7 Reasons Urban Sprawl is an Environmental Disaster
There has been a disturbing amount of rhetoric in support of destroying more untouched forests in the name of creating housing.
The current administration has long promised to turn over federal protected lands for sprawl. That is no surprise, and I have previously examined their anti-life-on-earth propaganda.
But it’s not just the Right. The New York Times last month published an opinion piece titled “Why America Should Sprawl.”
This piece, I suspect, was largely to provoke people like me. As Ray Delahanty said, “Well, I’m provoked.”
Continuing to sprawl is a terrible idea
First, it’s one of the root causes of the U.S. housing crisis in the first place, as we built too few homes too far from everything in too much space.
But today, the point I want to focus on is that urban sprawl is an absolute disaster for all life on earth. More sprawl is reckless if we want a thriving future and a healthy planet.
The Argument For Sprawl
After World War II, the mass adoption of the car and huge government investments in highways meant that people no longer had to live in cities or close to commuter transit stops to get to jobs in cities.
We could now build on plots of land previously impractical, and build we did.
The suburbs sprang up. With more housing supply, these cookie-cutter homes were affordable.
(Although only accessible to white Americans, as covered in The Color of Law.)
Today, cities like Houston and Dallas, which have continued to sprawl more and more, have been able to keep up with housing demand and keep housing affordable.
We should learn from this: more housing supply decreases housing costs.
I wrote about in my article on gentrification, many sections of the American Left would do well to understand this
We need to build more homes. But it shouldn’t be sprawl.
Urban Sprawl Partially Got Us Into The Housing Crisis, It Won’t Get Us Out of It
Thinking that more sprawl will get us out of this ignores the role it plays in our housing crisis.
Urban sprawl requires unsustainable infrastructure costs. With homes further apart, everyone needs to drive more miles, which means you need wider roads.
Highway construction is expensive. For example, the I-35 expansion in Austin is set to cost $4.5 billion.
These costs get passed on to taxpayers. Even with the handouts, those who live in suburbs further and further from jobs spend more money on transportation.
More importantly, they spend more of their life driving further and sitting in traffic.
Second, by having sprawled-out single-family homes, we use valuable city land that could house many more people, have shops, restaurants, and culture, and instead house… just one family.
We need more density to solve the housing crisis. We also need it to save the planet.
With this important but tangential stuff out of the way, let’s get into why urban sprawl is so bad for the environment.
83% of Americans Live in an Urban Area
This is according to 2018 stats. This means what I have to say here will apply to most of us, but especially in cities.
Urban Sprawl is an Environmental Disaster
Let’s get into every reason (that I can think of) why.
1) Increased Carbon Emissions from Transportation
The definition of sprawl is to live more spread out. This requires a car. The more we sprawl, the more we drive.
According to the U.S Department of Energy, the number of miles vehicles have traveled in the U.S. has ballooned from 1.13 trillion in 1971 to 3.19 trillion in 2023.
This is a direct result of urban sprawl. As we’ve expanded the suburbs, more people have to drive further distances to get to their jobs.
In Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser examines the research on how sprawl affects car usage. “The inverse connections between density and car usage are extremely strong—as density doubles, the share of the population that takes a car to work drops by 6.6 percent.”
Makes Public Transportation Less Viable: “Denseville vs Sparseville”
In his book Human Transit, Jarrett Walker explains why more dense housing is crucial for effective public transit. He compares two made-up towns: “denseville” vs “sparseville.”
The more dense the housing, the more practical it is for public transit. It means more people live within walking distance to the same stop, which allows transit to serve more people with the same resources.
ThE eV rEvolUti0n wiLL S0lVe tHiS
It’s true, electric vehicles don’t emit fossil fuels out of the tailpipe.
Yet, they do nothing else to combat the other environmental problems with car-dependency and urban sprawl.
2) The Destruction of Land
Urban sprawl uses up a vast amount of land. I think this is one of the most underappreciated environment issues.
The Sprawling Footprint of Single-Family Housing
The USDA’s 1997 National Resource Inventory showed that between 1992 and 1997, 11 million acres of land were converted to urban and other developed uses.
The typical suburban development pattern, detached homes on quarter-acre (or larger) lots, is astonishingly inefficient in its use of land.
And it has gotten worse! The original suburb, Levittown, today has four homes for every acre, is more than three times as dense as the Texas suburb, “The Woodlands,” according to Glaeser’s Triumph of the City.
Sprawl consumes vastly more land per person than any other form of development.
Once land is developed this way, it becomes locked into a pattern that’s extremely difficult to retrofit later. Even if you abandoned the sprawled area, it would take decades or centuries for the ecosystem to reestablish. It’s a bell that can’t be unrung.
