The South Really Is The National Suburb

It's also the biggest suburban sprawl problem ever, which means it's probably not sustainable.

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Twice in the last month I’ve headed to the South for a family event – in Georgia in May (which inspired my post about college towns) and suburban Nashville just last weekend. And I’ve been reminded just how much the South has become “The National Suburb”.

As I noted in my post about L.A. last week, that title used to belong to California. For most of the 20^th Century, if you lived in one of the crowded industrial cities of the Northeast or the Midwest, or you were struggling with rural poverty in the Plains states or Texas, California was the place to go. It had plenty of jobs, plenty of housing, and plenty of upward mobility. (People forget this, but up until the first run-up in housing prices in the 1970s, which led to Proposition 13, Los Angeles was pretty cheap.)

But it’s been decades since California’s been the national suburb. Like New York, it bleeds residents to other states and maintains its population through migration from other countries, both legal and illegal. (According to Joel Kotkin, California has lost 4 million residents to other states – approximately the population of Oklahoma – since the turn of the century.) Texas will catch up sometime in the 2040s.

The American Dream — and lawn — in Brentwood, Tennessee, outside of Nashville.

Meanwhile, everybody’s going to the South. North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia together have added 7 million people this century, going from 20 million to 27 million. North Carolina and Georgia are each over 11 million now, and will soon blast past Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in population.

Land and houses are cheap in suburban and exurban areas all over the South – meaning it’s possible to buy a quarter- to half-acre lot (which is almost impossible to find in California) in many locations for $200,000 to $400,000, well within reach of the average working-class household. Urban planners speak of Char-lant-ingham, the suburban sprawl that will soon stretch from Charlotte all the way through South Carolina to Atlanta and on into Alabamda to Birmingham.

Nashville As The National Suburb

Meanwhile, Nashville – where I spent last weekend – is sprawling like crazy too, and it’s rapidly becoming unaffordable. The metro area’s population has almost doubled since the turn of the century, to well over 2 million people. The core county, Davidson County (which is a combined city-county government with Nashville), added almost 200,000 people. Suburban Williamson County – centered around cute and affluent Franklin – doubled in population, adding more than 100,000 people.k

And boy does it show. Admittedly, I spent most of the weekend in a very affluent part of the Nashville region, along the I-65 corridor south of town in Brentwood and Franklin. Yes, there are baronial houses everywhere. But there are enormous lawns as well, big enough to accommodate dozens of California homes.

This profligate use of land is true all over the South. I can remember telling my brother one time that the state-required size of a California high school was 40 acres. His response was it seemed “a bit tight”; the high school his kids went to in suburban Atlanta was 100 acres, he said, and the school district could barely fit everything in.

When I saw the high school in person, of course, it had the biggest front lawn I had ever seen anywhere in the country. But my brother’s perception is a reflection of the overall Southern zeitgeist. The South has more land than it knows what to do with, and a native culture that values the rural ideal much more than in other parts of the country. Remember that the South remained rural far longer than the rest of the country.

A high school lawn in Alpharetta, Georgia.

Large lots are part of the reason people move there from elsewhere, especially California. There’s no reason to believe that sprawl will end with Char-lant-ingham, or that lots will get smaller anywhere except in a few more urban locations. I am amazed how much time I spent in the suburban and exurban South driving on seemingly endless subdivision roads and arterial highways just to get somewhere, and how the people who live there simply accept that situation as the way life is. California had a reputation for decades as the capital of sprawl, but there was never any sprawl like this.

How Do You Manage A Mess Like This?

People may like their big houses and big lots. But the problem is, once you’ve built this multistate monument to sprawl, how do you manage it?

To begin with, there’s traffic. When you build a whole metropolis out of large lots, everybody has to drive everywhere – and fast, because everything is a long way away. In Nashville, I saw the worst midday, mid-week freeway traffic I’ve ever seen in such a small city. And, of course, Atlanta’s traffic legendary; Atlanta has replaced Los Angeles as the most miserable traffic experience in the United States.

I-440 outside of Nashville.

Then there’s the challenge of paying for basic government services. It’s become increasingly clear that low-density development doesn’t pay for itself and contributes to the chronic long-term fiscal disaster that is building in local governments around the country. Several years ago, when I was working at Smart Growth America, we did a study that proved this to be the case in Nashville-Davidson County. (The report is available here). Since then, of course, Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns and many others have proved the same thing.

And you can see this in Nashville. The central county, Davidson County, blew through its land supply really fast by approving lots of low-density development. Now, suburban and exurban development have moved into the outlying counties, while Davidson is stuck with a bunch of low-density subdivisions that will have to be subsidized forever. Davidson has been lucky that there’s been a lot of high-density development in Downtown Nashville that throws off a ton of property tax, but who know how long that will go on?

As my dear friend, the late Rob Lang of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, used to say: The West – with its low-rise, auto-orientation but tightly packed urban areas – is just an urban design problem. But the South, with its endless sprawl, is an almost unsolvable problem. The “National Suburb” looks good house by house. But if you zoom out, it’s hard to know how to fix it.