Over-consumption is reflected not only in the scale of our houses, but in the sizes of our yards and streets as well. Oversized lots on vast roads, miles from any worthwhile destination, have made the American suburb as inhospitable as it is vapid.
Like the design of our houses, the form of our neighborhoods is mandated by a long list of governmentally-imposed regulations that reflect our national taste for the enormous. In most U. S. cities it is currently illegal to build places like the older ones pictured in this book. Taos Pueblo, Elfreth’s Alley, and Rue de Petit-Champlain all violate current U. S. zoning ordinances. Narrow, tree-lined streets with little shops and houses sitting at the sidewalk’s edge are against the law. Countless state, federal and private bureaucracies work hard to uphold these restrictions. The Federal Housing Administration, the Department of Transportation, the auto, housing and oil industries and a host of others have a lot at stake in suburban sprawl and the policies that perpetuate it. Our government has been championing sprawl ever since the 1920s, when Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, persuaded realtors, builders, bankers, road-building interests and the auto industry to form a lobby that would push for increased development to boost the U. S. economy.
Essentially, zoning laws have been determining the form of our neighborhoods since the 1940s. Communities like the older ones pictured on these pages somehow managed without them. Since its inception, zoning has brought us immense, treeless streets, mandatory car ownership, and densities so low that the cost of infrastructures has become nothing short of exorbitant.