The Massive Land Requirements of Car Infrastructure
Suburbs and cars are like, as the Catalans might say, cul i merda (butt and poop.)
The American road network now covers over 4 million miles, with a significant portion dedicated to serving low-density suburbs and exurbs.
These roads are increasingly wide “stroads” and highways cutting through landscapes like concrete scars.
Consider that a six-lane highway requires approximately 18 acres of land per mile.
The cloverleaf interchange between two highways can consume 30-50 acres of land that could otherwise support forest, wetland, or productive agriculture.
This is often city land that also destroys communities and contributes to horrific levels of asthma and other respiratory issues. I cover this historical problem in this essay on Hartford, and this article on why we should reimagine the Cross Bronx.
Parking compounds this problem to an almost unbelievable degree.
According to the parking network, there are an estimated 2 billion parking spaces in America. That’s 8 spaces for every car.
Transportation Alternatives puts this into concrete terms for how it affects cities. According to their 25×25 plan, if New York City repurposed just one quarter of the land it surrenders to cars, it could have enough space for 13 more Central Parks.
The Ecological Desert of the American Lawn
Lawn grass is our worst invasive species, covering an estimated 40-50 million acres of land in the U.S.
They provide almost no ecological value. They can’t support biodiversity like pollinators. They don’t support healthy soil.
They’re so useless they can’t even support themselves, requiring massive chemical inputs to keep them green and lush as well as staggering amounts of water.
Here are some stats on lawns I’d rather forget.
- According to Columbia University, 30-60% urban fresh water is used on lawns. In places with drought warnings, this is a serious water irrigation problem.
- According to the USDA, Americans use 60-80 million pounds of pesticides annually for lawns.
- According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, Americans use 800 million gallons of gasoline for mowing and maintenance each year.
- According to a 2001 study, a single hour operating a gas-powered lawn mower produces as much pollution as driving a car 100 miles.
All of this is for… for what? Mostly for aesthetic purposes.
Of course, we could make lawns ecological assets, but few homes do.
At the moment when we need to maximize carbon sequestration and preserve biodiversity, sprawl replaces complex natural ecosystems with these resource-intensive, ecologically barren expanses.
3) More Energy Consumption
Urban sprawl means inefficient buildings. As Edward Glaeser notes in Triumph of the City, “The average single-family detached home consumes 88 percent more electricity than the average apartment in a five-or-more-unit building.”
Heat Transfer Physics Favors Density
Single-family homes have external walls on all sides, exposing maximum surface area to outdoor temperatures. Each wall, roof, and foundation becomes a thermal bridge where heating or cooling escapes. This is a simple physics problem that urban sprawl can’t escape.
By contrast, apartments share walls, floors, and ceilings with neighboring units, dramatically reducing the exposed surface area per dwelling.
Even modest townhomes that share just one or two walls achieve significant energy savings compared to fully detached structures.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that heating and cooling account for approximately 50% of a home’s energy usage.
Sprawling Infrastructure Multiplies Waste
The energy inefficiency extends beyond individual buildings. Sprawling development requires:
- Longer power lines with greater transmission losses
- More extensive water and sewage systems with increased pumping energy
- More streetlights illuminating sparsely populated roads
- Larger maintenance vehicles covering more territory
Municipal water systems in low-density areas require significantly more pumping energy per household served. Street lighting—essential for safety—illuminates vast stretches of suburban roads often used by only a handful of cars each hour.
In compact urban neighborhoods, the same infrastructure serves many more residents. The energy footprint for basic services in sprawl multiplies several times over compared to denser development patterns.
This brings me to my next point.
4) Infrastructure Inefficiencies
I’m sort of repeating myself, but the point is clear: having everything more spread out is inefficient.
The Sprawl Tax: More Infrastructure, Fewer Taxpayers
A mile of road, water line, or sewer pipe in sprawling areas serves a fraction of the homes it would in denser neighborhoods.
Consider a typical urban block might contain 100+ housing units sharing the same length of infrastructure that serves just 10-15 homes in a suburban setting. This 10:1 ratio means each suburban resident bears far greater infrastructure costs.
Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn calls this the “growth Ponzi scheme,” where municipalities take on enormous long-term maintenance liabilities while lacking the tax base to support them.
Many suburbs are already facing fiscal crises as their infrastructure ages out and replacement costs exceed what their tax base can support.
The Climate Impact of Overbuilt Infrastructure
Every foot of concrete pipe, every yard of asphalt, and every meter of utility line represents embodied resource extraction, creation, and transportation.
