America’s housing was built for a world we no longer live in

America’s housing was built for a world we no longer live in

America’s housing supply was built for a world we no longer live in. But what will replace it? 

As the nation turns 250, that is one of the most important questions we face in the coming decades. Building enough homes, of the right kind, and in the right places is a prerequisite for economic opportunity and growth. Our crippling housing shortage is upstream of many of the problems that ail the US, from our cost of living and increasingly zero-sum politics to our seemingly intractable national bad mood. 

The root of the problem is that the United States governs housing under a nearly century-old paradigm that’s been cracking under growing strain. Since the end of the Great Depression and World War II, when the baby boom massively increased the country’s population and millions of Americans sought relief from derelict urban housing, suburbia has been the country’s default blueprint for development. Big single-family homes, two-car garages, and giant strip malls were not merely consumer preferences. They were also written into law by rigid zoning codes — the rules that dictate what kinds of things can be built where — incentivized by midcentury lending standards, and absorbed into the professional common sense of planners and builders. 

Inside this story

• America’s housing crisis is the result of an old development model that pushed the country toward single-family suburbia, making housing scarcer, more expensive, and more sprawling.
• In the next 50 years, that model will become even less suited to American life.
• The suburbs will be central to any housing transformation.
• YIMBY reforms are necessary, but probably not sufficient. We also need good urban planning.
• The future could be hyper-sprawling, or more vibrant and livable, or, more likely, a combination of both.

The system shaped not just the suburbs, but also many cities, and has kept homes scarce, expensive, and sprawling, resulting in a housing affordability crisis that has come to dominate politics. And in the decades ahead, this pattern will become even more misaligned with the reality of American life. Households are getting smaller, and Americans are getting older. If today’s low immigration rates continue, the US Census Bureau projects the country in 2076 will have fewer families with children and working-age adults, and far more seniors — the inverse of the demographic transition that drove the great suburbanization. Climate change and new technology, such as driverless cars, will also force cities and suburbs and populations to adapt.

US history offers reasons for optimism, showing repeatedly that we can reorganize ourselves with extraordinary dynamism when the occasion calls for it. Our cities have already lived many lives, growing from tiny outposts into world-leading metropolises, before receding again in the wake of suburbanization and de-industrialization, and then more recently gaining new life with influxes of younger generations.

The transformations ahead may not be as physically dramatic as those of the American past, but they call for equally monumental cultural and political shifts in our approach to housing. We’re already making progress: The ascendant “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) movement has persuaded states and localities to roll back restrictive policies that make it essentially impossible to build enough homes. The effects of those reforms are slowly making themselves felt in more affordable neighborhoods. 

But there is still far more to do. Housing reformers will need to turn their attention not just to removing bad regulations like single-family zoning and minimum lot sizes, but also toward reviving a role for government in shaping our communities through real, big-picture planning. Doing so would supply a missing piece in America’s housing agenda — making US cities and suburbs not just more affordable, but more vibrant and livable and helping us better use our existing infrastructure. That will matter even more as a shrinking working-age population makes endless outward sprawl harder to sustain.

A more abundant, more varied, and even more fun housing future is not inevitable, but it is decisively within reach. Here is what the future could look like by America’s 300th birthday, if we commit to making ourselves anew. 

Suburban retrofit abundance

Arthur Nelson, a professor emeritus of urban planning and real estate development at the University of Arizona, has a few words of warning for anyone trying to report on what cities might look like in a half-century: “You’re not going to be right.” 

Urban planners tend not to project many decades into the future because what that future will look like invariably hinges on factors we couldn’t possibly imagine today. The most important unknown for our future population and housing needs will be whether the US opens its doors to many more immigrants, as it has done at times in the past. Assuming immigration rates remain low, however, US population is projected to peak somewhere around the mid-21st century and fall thereafter; by 2076, it will have dropped back to today’s size, on the way to declining further. 

Despite that uncertainty, many of the housing abundance advocates, policy experts, and urban planners I spoke to for this piece expressed striking optimism that the future of housing will be better than the present, and enthused about how much can be transformed in 50 years. Start with the suburb, where the majority of Americans live today, and where the future of American housing will be decided. 

