The most prominent critic of urbanism and defender of suburban sprawl is
probably Randal O’Toole, who calls himself “the Antiplanner”.
He argues for private automobiles over public transit and for low-density single-family
housing enforced by suburban-style zoning that bans or restricts higher densities of housing.
When we started writing this video, his most recent article was “Densification
Was a Communist Plot”, which opens by explaining that the Soviet Union favoured apartment blocks
because they would be easier to bomb if anyone tried to revolt. He then denounces the urban
planners and libertarian think tanks like Cato and Mercatus that support making California denser.
California is already dense enough, he says, and it has no need for higher density,
which would just make it vulnerable to attack. “The people supporting these laws
either have no understanding of history or are deliberately trying to make America more
vulnerable to its enemies, or at least easier to control from the top down.”
Randal O'Toole is an eccentric and inflammatory character and it’s not always clear whether he’s
serious or trolling. In another post he says “the fight for free transit is about keeping
poor people oppressed”. But he is legitimately the most well-known figure who takes urbanist beliefs
about housing and transportation and argues for the exact opposite and so we think it’s important
to cut through and try to engage with his more relevant ideas. [O’Toole: “And urban sprawl is one
of those made-up problems.”] The Soviet references makes more sense if you assume he’s trying to
counter people who say that low-density zoning is tarnished by its origins in explicit class and
ethnic exclusion by responding that dense housing has nefarious origins too — “the Soviets wanted
to bomb their own people”. The problem is that social exclusion is not just a random historical
fact about single-family zoning, it’s an ongoing effect. Banning multiplexes and apartments in
high-demand areas literally means that lots of people, especially less wealthy people,
are unable to live there. This consequence isn’t entirely unintended, either; exclusion
is explicitly stated as a motivation pretty often. People actually comment on our videos
explaining how they don’t want multi-family housing near their “beautiful middle to upper
middle class single-family neighborhood” or explaining how zoning reform would change
the demographics of their neighbourhood to allow “low-rent” Democrat-voting minorities.
To address his less relevant points: Soviet apartment blocks were an efficient way to
house people after the devastation of the war and his 177-page source doesn’t mention the
Soviets planning to bomb their own cities. If we’re seriously basing urban planning around
North America getting bombed, which probably means nuked, then we shouldn’t live in capital cities or
near military bases (goodbye, San Diego), and being rural is going to help much more than
being in the suburbs of a city, especially if you work downtown. A nuclear strike in the U.S. would
come with only 20 to 30 minutes of warning, and if you thought traffic was bad after a sports event…
His more serious points come up very often in urbanism debates,
namely that urban planners and think tanks are forcing density onto cities and that people
just don’t want to live in denser housing. He writes against laws like California’s SB 9,
which would allow duplexes and fourplexes on lots formerly limited to single-family homes.
A major problem in the density debate is that critics of zoning reform like O’Toole often
muddle the distinction between allowing density and forcing it. He describes SB9 — which again,
legalizes duplexes and fourplexes — as “forc[ing] Americans to live at higher densities”. This is
especially weird from people like O’Toole who are critical of urban growth boundaries
as government overreach, a topic we’ll get to later, but somehow they don’t see the government
overreach in micromanaging small differences in what kind of housing you’re allowed to live in,
like a single-family or multi-family building. He gives a nod to the ideas of freedom and choice
by saying that people should be able to live in denser apartments if they want to, but as
we all know, policies like single-family zoning make these units difficult to actually build.
The idea that people just don’t want to live in denser housing is something we’ve addressed
before. Obviously people value space and privacy, but exactly how much they want
and how they balance those preferences with other needs and preferences varies a lot. We
could all maximize space and privacy by living in remote rural areas far from any city, but most of
us don’t do that. Even if you live in a detached home in a suburb, you probably live on a smaller
lot with a smaller house than you’d have if you lived in the countryside. You made a trade-off,
probably because you actually wanted to be close to an urban area for all the benefits and services
it offers. Along those lines, multiplexes and apartments make sense for many people based
on their budgets, space needs, and location preferences. The idea that people just don’t
want to live in denser housing is a complete red herring, because you wouldn’t have to ban denser
housing if nobody was going to live in it anyway. Developers would realize how hard it is to sell
or rent those units and they’d stop building them. The simple truth is that these density
restrictions come mainly from people who don’t want their neighbours to live in denser housing.
