How Sun Belt Cities Are Becoming More Like Boston and San Francisco

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For the past 50 years, Forsyth County, Georgia, has been one of the fastest-growing places in the United States. Today, the population of this Atlanta exurb, 45 miles northwest of the city, is 280,000—more than 10 times as many people as lived there just 40 years ago. It’s emblematic of the Sun Belt boom that has shifted the nation’s population geography south, into a string of fast-growing cities from Orlando to Phoenix.

Forsyth County may be emblematic of the Sun Belt in another way: It has soured on growth. In the last election, one commissioner ran as “big corporate developers’ worst nightmare”; another trumpeted “zero apartments approved.” This spring, county commissioners voted to establish a 180-day moratorium to freeze rezoning for residential development. “Our roads are gridlocked, and our schools are full,” said a third commissioner, Mendy Moore.

Similar growing pains are playing out in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, as residents grow irate over the loss of farmland, overworked sewer systems, crowded schools, and traffic. They are responding with impact fees, traffic studies, minimum lot sizes, and moratoriums, among other urban-planning tactics to slow down subdivision builders. “Anti-Growth Fervor Grips US South,” Bloomberg wrote last year. The belt isn’t buckling anymore.

In a new working paper, economists Edward Glaeser and Joe Gyourko put some data behind the anecdata. They show that the rate of new home construction is collapsing in big metro areas like Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas, Las Vegas, Orlando, and Raleigh that have long been synonymous with sprawl and cheap housing—especially on the urban frontier. They are building housing at a pace much closer to those of Rust Belt cities like Detroit and coastal cities like Los Angeles these days. “What we show is there is a sharp decline in the intensity of building in high-price, low-density housing tracts. What’s that? That’s the best suburbs,” Gyourko, a professor at Penn’s Wharton School, told me.

As sprawl dries up, prices are soaring: The paper notes that home prices in Miami, Tampa, and Phoenix have grown faster than those in metro New York City since 2000. Increasingly, housing affordability is a national problem, inspiring policy action in once cheap cities like Dallas and states like Montana. But problem solvers in those places may be up against a vicious cycle, in which rising prices attract well-heeled buyers who support policies that stop development—and cause prices to rise further.

“Sun Belt residents are starting to behave and stop development the way Bostonians did in the ’80s and ’90s,” Gyourko hypothesized. “It’s similar behavior but just starting much later. They’re not [exactly like] coastal cities yet, but if this keeps going for another 20 years they will be, and housing will be very expensive.”

From the 1970s to the 2000s, Sun Belt cities built on a massive scale—hundreds of thousands of new homes each decade. The sweet spot for those new homes, Glaeser and Gyourko show, was in “high price, low density” tracts—places that were in high demand, relative to the metropolitan average, and very suburban in character. In the 1970s, for example, Atlanta built 88 percent of its new homes in such areas—areas like Forsyth County. Miami built 65 percent of homes in those parts of the region in the 1980s. Dallas and Phoenix peaked in the 1990s.

Since then, the share of new homes getting built in those areas has fallen in all of those cities and others—evidence, the authors suggest, of a rising tide of not-in-my-backyard sentiment. And that’s a smaller share of a much smaller pie: Overall, the housing stock in these cities is growing by less than 1 percent a year, a fraction of the pace of decades past.

Of course there are other possibilities. Nationally, construction has not recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. The accompanying mortgage finance crackdown boxed lower-income buyers out of the market. There may be geographical and temporal limits to desire in sprawl, points so far from the metropolitan center of gravity that nobody wants to live there. And then there is the shift toward demand for more housing in closer-in, denser neighborhoods, which command high per-square-foot prices and have long been starved for development.

But the data suggest that the sprawl decline began before the financial crisis. And while a comb of tall apartment buildings on Miami’s Biscayne Bay waterfront in Brickell might reflect increased demand for urban living, there may be a push factor there—development is going where development can go.

In some quarters, this will be taken as good news. In addition to its environmental costs, sprawl’s reputation for affordability is undermined by the enormous transportation expenses that come along with living miles from schools, shops, and jobs. If you include the obligation that every adult in the household own, fuel, maintain, and insure a car, supposedly affordable cities like Houston can wind up being more expensive than cities like New York, by some measures.

Still, what construction has shifted to higher-density areas hasn’t been enough to offset sprawl’s decline, and rising home prices reflect that. In April, Conor Dougherty wrote a story for the New York Times Magazine questioning the conventional wisdom of anti-sprawl, arguing that exurban development has been a vital escape valve for the nation’s failure to build enough infill housing. His focus was on Princeton, Texas, 43 miles from Dallas, where the population has more than doubled since the pandemic, to 37,000 last year.

In May, the Census Bureau dubbed Princeton the fastest-growing city in the country. But it is also a poster child for the limits of sprawl. Last year, Princeton passed a moratorium on new residential development. The city staff said: “The city’s water, wastewater and roadway infrastructure is operating at, near, or beyond capacity.” Princeton, Texas, is full. Keep moving.