Imagine that, in 2076, you’re walking through a residential neighborhood in La Mirada, California, a midcentury, southeastern suburb of Los Angeles, one of the regions at the epicenter of today’s housing crisis. The bones look much like the suburbs we know today — gently curving streets, sun-baked yards, low-slung buildings set back from the sidewalk — but the old single-family monoculture in many neighborhoods has loosened: Houses built during the region’s mid-20th-century building boom now have small cottages, also known as accessory dwelling units (ADUs), tucked beside them. Some bigger houses have been subdivided into two homes. Other lots now hold triplexes, fourplexes, and small apartment buildings that sit comfortably among single-family homes. A few houses have become shared homes for seniors who want support and companionship without being cordoned off into a retirement community. (In 50 years, that will include people born in the 1980s, 1990s, and ’00s — me, and perhaps you, too.)

Even as the overall US population has plateaued, this late-21st century Greater Los Angeles might be home to millions more people than today, but it has not had to push all of them farther into the arid desert or the fire-prone hills. Because as many as two to three times more people are living on each acre of land, housing costs have eased. Many people rely on shared driverless cars, freeing up the space that would be needed for car storage, so land that had been parking can be put to better uses.

Perhaps most strikingly different from today’s suburbia, the hard wall between home and commerce — which is near-universally mandated by local zoning codes today — has softened. Near the neighborhood’s edge, where local streets meet a larger main road, a neighborhood grocery and clinic have opened on what used to be strictly residential lots. And, yes: That is a donut shop running out of a neighbor’s garage. A few doors down, an old three-bedroom has become a small co-working space, and a converted garage houses a bicycle repair shop. Housing has not only become more affordable, but with more of the rituals of daily life mixed in, the suburb has gained a richer, more connected public sphere. There are simply more people around — walking, talking, and lingering. 

Could we get there? Some experts I consulted predicted that simply easing regulations on what can be built in these neighborhoods will unlock a long-suppressed capacity for creative adaptation, allowing suburban areas to evolve in precisely this way. In the suburbs of superstar cities like LA, San Francisco, and Boston, land values are so high that property owners have strong incentives to redevelop single-family lots into more economically valuable uses, like multiple housing units. They just need to be legally allowed to do so. 

The YIMBY movement’s recent legislative successes have already put much of the country on that path. More than a dozen states, including California, have passed laws to allow building ADUs on residential home lots, and many others have new laws allowing denser housing, like townhomes and small apartment buildings in these areas too.

“I suspect it’s just a matter [of time] before the rest do the same,” M. Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research for the advocacy group California YIMBY, told me in an email. The upshot for the far future of housing is that “detached single-family zoning is dead,” predicts Gray, who is also an urban planner by trade. “I think the typical lot in a (non-HOA) suburb of a typical US city in 2076 will have at least a second unit; perhaps a manufactured ADU plopped in the back, perhaps a McMansion that has been converted into a duplex.” 

Such reforms also offer important tools for a graying population. As Nelson has argued, the number of senior households in the US is already growing faster than younger ones, and without zoning flexibility to redevelop single-family homes into smaller units or adapt them to the changing market in some other way, older homeowners would face the prospect of being stuck with large, hard-to-maintain houses. 

Even more dramatic suburban retrofits might come in commercial districts — think aging, abandoned malls, strip malls, and “power centers” built around big box stores and even bigger parking lots. As Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth has written, there is a growing movement to turn those sites into housing. 

An increasing number of states have started allowing apartments in commercial districts, where building multifamily housing is an easier sell politically than allowing it in residential areas where neighbors might resist. 

Meanwhile, Gray added, communities across the country have been very rapidly repealing parking minimums — the fixed number of parking spots required at every residence and business. As minimums are phased out, parking lots can be redeveloped  into housing and other uses better than acres of underused, heat-trapping asphalt.

“I expect most of today’s strip malls and shopping malls will gradually be converted into mixed-use pocket neighborhoods,” Gray predicts — a distinctly American version of a much older human pattern of development, where homes, shops, services, and public life are allowed to coexist. 

Maybe we need an urban planning revival

Despite early signs these reforms are nudging American housing toward a better future, the national rate of new home construction has barely moved, and forecasters expect little change in 2026. That owes less to the reforms than to the broader economy: mortgage rates largely stuck above 6 percent since 2022, which raise borrowing costs for builders and freeze existing owners in place; rising material and labor costs; and a thinning construction workforce worsened by President Trump’s immigration policies. Where YIMBYs have passed new laws, many local governments prove adept at finding ways to flout them. Housing advocates will have to commit themselves to a long fight, until change exists not only on paper, but also in the real world.

Even then, unleashing the free market alone won’t solve every problem with how American cities and suburbs are built and organized, or how they feel to live in.