He goes into a broader defense of single-family zoning in another article, “How Cato Sold Out
California Property Owners”, written to call out the libertarian Cato Institute for supporting
zoning reform (and also for firing him). He explains how, in the 1800s, American cities had
low rates of homeownership because people “didn’t want to invest in a home only to see its value
destroyed by the introduction of incompatible uses next door or nearby”. They fixed this first by
deed restrictions and later by zoning. Americans responded by massively increasing homeownership.
This led to a golden economic age of low inequality in the 1960s — “Homeownership was
accessible to almost anyone with a job, and people who owned their own homes were able to use the
equity in their homes to start small businesses, put their children through college, or fund
their retirement.” Urban planners, unhappy with Americans’ preferences for low-density living,
started in the 1970s trying to limit sprawl through urban growth limits,
which stop farmers and other landowners from developing housing on agricultural
or rural land surrounding cities. He sees these policies as an extreme injustice, “the greatest
taking of private property since the communist Chinese collectivization of farms in 1953”.
He cites an article referring to urban growth boundaries as New Feudalism “because,
while they allow people to own land, they effectively transferred the development
rights to that land to the government”. Limits on sprawl, not limits on density,
are the real threat to housing affordability, he argues. [O’Toole: “Why do planners think they
have the right to tell property owners what they can do with their own property? Well, planners
think that property rights evolve. In other words, if you own a chunk of land and your
neighbours think that the land makes a scenic view shed for my picture window, let’s not develop it,
you get your right to develop it stripped away from you because they’re in the majority
and their desire for “conservation” and scenic vistas trumps your private property rights.
And this is essentially the law of the land in California, Oregon, Florida, and other states
that have adopted these planning rules. They have what they call ‘public involvement’.”
It’s still confusing seeing someone really come out swinging against urban growth boundaries,
saying you don’t even own property if the almost communist government can take away your right
to build housing, but then apparently see no problem in the government telling homeowners
that they can only have a single-family home, no duplexes or fourplexes allowed. His argument
for zoning because it encourages homeownership is interesting, but not all zoning is created equal.
Restricting factories is sensible — restricting multiplexes borders on absurd. There’s also a
glaring conflict in how he talks about the effects of single-family zoning. He insists that it’s not
bad for affordability — “abolishing single-family zoning won’t make housing more affordable” he
says. But his argument for single-family zoning is that it makes housing a more attractive investment
that won’t lose value. Presumably this means it will increase in price too, because that’s
what we expect from investments, and that’s the only way housing could compete with stocks as a
way to fund your retirement. This conflicts with affordability. One generation’s “good investment”
is the next generation’s “crushing housing costs”. Maybe he gets around this by saying that
each generation can find their affordable housing in increasingly distant suburbs and exurbs, but
people don’t just want a home anywhere. If that was the case we would all move to rural areas.
Most people want to live close to jobs, family, friends, public transit, and other amenities.
He stresses that single-family homes are more affordable than denser housing because they have
lower construction costs per square foot. Based on Canadian construction cost data,
this is really an issue for tall buildings. Ground-oriented density like townhouses can
be just as cheap or even cheaper to build than detached homes, while also saving on land costs.
Low-rise density is probably peak affordability under ideal conditions,
and the fact that most Canadian and American cities don’t allow it by default is an insult
to affordability. With that said, tall buildings do make sense in high-demand areas to provide
more supply and spread out land costs and other fixed expenses. Also, one barrier to affordable
single-family homes is that the same exclusionary instincts that lead to municipalities banning or
restricting multi-family housing also lead to banning or restricting smaller, more modest
detached homes. Four-fifths of all cities in the U.S. have minimum lot size requirements,
many as high as one-acre, and this matters. We can see very clearly in Vancouver that the
affordability of detached homes depends on how densely they’re allowed to be built. If we’re
serious about affordability then we shouldn’t have zoning rules against modest detached homes either.
