As homeownership slips further out of reach in America, more people are spending more of their lives as renters. Millennials and Gen Zs are less likely to own homes than older generations did at the same age, and the median age of a first-time homebuyer recently reached an all-time high of 40, up from 28 in 1991. 

That need not be a bad thing. Renting offers many benefits — flexibility, far lower upfront costs, never having to figure out what a “sacrificial anode rod” is — and homeownership is overrated as a savings vehicle. 

But being a renter in America (as roughly one in three people here are) can also be a very undignified experience. In most states, your landlord can kick you out when your lease ends for no reason at all, even if you haven’t done anything wrong. Many tenants live in fear of receiving their next lease renewal, not knowing if they’ll be displaced by the next rent hike. 

Some progressive policymakers, buoyed by the growing influence of democratic socialism and a resurgent tenant movement, are reviving an old, highly controversial answer to renters’ lack of security: simply ban steep rent increases through rent control. 

In June, New York City, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, froze rents on rent-stabilized apartments, which make up about 40 percent of the city’s rental housing stock. Rent control laws have been passed or tightened in recent years in places from Washington state to Los Angeles to Montgomery County, Maryland, and tenant advocates this year have pushed similar measures in Massachusetts, Washington, DC, Providence, Rhode Island, and Redwood City, California. 

Rent control’s advocates argue that the policy not only moderates prices, but also offers tenants stability and a firmer claim to their homes. It helps put “the landlord-tenant dynamic on different and more equal footing,” as Siraj Sindhu, executive director of Reclaim Rhode Island, which backed a Providence rent-stabilization ordinance that passed the city council before being vetoed by the mayor, told me. 

Those are really important goals. I’m a lifelong renter, having literally never lived in an owner-occupied home, and I hate that I can’t predict what my housing costs will be less than a year from now. But is rent control the best way to achieve stability? 

Housing economists have long hated rent control; the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously called it “the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.” Decades of research have found that it can have many unintended negative consequences, including depressing housing construction by making it financially impractical to build new rentals. And as we know from today’s crippling housing shortage, nothing is worse for long-term affordability than a scarcity of homes. More recent research, however, suggests that better-designed rent control laws can protect some tenants without having catastrophic consequences for housing supply. 

That rent control keeps coming back as a centerpiece of our housing politics reflects just how impoverished our policy ideas are for providing renters what they lack most: predictable costs and secure tenure. The US has an elaborate policy infrastructure to privilege and subsidize homeownership, while treating renting as an afterthought, like a condition of poverty or at best a waystation on the path to buying a house. That makes ever less sense in a country where millions of people will rent for life, whether by choice or necessity.  

The truth about rent control is somewhere between both extremes. It can, in some cases, certainly be worthwhile. But it remains a highly limited tool, and others can furnish some of the same benefits without fueling the very affordability crisis that they’re meant to address.   

Why economists (mostly) oppose rent control

Rent control polls favorably, and it’s not hard to imagine why — voters despise high prices. Capping rents might intuitively seem fair and costless: The tenant is protected from ridiculously high prices, the landlord profits a bit less, and society as a whole is no worse off. Who could object to that? 

In fact, though, many economists vehemently oppose rent control precisely because it isn’t cost-free — it merely moves costs onto others and makes them less visible.

In uber-expensive cities like New York and Boston, rents are so high because demand to live there far outstrips the supply of homes. In a healthy housing market, high prices signal to developers to build more homes, which then brings prices down and, just as importantly, grows the city’s population and economy by providing homes to people who want to move there. We’ve recently seen this happen in Austin, Texas: The city experienced a rapid run-up in rents during Covid, and builders responded (after the city eased some of its building restrictions) with a flood of new apartments. Rents have since fallen well below pre-Covid levels in real dollars. By contrast, policies that cap rents would diminish the incentive to build rental homes at a time when the US needs many more of them. 

Meanwhile, if rent caps fail to keep pace with landlords’ rising costs, owners may neglect maintenance or even pull apartments from the rental market if they no longer pencil out. One widely cited economics paper documented this dynamic in San Francisco, where the majority of rental housing is rent-controlled and annual rent increases are capped well below inflation. The city’s 1994 expansion of its rent control law, the researchers found, shrank the supply of rental housing among newly covered properties by 15 percent, largely because landlords converted rentals into owner-occupied units. The expansion made tenants 10 to 20 percent more likely to remain in their homes, but at the cost of making San Francisco’s rental housing scarcer and raising the rents of non-rent-controlled apartments. 

