American cities are at a crossroads

When we envision our future, we often think in terms of technology, culture and geopolitics. All of that determines both our lifestyle and the kinds of cities we build.
US cities have arrived at
a crossroads. Explosive growth in the South and Southwest, heightened awareness of inequality, an aging population and technology that redefines transportation and buildings are changing priorities for development. Like never before, Americans have an opportunity to ask themselves how and where they’ll live over the next few decades.
The past century has brought two huge changes in urbanisation in the
US. The mid-20th century saw the expansion of the suburbs, increasing auto dependence and an evacuation of affluent residents from urban cores. Then, beginning roughly in the 1990s, there was a move back to cities, especially by highly paid knowledge workers.
But this urban revival, driven by clustering in industries like technology and finance, was generally not accompanied by enough housing and transit construction to accommodate all the new arrivals.
The result was skyrocketing rent, with landlords and incumbent homeowners profiting handsomely, and working-class Americans exiled to city fringes where their commuting options were limited.
Meanwhile, the suburbs kept right on building up through the middle of the 2000s. Houses got larger as the exurbs spread farther from city centers and commuting times rose accordingly. That process seemed to hit its natural limits in 2007 and 2008, when the housing market crash sent construction plummeting:
Exurban development is limited by commute times, while urban cores have become unaffordable because of NIMBYism’s chokehold on new housing. And now the pandemic has unleased new forces to disrupt that uneasy equilibrium. The rise of remote work, in particular, promises to allow at least some knowledge workers to live outside of expensive city centers.
What kind of housing people will dwell in, how they’ll get to work, where they’ll shop and what they’ll do for entertainment are fundamental to the quality of life in every country in the world. For Americans, a picture of the future is beginning to come into focus.
Housing is probably the most important aspect of any city, and the US simply hasn’t been building enough of it. Politically powerful homeowners and landlords dominate local governments, blocking residential construction through a morass of zoning restrictions, parking requirements and other laws.
New developments are strangled by endless reviews and challenges, often with environmentalism as a pretext. Fear of urban change is bipartisan — while NIMBYism has often been a tool of the right, it’s recently won a growing number of champions on the left.
In response, pro-housing movements are springing up across the country. In Minneapolis and in the state of Oregon, these movements won their first big victory — bans on zoning laws that restrict neighborhoods to single-family homes.
Now some California cities are following suit. There’s even talk of action at the national level: President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposals include handing out money to cities that end the historically discriminatory practice of banning multifamily residences.
So what would denser US cities of the future look like? Those who fear density often imagine so-called “Manhattanisation” — forests of gleaming towers rearing into the sky. But while these do occasionally get built, the vast majority of new housing won’t look anything like a giant futuristic hive. That’s because most people in the US don’t live in dense city centers where such towers make economic sense.
Much new housing will come in the form of low-rise apartment buildings.

—Bloomberg