Reshaping Metropolitan America: Development Trends and Opportunities to 2030 (Metropolitan Planning + Design)

by Arthur C. Nelson

More than $20 trillion will be spent on reshaping America’s metropolitan areas between 2010 and 2030.

For tens of millions of households, the “American Dream” was seen as owning a detached home on a large lot far away from, well, everything.

Second, federal, state, and local financial regulations, incentives, and planning decisions clearly favored single-family, detached homes, often on large lots, over attached homes or even detached homes on small lots. In part because of these factors, the United States saw the greatest change in home ownership rate seen in the nation’s history, rising from a low of 43 percent in 1940 during the depths of the Great Depression to 66 percent in 2000 and in 2010.1

the density of cities with more than thirty thousand people fell from about 6,500 persons per square mile in 1950 to about 3,700 per square mile in 2000.2

By 2010, more than half of America’s homes sat on more than one-sixth of an acre;