Sprawl is not the solution to the housing crisis. In addition to wasting land, destroying natural and agricultural resources, producing car-dependency, threatening lives, and generating climate-changing emissions, sprawl is bad for the fiscal health of cities.
In the July 2025 issue of Ecocities Emerging, I wrote about the New York Times article that launched a thousand blog posts: “Why America Should Sprawl.” I argued that we should be solving the housing crisis without exacerbating our many other crises including traffic-related deaths/injuries, the negative impact of car culture on urban life, climate change, farmland loss, environmental degradation, declining biodiversity, and the burdens that car ownership adds to household budgets.
However, I failed to mention that sprawl has also been disastrous for the economic survival of jurisdictions that embraced it after World War Two. In Kansas City: The American Story of Growing Into Decline, Charles Marohn writes: “Kansas City … has spent three generations destroying its own wealth, depleting its resources and adding unfathomable liabilities in its confusion over the difference between growth and wealth creation.”
In this short but fact-filled book, Marohn and co-author Daniel Herriges, both leaders of the Strong Towns movement, tell the story of how Kansas City made the wrong turn and basically drove city finances into the ditch. But the same process has occurred, and is still occurring, in most American cities and many other cities around the world.
As Rachel Quednau, Strong Towns’ Program Director puts it: “Nearly every city in America has expanded its infrastructure and service obligations far beyond what it can reasonably afford to maintain. The bills are coming due. It’s time to pay attention and change our model of development into one that is not fragile and risky, but strong and resilient.”
The roadways needed to serve sprawl are the primary, but not the only cause of fiscal decline. Before embarking on what Marohn and Herriges call the ‘radical experiment’ of suburbanization, Kansas City was a city of walkable neighborhoods with a thriving culture. Today, the Kansas City metro area leads the nation in lane miles of freeway per capita.
Freeways destroy cities in many ways. In Kansas City, real estate interests convinced public officials to plow freeway corridors through the heart of the city in a misguided strategy intended to “eliminate blight” as well as allow suburbanites easier access to downtown. In addition to displacing thousands of people, fragmenting neighborhoods, and creating barriers for walking and bicycling, the buildings removed from these freeway corridors alone took millions of dollars off the tax rolls. An analysis of comparable freeway projects in Minneapolis estimated that freeways directly displaced buildings that would now be worth $655 million. The destruction caused by freeways in Kansas City was so devastating that it was nicknamed the Kansas City Blitz.
In addition to direct damage, freeways degrade the value of nearby properties. Maps of Kansas City illustrate how real estate values drop near freeways (in contrast with higher values in areas near the streetcar lines that used to provide mobility in Kansas City before the automotive juggernaut.)
Initially, the freeways facilitated access between suburbs and downtown Kansas City. Apparently, public officials had not considered that this might encourage wealthier households to move from pre-war city neighborhoods to the suburbs. The flight to the suburbs left older neighborhoods with little to no new investment, an outcome that was exacerbated by redlining, which basically prevented government backed mortgages in areas deemed to be risky investments. These maps of blighted areas became self-fulfilling prophesies.
Kansas City assumed it would benefit by keeping sprawl within its city limits and went on an annexation spree. But rather than capture growth, it was burdening itself with liabilities. The land area of the city grew by 423 percent between 1946 and 1964 (from 60 square miles to 314 square miles). But the population only grew by 12 percent during this time period (from 434,000 to 486,000) as households departed the pre-war neighborhoods and spread themselves across the landscape.
As a metric of what Kansas City did to its per capita service obligations, the city added 1,625 miles of streets after World War Two, a 169 percent increase, while growing by only 13 percent in population. The city was responsible for 12 feet of road per person in 1946 versus 148 feet of roads per person today. In addition to lower density, car-dependency increased due to the change from grid street patterns to disconnected cul de sacs and the misguided belief that residential neighborhoods should be separated from other land uses.
