, even the major factor.

Zoning regulations happened en masse at the tail end of the Great Migration, to control and confine black migration to northern cities.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_zoning

Please look up redlining.

It's not about squeezing everyone into a dense city: it's about legalizing or prohibiting the traditional small town form.

My grandfather lived in a small town in Oklahoma that was literally three blocks long. It had a traditional pre-war Main Street of attached commercial buildings with on-street parking, surrounded by detached single-family housing. But when you go there now, the whole town is surrounded by exurban sprawl: all newly constructed businesses are surrounded by a lawn enclosing an oversized on-site parking lot and the business in a detached building. It is nearly impossible to go in and do your shopping by walking from business to business: you have to drive to do every kind of errand.

And this is true of small towns all over: any rural small town with recent construction now has its own exurban zone. It's ridiculous: the closest thing to a prewar Main Street is a strip mall with an onsite parking lot.

The government has clearly pushed sprawl by discouraging or in some cases outlawing mixed-use urban development. People have clearly always had (and should have) the choice to migrate out of cities, but they should also have the choice to live in small town or urban style developments too.

Sure, people who don't like cities shouldn't live in cities, but why restrict density within cities?

It's not a binary choice of dense-area-of-Manhattan and Smallville. Historically, for better or worse, a lot of people have decided/voted that they want an urban environment that's dense but not "too" dense. You may disagree--especially if you feel you have to live in the area of question--but it's really not irrational from the perspective of current residents.

Sure, agreed: I think the point is that "what is the right level of density for which areas?" is probably not something that should come from federal government loan regulations.

No argument. It's a matter for local voters--although I suspect many here don't agree with that either.

It is a problem; people tend to vote in their own best interests (except in Presidential elections - Zing!), and that generally means voting against new housing nearby.

We let other people live in our apartment, is that a problem, too?

In places like Boulder, Colorado, it is. There are laws against N unrelated people living together in the same place. NIMBY central.

The point is that Smallville is also illegal. The article is talking about the Main Street of yore, the closest thing to which is built today is an exurban strip mall with an enclosed parking lot.

Sure, but we literally have one Manhattan in the entire country. Maybe we could try having as many as three or four real cities in the country? Maybe one on the west coast?

Well, there's Chicago.

But sure. Persuade whatever West Coast city to aggressively build for density. For better or worse, we don't do these things as top-down directives in the US.

Ahem. -Vancouver, BC

It's not only density but also separation of different usage types.

> Anyone have any other potential explanations?

It's probably a combination of many factors.

One that comes to mind is public health--don't diseases spread faster and through a larger fraction of the population in densely populated areas?

This is true for before-modern-sanitation European cities, not really valid for today

Unless you're dealing with something very contagious, in which case the city density is the least of your problems (people still get together in schools, offices, etc)

Wouldn't your #2 help your #1. By making sprawl, we sell more cars, and build more roads.

Close. Cars and gasoline were quite cheap relative to land prices. They still are.

The "build more roads" thing does influence land prices.

Simply part of a trend of bureaucracies / governments to always extend their power.

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