Secretary Duffy Was Right to Make DOT More Family Friendly

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has directed agencies within his department that hand out competitive grants to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” In practice, as Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies told the New York Times, that means prioritizing federal grantmaking to “lower-density communities where there are more single-family homes, family life is often more affordable, and family formation is higher." 

It may seem strange for the Department of Transportation to get involved in family policy. But it has already been involved in such policy, as the Federal Transit Administration has preferred to give its transit grants to cities and regions that emphasize high-density housing. This was based on the assumption that people living in high-density housing are more likely to ride transit than drive a car—an assumption disproven by research by Portland’s Cascade Policy Institute that found that people living in such developments are not significantly more likely to ride transit than people in the rest of the region.

What we do know is that high-density housing—particularly the mid-rise and high-rise apartment buildings favored by Federal Transit Administration grants—reduces fertility rates. Countries such as Russia and South Korea that have packed as many of their people as possible into such housing have seen drastic drops in their fertility rates. 

The construction of so-called transit-oriented developments—high-density housing projects favored by the Federal Transit Administration—is only part of an overall strategy adopted by some states to increase urban densities. Most Pacific Coast states, Atlantic Coast states north of Washington DC, and Florida have passed “growth-management” laws aimed at curbing urban sprawl by forcing cities to “grow up, not out.” Usually, this means drawing a line around cities or urban areas and severely restricting development outside of that line.

Through such means, California has packed 95% of its people into just 5% of its land. Urban densities in California are twice the national average. Oregon has restricted development to little more than 1.3% of the state. Florida repealed its growth-management mandate in 2011, but most counties in the state still restrict rural development. A few interior cities, such as Denver, also have urban-growth boundaries. Not coincidentally, states with the strictest growth-management policies tend to have lower fertility rates.

Growth management creates artificial land shortages that make housing expensive. The planners’ solution, high-density housing, has two problems. First, all things being equal, the vast majority of Americans—some surveys say as much as 80% —would rather live in single-family homes, which offer more privacy, less noise, and usually room for gardening and outdoor play areas. More than 80% of the residents of a dozen different states—none of which have statewide growth-management laws—live in single-family homes.

Second, all things aren’t equal, as denser multi-family housing requires elevators, more steel and concrete, and indoor lobbies and hallways. All of these make mid-rise housing cost twice as much as single-family homes, per square foot of livable area, while high-rise housing can cost at least five times as much.

Builders respond to this by making most mid-rise and high-rise apartments smaller than typical single-family homes. For example, home seekers in San Antonio, Texas, which has no growth-management planning, can find numerous 2,000-square-foot single-family homes for sale for around $225,000. Meanwhile, residents of Seattle, which has a fixed urban-growth boundary, will have a hard time finding a 1,000-square-foot condominium in a multi-family building for less than $500,000. High housing costs and small apartment sizes in regions with growth-management planning have depressed fertility rates because people who have no room to raise children are less likely to have them.

Matthew Yglesias claims that Secretary Duffy’s policy will backfire. “The problem,” Yglesias says, “is that directing funding to low-density communities is going to lead to more housing scarcity and less family formation.” But Yglesias has misdiagnosed the cause of high housing prices.

Density advocates seeking to divert public attention from the impacts of growth management on housing prices have blamed high housing prices on single-family zoning. This is absurd: so long as room is available to build more homes, single-family zoning has almost no effect on housing prices. 

Almost every American city except Houston had single-family zoning by 1960, yet housing was affordable throughout the United States. It was only after states and regions began to adopt growth-management plans in the 1960s and 1970s that housing started to become expensive. Today, Houston still has no single-family zoning, yet housing there is more expensive than in San Antonio, which does have single-family zoning.

By blaming single-family zoning for high housing prices, density advocates persuaded California and Oregon legislatures to abolish such zoning and allow multi-family housing projects in single-family neighborhoods. They called this “yes in my backyard” or YIMBY. 

But YIMBYism doesn’t work. Tearing down single-family homes to build apartments that will be even more expensive reduces the supply of the kind of housing Americans want to increase the kind they don’t want. That won’t make housing affordable. For this reason, it is no surprise that census data reveal that higher-density urban areas are less affordable (meaning median home prices are a greater multiple of median family incomes) than those with lower densities.

After World War II, developers ranging from Henry J. Kaiser on the West Coast to William Levitt on the East Coast provided affordable housing by buying large blocks of land, subdividing the land into individual lots, building streets, water, sewer, and other services to those lots, and then constructing hundreds of homes at a time. The homes they built were typically about 1,200 square feet and sold for under $10,000—which is around $100,000 in today’s money.

Eventually, such large developments evolved into what became known as master planned communities, complete with parks, schools, and commercial areas. Dozens of such master planned communities are under construction in Texas at any given time, but they are effectively illegal in California, Oregon, and other states with strict growth-management laws because there are no large blocks of undeveloped land inside of their urban-growth boundaries.

Duffy’s directive effectively tells transportation agencies to favor grant applications from states and regions that haven’t adopted growth-management planning. This may persuade some of the states that use growth-management planning to abolish such planning and the urban-growth boundaries and other rural restrictions that go with it.

Doing so will not threaten the nation’s farms, forests, or open space. The 2020 census found that all of the nation’s urban areas cover less than 3% of the nation’s land. Even densely-populated states such as Rhode Island and New Jersey are mostly rural open space. Meanwhile, the nation has four times as many acres of agricultural land as it actually uses for growing crops. The nation’s forests are also growing far more wood than we actually use. 

To be most effective, Secretary Duffy’s policy also ought to be adopted by the Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, as some agencies in that department also have favored dense, anti-family housing. There are no legitimate reasons for trying to force more people to live in multi-family housing instead of single-family homes, but there are many good reasons, including increased fertility, for letting Americans live the way they want to live, which in most cases is in single-family homes.

Randal O’Toole is a land-use and transportation policy analyst for the Oregon-based Thoreau Institute and the author of numerous books, including American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the American Dream of Homeownership and Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.