Yet even as the low-density post-war sprawl added disproportionate service obligations, it produces relatively low taxable value per acre. To this day, the highest per acre value remains within the Kansas City limits of 1910, when it was still a walkable city.
In addition to streets, the city’s tax base was hollowed out by parking. Kansas City has 1,219 square feet of parking for every man, woman, and child. Some of that parking responds to the post-war notion that drivers are entitled to leave their constant 4,000-pound companions everywhere they want to go. But parking also proliferates because Kansas City taxes surface parking at the value of its asphalt paving, which makes it a tax-light way for speculators to hold land for years (or decades).
Kansas City has 41.4 square miles of asphalt (roads plus parking) versus 18.8 square miles of buildings. On a per capita basis, that amounts to 2,347 square feet of streets/parking versus 1,065 square feet of buildings. Over twice as much area is devoted to uses that generate little tax revenue or, in the case of streets, pay no taxes and yet require regular costly maintenance and repair work. That largely explains why Kansas City is struggling to raise enough tax revenue to maintain its vast network of roads, pipes, and other pubic services. Strong Towns emphasizes that these ratios are typical in America and many other cities throughout the world.
To avoid the fiscal mess of places like Kansas City, Strong Towns advises cities to follow the successful development pattern most commonly used up until the mid-20th Century. Avoid radical changes in existing development patterns. Grow incrementally, repeating the preexisting pattern and promote development by a large number of people rather than relying on (or worse yet, subsidizing) a few big projects.
Marohn provides a jaw-dropping account of a big-box store (surrounded by a sea of parking) that might produce significant sales tax but pays relatively little in property tax because it is cheaply built. The taxable value of these neighborhood-busting discount stores is less than one third of the per acre value of a multiple use building with two floors of residential over ground floor retail. Marohn focuses on older, downtown properties with ten to 40 times, (and in the case of an old hotel, 100 times) more taxable value than the Costco and Home Depot examined in this study.
Strong Towns advises Kansas City (and others) to reverse course on their 80-year experiment with suburbanization and recommit to the strengths that built the city. Maintain older, walkable neighborhoods with their affordable housing and mixed uses. Build on inherent assets such as rivers and natural features as well as civic institutions, parks, and historic resources. Use the urban DNA of the traditional street grid to recreate the mobility and community that characterized the city when it catered to people instead of cars.
I am writing this item from Dayton, Ohio, a city that, like Kansas City, suffers from the failed US experiment with suburbanization. Various highways have obliterated large portions of Dayton. That might have seemed like a good idea in the 1950s. But it likely was a big factor in the city’s decline along with the near disappearance of a once-thriving industrial economy. Dayton’s population now stands at 136,346, almost half of its 1960 population of 262,332.
But from casual observation, Dayton is following the advice of Strong Towns and others, (including Alan Mallach, author of Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World) by rebuilding the city using its existing assets. For example, Dayton and its region are creating an enviable park system linked by the five waterways that converge here. These riverfront greenspaces are home to off-street multiuse trails that form the spine of an alternative transportation network that make it possible for many households to get around with fewer or even no cars.
Dayton’s abandoned industrial buildings are being redeveloped into residential lofts at densities that support businesses, public transit, and an urban lifestyle that attracts creative people and entrepreneurs. Intentionally or not, Dayton is following the Strong Towns playbook of rebuilding the city at a value per acre ratio that puts he city in better fiscal health while also creating a more vibrant place to live.
Notes
Mallach, A. 2023. Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World. Washington: Island Press.
Marohn, C. and D. Herriges. Kansas City: The American Story of Growing Into Decline. Accessed at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53dd6676e4b0fedfbc26ea91/t/5fae977f0e8bbf646f1d01a6/1605277573071/Kansas-City-Ebook-Final+copy-compressed.pdf.
Pruetz, R. 2025. Make America Sprawl Again? Ecocities Emerging. Accessed at Make America Sprawl Again? – Ecocities Emerging