He also points out a correlation where denser cities tend to be more expensive.
The problem is that density is partly a response to high demand and affordability pressures.
Maybe a single-family home in Tulsa, Oklahoma is cheaper than an apartment in New York,
but it doesn’t mean that New York can become more affordable by banning or demolishing apartments
in favour of single-family homes. If you look within each city, it’s usually the case that
denser housing is more affordable. A detached home in Toronto averages $1.7 million, a semi-detached
1.3 million, a townhouse 1.2 million, and a condo $800,000. Townhouses and condos are clearly more
attainable. The same pattern applies in the U.S., although the data isn’t as fine-grained.
Condominiums are cheaper than detached homes in 18 of the 20 biggest metropolitan areas.
The two exceptions are Detroit and Atlanta, but everywhere else — including Boston,
Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, and Chicago — detached homes are more expensive.
Another argument O’Toole and others make is that zoning reform betrays potential homebuyers
who want a single-family home but won’t have as many options if some lots are used for multiplexes
or apartments instead. But single-family homes really just don’t house very many people
so you’re weighing one family against four in the case of a fourplex or many more in the case
of an apartment building. This isn’t to say that every lot in every city needs to house as many
people as possible, but when demand exists for land to be used more efficiently, it shouldn’t
be up to planners (or anti-planners) to prop up low-density housing through strict zoning.
Randal O’Toole is actually right about one thing though. Greenbelts or urban growth boundaries can
make housing less affordable, and it’s hard to be entirely comfortable with them if you take a
philosophy of housing abundance. We’re sympathetic to the environmental motivations but we have to be
careful when they don’t actually make demand for land go away. Often leapfrog development
just continues on the other side of the greenbelt and people have longer commutes, or they’re pushed
to other cities to develop land there instead. California’s limits on housing — both growth
boundaries and zoning limits on density — actually increase carbon emissions when they push people to
move to more affordable cities in a place like Texas whose more extreme climate requires more
energy to heat or cool buildings. However, in what universe would the solution to urban growth
boundaries be opening up the land to a monoculture of single-family homes in car-dependent sprawl?
You miss an opportunity to develop good urbanism outside of the influence of NIMBYs,
you burn through land so much faster, and you negate some of the housing affordability gains
with big transportation costs. Urban expansion should mean allowing a range of housing types
to meet people’s different needs, preferences, and incomes, and it should not be built entirely
around cars. Maybe car-dependent areas that only meet some people’s needs feel like freedom to
those people, but it’s not freedom for everyone, it’s a basic failure of infrastructure and
government services like failing to provide libraries, schools, or a fire department.
Building entirely around cars also limits your growth in the future.
O’Toole keeps coming back to the idea that California is “dense enough already”, and
one article he links refers to duplexes and fourplexes as a “radical density experiment”,
but the densities we’re haggling over, especially with SB9, are pretty modest. Cities all around the
world handle these densities with ease. It’s only when you put everyone in a car, truck,
or SUV to get anywhere that even modest densities feel threatening and crowding.
One final point is that O’Toole’s core argument for single-family zoning is that it makes
housing an attractive investment and encourages homeownership. Owning a home offers many benefits,
including long-term stability and a sense of permanency and control that many people enjoy,
and those are reasons why homeownership should be accessible and affordable,
but we don’t think it makes sense to try to push people into homeownership with additional
incentives like rising prices. A better world to us is not one where housing is a great investment
opportunity that encourages people to buy in and punishes renters, it’s one where housing is
stable and affordable and you can be comfortable buying or renting. If you want to stay open to
job opportunities in multiple cities, for example, you should probably be renting and you shouldn’t
feel pressured into buying before you’re ready, because you’re worried about getting priced out.
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. Randal O’Toole has written a lot,
and we’re barely scratching the surface here. He also talks about transportation and, brace for it,
environmentalism too. While his inflammatory style distracts from his ideas, and his frequent
references to communism don’t feel as relevant now as they might have 50 or 60 years ago,
he’s essentially a compilation of all the typical arguments against urbanism that we come across
and so he’s a useful way to address many of them in one place.
As always, a special thanks to our supporters on Patreon.