Those failures are visible everywhere: Have you ever wondered why so many residential streets wind around in aimless, circuitous patterns, disconnected from the town around them? Or why you are forced to endure a nightmare commute to drive just 10 miles? These are all failures not just of too much regulation in the form of rigid zoning, but also of an absence of coherent urban planning. 

Robert Goodspeed, an associate professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, points to good planning as an essential missing element in today’s housing reform movement. “I think that the YIMBY movement has completely missed the importance of planning,” he told me. “Even if we repealed all zoning, it still doesn’t realize a well-designed, well-planned community that has high quality of life.”

The zoning approach works so poorly because it micromanages what can or cannot be built on any given parcel of land. It’s a set of prohibitions on what the private market is allowed to do (made without regard for how people actually want to live): No apartments can be built on this street, even if there’s an enormous amount of demand to live there; no coffee shop may be opened on that corner, even if it would fill up with neighbors delighted to make it part of their daily routine.

Urban planning, on the other hand, at its best is concerned with the public realm. It oversees the larger body of a city or area and provides the connective tissue of its infrastructure — roads, transit, parks, sewers, and other utilities — that links up the space, something the private sector can’t provide. It allows cities to function as a cohesive whole and has the potential to give the public access to what a community has to offer. 

The art of good street design

One of the most important jobs of urban planning is to lay out a street network, like the gridiron plans of New York and many other US cities. In most American suburbs, particularly outer suburbs that were built out post-World War II, residential streets have been organized much differently, in a meandering, maze-like manner scattered with cul-de-sacs and other dead ends that disconnect the neighborhood from the surrounding community.

“You have to ensure that every neighborhood is connected to another,” Alain Bertaud, former principal urban planner at the World Bank, told me. “The market does not provide that. The job of the planner is to get involved much less in what is private, and much more in what is public.” 

Street design is also important for the feasibility of densifying suburban areas with more diverse and affordable housing types — for the YIMBY agenda itself. Density needs permeability: A connected street network can more easily absorb more residents because it gives people many ways to move through it; a network filled with dead ends, on the other hand, concentrates traffic through a few choke points, making even modest population growth feel to neighbors like an overload.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American planners were animated by real civic ambition, laying out future-minded street grids that could continue to grow and connect the residential and the commercial. One reason more recent development has been so poorly designed, Gray argues, is that planners have become so bogged down enforcing the tedious minutiae of zoning codes. “Zoning has utterly consumed planning, to the point that many city planning departments now do little that would resemble what a normal person might think of as planning,” he writes in his book Arbitrary Lines. Gray calls for abolishing zoning altogether, and freeing up municipal planning offices for more useful work that can accommodate the changes we know we need to make to our housing stock. 

Easier said than done, of course. The US comprises thousands of individual cities and suburbs, each with its own zoning code, and they will not surrender that authority willingly. 

But it’s not crazy to imagine that, in 50 years, planning in the US looks very different from today. Local governments derive their authority to zone from states, Gray points out. And just over the last few years, states from Montana to Maine to Oregon have been wresting certain zoning powers away from cities and suburbs. That shift could provide the seeds for a future where planning is run on a more unified, regional level, much like it is in peer countries like France and Japan. Local planners might then be empowered to focus on what matters — facilitating humane growth in places that people want to move to, and creatively solving the challenges that will arise from retrofitting a built environment that was not designed to accommodate that sort of evolution. 

Could we just…start over with all-new cities? 

One of the country’s most audacious attempts to revive American urban planning is unfolding in Solano County, California, roughly an hour north of San Francisco. There, a controversial, billionaire-backed company is advocating an iconoclastic solution to the Bay Area’s housing affordability crisis. 

Instead of fighting through red tape to get permission to add a few homes in Palo Alto or Marin County, the startup California Forever wants to build a new city from scratch. Forty years after construction begins, the company hopes, it would be more populous than the St. Louis, Orlando, or New Orleans of today, providing homes to around 400,000 people and jobs in advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, and other industries. 

The project has not yet broken ground, and, ironically enough, likely won’t be able to for several more years, as it moves through environmental review and other required regulatory steps. But it eventually hopes to prove that it’s still possible to build physical things in the world’s tech capital, the place that has transformed everyday life at extraordinary speed but still struggles with the elemental task of making room for people to live. The project has won support from many prominent housing reform advocates, who welcome it as a bracing challenge to an untenable status quo that has meaningfully damaged the US economy. (According to one widely cited study, restrictive housing policies in superstar metro areas, including San Francisco and San Jose, lowered overall American GDP growth by around 36 percent between 1964 and 2009 because they prevented more people from moving to those highly productive cities.)

