Imagine you have a headache from dehydration. You could go get a glass of water, but instead you pop two painkillers. The headache goes away, but the painkillers give you an upset stomach. The pill you take for the stomach ache makes you drowsy. So you chug a bunch of strong black coffee for the drowsiness, and now you're more dehydrated and your headache is coming back....

This absurd vicious cycle of treating the side effects of the previous treatment, ad nauseam (literally), when a simple solution was right in front of you, is not that different from the way many local governments attempt to manage the effects of growth. The rapidly growing, mostly-suburban county I live in has an absolutely byzantine tangle of regulations aimed at shaping the nature of future large-scale development on currently rural land, and mitigating the negative effects of that development. Those effects range from traffic congestion to loss of open space and wildlife to aesthetic impacts to concerns about affordable workforce housing.

The real problem is not that we haven't achieved the right balance of regulations to satisfy everyone's needs. The real problem is deeper and yet simpler. It's that the development pattern that we at Strong Towns call the Suburban Experiment is a costly failure.

The Suburban Experiment in Florida

Nearly all new residential construction in my area of Florida, like most of North America, is done at a very large scale by deep-pocketed corporate developers, owing in no small part to the aforementioned byzantine tangle of regulations. This makes it prohibitively difficult, in many cases, for smaller players to be in the game at all. There are no small bets in this environment, no low-risk experiments in different ways to build community, just a stifling homogeneity.

Much of the new residential construction in my area is built a full subdivision at a time, to a finished state. This results in almost guaranteed decline over time, as the neighborhood is frozen in amber and cannot incrementally evolve to meet changing needs and wants. Single-family houses can't become duplexes can't be replaced with apartment buildings. You can't open up a shop downstairs which gives way to a different shop which builds on an annex to make room for more customers.

Massive amounts of private and public debt are used to fund the construction of these master-planned developments, and whether or not they deliver long-term value and tax revenue for the public coffers, the public is still on the hook to maintain and eventually replace the infrastructure that serves them.