Exiles From Main Street

Spaced out: The collective costs of suburban sprawl

Suburbia’s failings have been obvious for half a century. Housing subdivisions have stranded kids and mothers in communities devoid of communal life. They have forced residents to spend more time in cars than in conversation. They have chewed up God’s green earth. And yet: Two out of three Americans now live there, up from one-third of the 1960 population.

Fifteen years after Joel Garreau’s classic book Edge City spotlighted the clustering of malls and glass-cube office parks next to interstates, a spate of authors (Alan L. Berger, David Brooks, and James Howard Kunstler among them) are revisiting suburban supremacy. Why have Americans climbed over hills and fanned through valleys to move into new exurbs, even as traditional cities have revived?

The plainest reason, Anthony Flint writes in This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America, his crisp new dissection of how suburban development steamrollered its foes, is that Americans want roomy and affordable houses located in safe places near edge-city jobs. The heart of Flint’s book, though, is his tracing of the repercussions of this shift. His report: Moving to the fresh air, opening the door, and shooing out the kids