Despite its Silicon Valley provenance, California Forever’s most interesting ambition is less futuristic than throwback. It hopes not merely to add a mass of badly needed housing stock to the Bay Area, but to deliver it in the form of a pedestrian-centered city of the kind that hasn’t been built in the US in a hundred years. Its architectural renderings show handsome mid-rise townhomes, apartments, and single-family homes along shaded, walkable streets with a bus rapid transit system, all organized around a traditional grid network of streets. Gabriel Metcalf, the head of planning for California Forever, told me he predicts the city will eventually have the lowest per capita rate of car travel anywhere in the US other than New York City.

Of course, the project in its full form might not get past regulatory hurdles. Even if it does, it could end up being too expensive for the people who work in its schools, grocery stores, and coffee shops to live in, especially with California’s high labor costs, environmental review, and other expenses baked in. It’s also very difficult to build a successful city from the top-down. 

But whatever becomes of this movement to build entirely new cities, it is tapping into a real gap that already exists in the US housing market: Despite our reputation for being car-loving suburbanites, many Americans want something different. A 2026 Pew Research Center survey, for example, found that 44 percent of respondents say they prefer to live in a walkable area — even if the homes are smaller (other estimates actually put the number higher). The surest prospect for making that a reality might not be new cities, but repairing existing ones. 

Alicia Pederson, a Chicago-based writer, researcher, and founder of the organization Courtyard Urbanist, predicts that, with good urban planning, we could in 50 years see a “golden age of American city-building.” With a graying and eventually shrinking national population, many cities will have to work harder to attract and retain residents by offering a better quality of life, she told me in an email. That might mean providing better housing options that make vibrant, walkable life accessible to more Americans without sacrificing the benefits of suburban single-family homes: spacious, sunny housing units and abundant green space. The kind of courtyard blocks common in some European cities offer one elegant solution: They occupy an entire city block, with a perimeter of mid-rise buildings and an interior yard. And they can accommodate homes in a range of sizes, which are more flexible and easier for aging people to maintain than detached houses. 

The future is still up for grabs

It’s entirely possible that sheer inertia keeps the US on its current sprawling trajectory as it approaches its 300th birthday, with reforms producing only a scattering of ADUs and boxy apartment buildings often derided as “gentrification buildings,” rather than any deeper transformation of the American built environment. 

Arpit Gupta, an associate professor of finance at New York University who I consulted because of his talent for poking holes in urbanist orthodoxies, predicted that the US by 2076 will actually see “a dramatic increase in sprawl” thanks to the future adoption of autonomous vehicles. That’s because he and many other transportation researchers believe many people would be willing to tolerate longer commutes in self-driving cars than they do in cars they have to drive themselves, providing one more reason to push housing ever outward. Minus the self-driving cars, that’s what’s happening in the hyper-sprawling and still growing Sunbelt, where new housing continues to be built farther and farther from city centers. 

But there are many other paths we might take. Domestic migration may begin shifting northward in the coming decades, amid a warming climate and water scarcity in the Southwest. Many Midwestern cities are showing signs of renewed growth (may I recommend moving to Madison, Wisconsin?), offering a chance to build more and better housing on the region’s extensive pre-war urban bones. And it’s much too early to assume that AVs will massively increase the amount we drive, Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, cautioned me. Different policy choices could lead to shared self-driving systems that encourage less car ownership and more density.

The future won’t vindicate every utopian blueprint — nor should it. Our housing system ought to be open and capacious enough to accommodate the country’s diverse and evolving preferences. The way we’ve organized housing for much of the last century has given us not only pervasive unaffordability, but also too few choices, too few versions of the American dream. That very scarcity is part of why Americans today are so angry at one another: It feeds the sense that we’re fighting over scraps. 

But if we make room for more ways of living together and think big about how to get there, we may find ourselves less trapped by the failures of the present than we think. Cities often surprise us: Fifty years ago, who could have predicted that places like New York City and Boston, then battered by population loss and disorder, would recover so dramatically? 

The trajectory we take in the next 50 years will surely confound our predictions, too. And that’s reason enough to build something less brittle than what we inherited — a housing approach with enough room, variety, and imagination to enable American life to change again.