Garbage trucks, mail carriers, and school buses all must travel further to serve fewer people.
The climate crisis demands infrastructure efficiency, yet sprawl delivers the opposite.
5) Messes Up The Water Cycle
When rain hits the concrete, asphalt, and compacted soils of suburban developments, it can’t soak into the ground. Instead, it rushes off, carrying lawn chemicals, road oils, and other pollutants directly into waterways.
The EPA now identifies urban runoff as the leading source of water quality impairments to surveyed estuaries.
Meanwhile, without proper groundwater recharge, streams dry up during drought periods and flash flooding becomes more common during heavy rains.
For example, highway construction in Houston’s Sims Bayou watershed, as examined by the Natural Hazards Center, “exposed an additional 3,500 households to flooding between 1980 and 2000. This is the consequence of an increase of impervious surface by 15 percent.”
6) Worsens The Urban Heat Island
Sprawl supercharges the urban heat island effect despite its lower density. Dark pavement in roads, driveways, and parking lots absorbs solar radiation and releases it as heat, raising local daytime temperatures by by about 1–7°F higher than temperatures in outlying areas.
These elevated temperatures are deadly.
Heat-related mortality increases dramatically during extreme temperature events, with vulnerable populations suffering most.
The sprawl pattern creates a vicious feedback loop: higher temperatures drive increased air conditioning use, generating more waste heat and requiring more energy, resulting in more emissions that further warm the climate.
7) Ecosystem Fragmentation
Bed Goldfarb’s book, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet brought this concept to my attention. I think the best way to explain is with one of his examples: salamanders.
These small amphibians migrate seasonally between upland forest habitats and breeding pools, often covering distances of several hundred meters.
For millennia, these migrations occurred unimpeded, allowing salamander populations to maintain genetic diversity and ecological balance. However, roads now intersect these ancient pathways.
Goldfarb documents how some mortality rates exceed 50% in some salamander populations attempting road crossings.
This example illustrates a fundamental challenge of car-dependent development: our transportation network doesn’t just consume land directly beneath the pavement, but functionally transforms habitats on either side, creating ecological barriers that many species simply cannot overcome.
Sprawl slices ecosystems into isolated fragments, severing ecological connections essential for biodiversity.
We Should Not Force Urban Growth, But We Should Reduce Barriers to It
Qhen I talk about the problems of sprawl and the benefits of living more densely, someone in my TikTok comments will say that I’m “trying to force everybody into cities.”
This is one logical step away from how the 15-minute city idea has been attacked by the American Right. They think city-slicker liberals want to shove us all into cities so that we’re all easier to control.
There’s such an irony to this. Right now, most of us are forced into single-family homes because that’s what we’ve built. Most of us are forced into car commutes, sitting in traffic because of our sprawled development and dependence on cars.
I wrote about this in this article where I used Ron DeSantis’s comments as an example.
Again, to turn to Edward Glaeser, he wrote, “We should not force urban growth, but we must eliminate the barriers that artificially constrain the blossoming of city life.”
Action Steps For Those In Suburban Homes
My point here is not that those who live in suburbs are bad people, or that they’re doing something wrong. We’re all living in a built environment we did not construct.
I do not mean to inflict guilt on you if you do, and I’m not better than you for living car-free in an apartment building.
The goal is to raise awareness of these problems, and by understanding them, shape the world with our future decisions and advocacy.
Look at Housing That’s Close to Transit
If you want to live near a city, look at housing available that’s close to transit so you can reduce your reliance on cars.
Consider Attached Homes
This will often go hand-in-hand with the first one. This type of housing is often called the “missing middle.”
Turn Your Suburban Lawn into an Ecological Asset
If you’re not moving (totally get that), one of the best steps you can take is to make your lawn something that helps provide habitats for wildlife, restore the soil, and improve the watershed.
There are a million and one options for this. For some inspiration, check out the NoLawns subreddit.
It may seem like a lot of work, but once you’ve established it, it will likely need less maintenance and no fertilizer.
Go to Your Town/City Meetings and Advocate for Dense Housing Development
Even if you don’t want to live in an apartment or even an attached home, having more options can reduce housing costs where you live and provide alternatives for sprawl for everyone.
Often, what blocks this new housing is local political opposition. In urbanist circles, we call disparagingly call these stereotpyically white, older people who oppose housing “NIMBYs,” not-in-my-backyard.
Our local meetings need more people with fresh ideas. Sharing your ideas on a local level can have a disproportionate impact on what happens. For example, check if your locality has these zoning regulations.
Related Topics
I have a simlar article on the problem with car dependency.
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