How did the US become filled with sprawl? Simplistic debates about "centralized planning" versus "the free market" belie the truth: that a strong coalition of private and public interests helped create the sprawl that dominates our landscape.
Those who attribute America’s sprawling road infrastructure to either government planning or free markets aren’t exactly wrong. But it’s more accurate to say that highway building programs constituted a capitalist support system for a broad coalition of automobile interests. As urban historian and Building Suburbia author Dolores Hayden told me*,* “the federal government intervened very effectively on behalf of business from the 1920s on” and was “very pro-money making” for these groups, which were “doing precious little on behalf of citizens.” At best, this arrangement might be called quasi-centralized planning, but Hayden’s term for it—“stealth planning”—is more apt.