Triumph of the City

by Edward Glaeser

  Arthur Levitt and Mass-Produced Housing

  One of those veterans was a lieutenant in the Seabees named William Levitt. Levitt, the son of a British-born lawyer, was born in New York in 1907. He dropped out of New York University to get into construction with his brother Arthur, who became the designer while Bill took care of the business side of the operation. Together they built two thousand homes in the 1930s, mostly for rich clients on Long Island. Levitt began experimenting with large-scale housing for middle-income Americans, but his early efforts produced decidedly mixed results. His sixteen-hundred-shack project in Norfolk, Virginia, built before World War II, still had unsold units in 1950.

  After the war, Levitt was determined to become the Henry Ford of the building business, creating an inexpensive product on a vast scale. Together with his father and brother, he assembled almost twenty square miles of land near Hempstead, Long Island. Potato farmers got rich as Levitt pushed prices from $300 to $3,000 an acre. Levitt wasn’t going to bottom-fish, as he had in Norfolk. He was building a high-quality product, at least for its time. The homes had modern appliances and sturdy construction. He master-planned the community. It had, and has, parks and schools and plenty of green space.

  Although the result—Levittown—drove highbrow critics like the New Yorker’s Lewis Mumford to fits of literary condescension, the town’s low prices and relative opulence made it wildly popular with ordinary folks. The critics may have been right in decrying the endless monotony of similarly styled ranch and colonial buildings, but tenements were hardly architectural masterpieces either. More important, as the sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in his description of Levittown life, critics write from a “tourist perspective” that prizes “visual interest, cultural diversity, entertainment, esthetic pleasure, variety (preferably exotic), and emotional stimulation.” A typical resident who bought in Levittown wanted “a comfortable, convenient, and socially satisfying place to live—esthetically pleasing, to be sure, but first and foremost functional for his daily needs.” Architectural experts do tend to value stylistic sophistication much more than most home buyers. Appreciating art is, after all, the experts’ job. But home buyers, unless they are very rich, tend to put more weight on floor space, lot size, modern conveniences, good schools, and access to jobs.

  Like Ford, Levitt fought ferociously to cut costs. He shut the unions out, which brought on the picket lines. One possibly apocryphal story told of a picketer who liked Levitt’s houses so much that he bought one. Avoiding unions made it possible for Levitt to use the latest building technologies, like spray painting, which violated make-work rules. He bypassed middlemen and bought everything from lumber to televisions directly from the manufacturers. He set up his own nail-making plant. Home production was broken down into twenty-six separate steps and farmed out to scores of subcontractors. To this day, mass production remains a key reason why new homes in growing suburban areas are much less expensive than bespoke houses built in older places. By building thousands and thousands of homes quickly in one area, Levitt was able to sell a comfortable modern house for less than $8,000 in 1950, less than $65,000 in 2009 currency.

  Levitt’s average home buyer earned about half that amount per year. Few of them would have had eight grand to put down for a new Levitt house, but the federal government was splurging on housing subsidies. The GI Bill offered no-down-payment housing loans for veterans, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guaranteed up to 95 percent of mortgages for middle-income buyers. With a government-guaranteed loan, Levitt’s buyers only needed to come up with $400 to buy a home packed with modern appliances and surrounded by leafy space. Levitt’s eight-hundred-square-foot ranch houses now seem tiny and quaint, but to New Yorkers who had grown up in crowded tenements, they were the McMansions of their day.

  Neither federal housing policies nor interstate highway spending were designed to be antiurban, but they certainly hurt cities. The highway program was meant to connect the country, but subsidizing highways ended up encouraging people to commute by car. Encouraging home buying through the home mortgage interest deduction and government-guaranteed mortgages was meant to correct alleged imperfections in the mortgage market and create propertyowning citizens with a stake in their country. The biggest public homeownership subsidy of all ended up being the tax deductibility of mortgage interest, which began not as a housing policy but as a by-product of the general deductibility of interest expenses—an almost accidental part of the income tax code that has ended up having a huge impact on the way we live. Subsidizing the purchase of big houses ended up encouraging people to leave the cities. FHA loans went disproportionately to middle-class enclaves in the suburbs, perhaps because those areas seemed like good bets to FHA administrators or perhaps because this was where new homes were being built. The government wanted to reward veterans with bigger homes, but those bigger homes tended to be suburban. Owner-occupied houses are overwhelmingly single-family houses, and they tend to be in suburbs. When public policy promotes home ownership, it also pushes people to leave cities.

