This June, Census Bureau data revealed that the average size of a new home built in the United States set a record during 2013. At approximately 2,600 square feet, the average home size was up for the third consecutive year. Most tellingly, the 2013 figure eclipsed the former record of 2,521 square feet set in 2007—before the financial crisis took its toll on the U.S. housing market. The economic turmoil of the past six years had apparently been forgotten, as Americans quickly returned to the belief that bigger is always better. At the same time, these new homes need space, a reality that is leading many real estate experts to predict the revival of suburban sprawl.
Steven Conn’s Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press) provides a much-needed intellectual history for such recent developments. Throughout the 20th century the American city came to be seen as both the host and creator of a series of problems, including overcrowding, poverty, disease and crime. Yet, in the struggle to address such concerns, the city simultaneously became the focal point of the “deep-seated American suspicion of government as an agent of the collective good.” The collision of these forces led even those inherently sympathetic to the plight of city dwellers to call for distinctly anti-urban strategies that pressed for the removal of such people from the urban environment. Healthy Americans needed space and, by the early 20th century, cities across the United States lacked this vital amenity.
Such conclusions, as Conn astutely observes, stretched across the ideological spectrum. The Progressive movement preached about the evils of overcrowding, while the right-wing developers of such “Sunbelt” cities as Phoenix, Dallas and Houston called for a built environment that also worked to combat urban congestion. Sometimes public policy was employed to create such places, as in the construction of new towns during the New Deal era of the 1930s. Such towns, including Greendale, Wis., were meant to provide all the things that cities could no longer offer, including clean air, grass, sunlight, a sense of community and the chance for self-sufficiency.
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Yet Conn also effectively illustrates how this anti-urban impulse had little faith in the ability of the government to address the woes of the American city. The businessmen of the Sunbelt saw market forces, not government intervention, as the best way to grow livable communities. This distrust in governmental action was shared by the countercultural actors who fled the cities to rural communes throughout the late 1960s and early ’70s. For such individuals, the city had come to represent all that had gone wrong with American society.
As Conn points out in his afterword, this continual movement away from densely populated cities has had profound economic, social and environmental consequences. The challenge for the 21st century is to find ways to combat the anti-urbanism that took root throughout the preceding century.