A Better Future
17th November 2022
In earlier times, even with a soaring population, Americans knew how to accommodate housing demand. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we built cities from scratch along the frontier. The existing major urban centers—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia—all expanded rapidly, both by density and expansion into land on the periphery.
After the Second World War, mass suburbia and its expansion in homeownership ushered in a period of sustained prosperity that lasted until the 1970s. After 1940, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. homeownership rates grew rapidly, from 44 percent to 63 percent over the next three decades.
But now, in many places, it is exceedingly difficult, even impossible, to build the kind of family-friendly housing long sought by most Americans. Instead we are being left with two negative trends: increasingly low housing affordability for many, and the forced march of a whole new generation into the kind of small, crowded spaces they generally eschew, particularly after they enter their thirties.