  When Levittown was built, in the 1940s, access to public transportation was still important to residents. The town had a train station, and many Levittowners rode the rails to their Manhattan jobs. But American suburbs were coming to depend on the car far more than older, higher-density areas like Barcelona’s Eixample. In Levittown, residents still needed a car to get to the train station or to run errands around town. Moreover, plenty of early residents carpooled to get to work, still a common practice, albeit one now used largely by the less wealthy. Still, Levittown was a hybrid: a town that required a car for local driving but that still connected with trains for longer-distance travel.

  Rebuilding America Around the Car

  As master-planned suburban communities followed the path of William Levitt, they increasingly dropped the connection with public transit altogether. In the growing areas of Sunbelt sprawl, businesses are dispersed throughout the area rather than centralized in a single downtown. Almost half of the jobs in America’s ninety-eight largest metropolitan areas are more than ten miles away from the city center. People do their shopping in malls built around the car, rather than in conventional downtowns. Cheap trucks and highways freed firms from ports, railway depots, and the Great Lakes system.

  Car-based suburbs are the latest installment in the move to sprawl that started in Washington Square and Eixample, but car-based communities feel very different from every older area. All of the previous transport innovations still required some walking. You had to get by foot from the bus stop or train station to your job or home. The presence of foot traffic kept the older communities fairly dense. But the car changed all that. By eliminating the need for walking, the car supported a quantum leap in the size of land areas that people could occupy. As a result, the inverse connection between density and car usage is extremely strong—across a broad range of cities, as density doubles, the share of the population that takes a car to work typically drops by 6.6 percent.

  Cars also need much more space than omnibuses or elevated rail lines or walking. Nine square feet of road space is plenty for a pedestrian walking down Fifth Avenue, and on a busy day, walkers will put up with much less. The Honda Accord, a modest-size car, takes up about a hundred square feet on its own. If that car is going to have a couple of feet around it and several car lengths ahead of it, its space needs can easily increase to three or four hundred square feet on a highway. The fortyfold increase in space that accompanies the shift from walking to cars explains why so much of the land in car-based cities is given over to highways.

  And cars don’t use up space only when they’re hurtling down the asphalt. They also require space when they’re standing still. A typical parking space can often be more than 120 square feet—about the size of a standard work cubicle. Bringing a car to work essentially doubles the amount of space that someone needs on the job. In older, dense cities, that space requires structured parking, which can cost more than $50,000 per
space to build.

  The mismatch between the car and the world’s dense older cities explains why cars have led to the construction of vast new low-density living spaces, sometimes on the edge of older cities and sometimes out on their own in the middle of the Sunbelt. Even the shifts in the late nineteenth century, when skyscrapers rose higher and streetcar suburbs were built, seem small relative to the massive creation of spaces built around the automobile.

  Some have suggested that American sprawl represents an English cultural heritage that puts an outsize value on single-family detached houses and backyards, but there are obvious reasons why Europeans have remained more urban than Americans. Many European cities are old and enjoy the architectural legacy of centuries of genius. Living in central Paris is fundamentally different from living in most American central cities. European governments slowed the advance of the automobile by taxing gas more heavily and spending less on highways. The average gas tax in France over the past thirty years has been about eight times higher than average gas taxes in the United States. In the mid-1990s, when the average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. was close to $1, the average price per gallon in Italy or France was close to $5.

