Noah Smith, who is a YIMBY urbanist you may know, has a recent piece on his blog called "The American suburbs are better than you think." I'll let you all read it on your own, but he goes after some of the common tropes: the suburbs force long commutes, the suburbs are lonely and isolating, and so on.

But in the end, he more or less lands where I landed in my recent post, "What do homebuyers and tenants actually want?" And that is, there are certainly lots of people who prefer the suburbs (and that's fine), but we need to get better at building housing within our cities, too. And until we do, we won't get a clear sense of consumers' revealed housing preferences.

Here's an excerpt from his post:

I’ve been a relentless advocate of building more dense, walkable cities in America. Not only would this raise GDP (because of improved clustering effects), but it would let Americans live where they want. The demand for life in cities like NYC exceeds America’s willingness to supply these environments; this raises rents in places like NYC, which pushes a lot of people into the suburbs who don’t want to be there. Forcing those city types into the ‘burbs raises rents for people who like suburbia. Basically, everyone would be happy if America had a few more Manhattans and a lot more Brooklyns.

As I said in my post, I'm all for giving housing consumers as much choice as possible. But the one thing that neither of us touched on in our posts is the simple fact that, as a general rule, urban living is significantly more environmentally sustainable than suburban living on a per-capita basis.

This is, of course, one of the points of urban greenbelts. They are meant to curb sprawl and encourage intensification. But if we don't unlock the right kind and amount of housing through intensification, then we are simply constraining supply across the board. We also know that otherwise, developers and consumers will "leapfrog" urban growth boundaries and continue sprawling.

As an urbanist and developer, I think of it this way: My job is to do what I can to build more dense, walkable communities and figure out (and advocate for) ways to build more attainable housing — specifically, housing that meets the needs of a wide variety of households. And in doing so, I believe that we will retain a segment of people in the city who might have otherwise moved to the suburbs.

Cover photo by Ivaldo Hadi