  Comparing seventy cities worldwide, Matthew Kahn and I found that when countries move from having low gas taxes to high gas taxes, the density of development increases by more than 40 percent. Vehicle ownership, unsurprisingly, falls as well. Despite higher gas taxes, as Europeans have gotten wealthier, they’ve started driving more like Americans. Today, 84 percent of passenger transport, by mile, in France is done by car. In Italy there are about 6 cars for every 10 people; the comparable numbers for France and Germany are 5 and 5.66. The United States still has more cars—there are 7.76 cars for every 10 Americans—but the gap is narrowing considerably.

  As European car ownership has increased, Europeans have also moved to the suburbs. Cars, not culture, are the root of sprawl. A report from the European Environment Agency notes that since the 1950s, more than 90 percent of the new construction in cities like Vienna, Marseilles, Brussels, and Copenhagen has taken place in “low density residential areas.” No country has a more venerable urban culture than Italy. Most tourists to Milan take away a strong memory of the spectacular Duomo and the nearby Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. But just like Detroit and St. Louis, the central city of Milan has lost hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have moved to more car-intensive suburbs. The people fighting to save Leipzig are also battling a strong surge of suburbanization there.

  It would be great for older cities if people just stopped liking cars, but that won’t happen. For individual commuters in developed countries, cars save a lot of time. As mentioned in the introduction, in the United States, in 2006, the average car commute lasted twenty-four minutes; the average commute by mass transit took forty-eight minutes. The problem with public transportation is the time involved in getting to the bus or subway stop, waiting to be picked up and then getting from the final stop to one’s ultimate destination. That time cost, which is independent of the distance of the journey, averages about twenty minutes for buses and subways. Even before the bus has traveled a stop, the commuter has used up as much time as many car commuters spend on their entire trip.

  Some urbanists hope that rising gas prices will put an end to car-based living, and certainly higher gas prices make density more attractive. Yet unfortunately for cities, automotive ingenuity favors the suburbs. If current gas prices doubled, the gas costs of a family that drives twenty-five thousand miles a year in 25-mile-per-gallon cars increases by $3,000. But that family could completely undo this increased cost by switching to a Prius. Given the already vast investment in suburban infrastructure, I wouldn’t bet on Americans giving up their cars even if gas prices rise enormously. Higher gas prices are more likely to reduce sprawl in the developing world, where infrastructure isn’t yet in place and poorer people will be more responsive to higher costs.

  Older cities can’t count on either higher gas prices or a sudden disgust with the automobile to bring more Americans back to downtown living. But they can make city life more attractive by speeding the trips of their own residents. Urban bus commutes can be improved, as they have been in London and Singapore, by charging congestion fees that reduce the numbers of drivers on city streets. Even more important, new compact high-rise development can provide the one commute that is even faster than a twenty-four-minute drive: a fifteen-minute walk. In many cities, like New York, once-poor neighborhoods, like Tribeca, that can offer fast commutes on foot to core business districts have come back, spurred by the same increasing value of time that pushed Americans out of public transit into cars. Cities can compete, but they need radical new designs that offer affordable housing and quicker commutes. Yet today, the most creative developments are in the suburbs.

  Welcome to The Woodlands

  Today, cities aren’t competing against the relatively spartan suburbs built by the Levitts. They’re fighting against far more attractive developments built in Sunbelt exurbs that manage to provide affordability and space and a wealth of amenities. About thirty miles north of Houston, on twenty-eight thousand sylvan acres, over ninety-two thousand people live in The Woodlands. Levittown, which today has four homes for every acre, is more than three times as dense as this Texas suburb. About 28 percent of The Woodlands land is given over to parks and other protected green space.

  The Woodlands is the brainchild of natural gas mogul George Phydias Mitchell, who is, like Levitt, the son of an immigrant. Mitchell’s father, born Savvas Paraskevopoulos, left a mountainous quarter acre of land in Greece to come to America and lay railroad track. He eventually ended up running a shoeshine and dry cleaning business in Galveston, Texas. His son George grew up catching fish and selling them to Houston tourists who would then proudly parade them as their own catches. George went to Texas A&M to study geology and petroleum engineering. He graduated first in his class and then spent World War II in the Army Corps of Engineers. After the war, he started wildcatting for natural gas, which was in great demand because cities were creating regulations that stopped private homes from burning coal for heating and cooking. The foes of this regulation argued that its costs would be enormous, but they underestimated the power of human creativity. Mitchell was a leader in the natural gas industry, which has provided a far greener way to heat America’s cities than coal or oil.

  So maybe it’s no surprise that George Mitchell is something of an environmentalist. Apart from some nasty allegations about polluting a Texas aquifer, Mitchell has managed to cultivate a reputation for being a green energy man, which is not the stereotype of the Texas wildcatter. In the 1960s, he decided to diversify into real estate, and he envisioned a vast city in a forest thirty miles north of Houston. Building a large new community in the middle of nowhere takes deep pockets, and Mitchell had to borrow millions to make his place-making bet. The Department of Housing and Urban Development gave The Woodlands a $50 million loan guarantee. But that guarantee came with conditions, one of which was the need for environmental sensitivity.

  Mitchell then hired Ian McHarg, a Glaswegian based in Philadelphia, as his environmental consultant, and told him, “I have named my project The Woodlands and there had better be some woodlands when we get done.” Mitchell’s green sensibilities had been intrigued by McHarg’s Design with Nature, a tract on urban planning that emphasizes an area’s natural ecology. Together Mitchell and McHarg built The Woodlands. The community grew slowly. It didn’t even acquire its first mall, the sine qua non of a true suburban development, until 1994. But as Houston expanded, The Woodlands exploded. Its population more than doubled in the 1990s, and it grew by over 40 percent between 2000 and 2008.

  More than half of the adults in The Woodlands have a college degree, and the median household income is over $100,000. The residents are also spending remarkably little on housing, given their income levels. According to the Census Bureau, the average home value there is about $200,000, although it is c
ertainly possible to spend more. I went to an open-house for a pretty impressive three-thousand-square-foot home that cost well under $300,000.

  One of the most interesting, and almost urban, aspects of The Woodlands’ management is its focus on social capital. The Woodlands works precisely because it is not a collection of isolated individuals; its social infrastructure has been designed to foster interpersonal connections. In 1975, Mitchell hired a Wharton-trained Lutheran minister to run The Woodlands Religious Community Incorporated, now called Interfaith, which was meant to “plan the religious community and all the human services in this new town.” The minister bought a motor scooter and followed moving vans, meeting new residents as they arrived. Interfaith made sure that The Woodlands provided appropriate space for social, particularly religious, activities. Because nothing sours an area like religiously motivated hatred, Interfaith makes sure that religious messages are kept positive. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Interfaith managed to get rabbis to pray for Palestinians and Islamic leaders to pray for Jews.

  Almost half of The Woodlands’ households have children under eighteen, and The Woodlands specializes in schools. There are two highly rated traditional public high schools and an Academy of Science and Technology. There are four private high schools, two religious and two secular. The Woodlands knows that its well-educated residents care about their children’s education. Only recently have big cities shown the same level of concern for providing the high-quality schools that will attract more educated residents.

  Apparently The Woodlands’ customers also care about golf. The development has seven golf courses. The Woodlands also has the Houston Symphony’s summer home, a large and shiny shopping mall, and over 150 restaurants. The developers have even created a walking town area, where people can stroll and shop, but the Texas climate isn’t always ideal for strolling, and far more people shop at the mall. Of course, most people drive to The Woodlands mall and its walking downtown. While there is a bus service that connects the area to Houston, fewer than 3 percent of commuters in the area use public transit. One of the great ironies of Mitchell and McHarg’s environmentalism is that they tried to build a green community with plenty of trees and energy-efficient homes, but home owners drive so much that they undo most of those environmental benefits. Moreover, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter, Texas has such a hot, humid climate that cooling those homes and restaurants inevitably generates a big carbon footprint.