Rent control programs are generally not means-tested, meaning that tenants in eligible apartments receive it regardless of their incomes. So a higher-income tenant who happened to secure a regulated apartment can remain indefinitely at a steep discount, while a lower-income newcomer is left to compete for market-rate units, which are exorbitantly priced in part because of rent control.

As a result, rent control laws bear part of the blame for why San Francisco and New York City are so unaffordable, Arpit Gupta, a housing economist at New York University, told me. Trying to suppress rents in cities like these is like trying to hold the lid down on a boiling pot — the pressure inevitably spills over somewhere else. Gupta, who sits on the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, which sets maximum increases for the city’s rent-stabilized apartments, cast the lone “no” vote on the rent-freeze measure this summer. 

The freeze creates “a severe risk of financial distress” for many buildings, he told me. It could prompt landlords to leave apartments vacant after a tenant moves out if the cost to rehabilitate it cannot be recouped through the legally permitted rent. The number of vacant rent-stabilized apartments in the city has already been rising, and Gupta has argued that New York state’s 2019 overhaul of its rent-regulation laws, which further constrained landlords’ revenues, may be partly to blame.

Many leftists don’t like arguments like these because they’re uncomfortable with the idea that housing must be kept financially worthwhile for private owners. I sympathize with that instinct — housing is a human need, and it feels wrong for its availability to depend on profitability. But it doesn’t do us much good to ignore the structure of the economy we actually live in, where housing is overwhelmingly provided by the private market. 

Housing markets can be very good at providing for people’s needs, if we allow them to work better by legalizing more housing construction and pair it with targeted rental subsidies to people with low incomes. 

How rent control got smarter 

One of the clearest ways to understand rent control comes from Shane Phillips, a housing researcher at UCLA. It should be viewed not as a long-term affordability strategy, he has argued, but as a targeted stability tactic. For affordability, there’s no substitute for building enough homes. But in already broken, unaffordable markets, like many of America’s superstar cities, rent control can be a stopgap that lets some residents remain in their homes. It’s reasonable to expect that people’s homes shouldn’t be treated as crude commodities that they can be priced out of at any moment. The question is how to balance security for existing residents against the structural harms rent control can cause to the overall market.

Not all rent control policies are created equal. Old forms of it appeared in places from ancient Rome to imperial China to the Jewish ghettoes of Early Modern Europe. When describing modern rent control, however, researchers distinguish among a few different types. “First-generation” rent controls arose largely as emergency measures across Europe during World War I, becoming very widespread in the US during World War II. These typically froze each unit’s rent at a fixed dollar amount, with few avenues for adjustment as costs rose; over time, they tended to push homes out of the rental market and discourage maintenance, reducing both the quantity and quality of rental housing.

By the 1970s-80s, a “second generation” of rent control laws, often called “rent stabilization,” was adopted in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, municipalities across New Jersey, and numerous California cities. These introduced some important innovations: They allow modest annual rent increases, set by a formula or regulatory board and often pegged to the rate of inflation. They exempt new-construction buildings from price controls, which reduces the disincentive for developers to build new apartments. 

They also often include “vacancy decontrol,” which allows landlords to reset an apartment’s rent to its current market rate after a tenant moves out (after that, the unit remains subject to the annual rent increase caps). Vacancy decontrol is especially important for preserving rental housing supply, experts told me. But it also creates an incentive for owners to try to push tenants out so they can raise the rent. To combat this, most rent-control programs include “just-cause” eviction protections, meaning that landlords cannot arbitrarily evict tenants or refuse to renew their leases; they must cite a serious lease violation (or another legally recognized reason, such as removing the unit from the rental market). 

Second-generation systems remain in place in major US cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They tend not to distort housing markets as severely as first-generation laws, but they can still, as seen in the evidence from San Francisco, meaningfully damage housing supply. And Gupta has warned that New York City’s system has been regressing back toward first-generation rent control, with the recent rent freeze and the removal of vacancy decontrol under New York state’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.

Meanwhile, the recent revival of interest in rent control has produced some laws whose design may magnify the policy’s worst impacts. Montgomery County, Maryland, which includes some of Washington, DC’s most expensive suburbs, implemented a rent-control law in 2024 that lacks vacancy decontrol, while St. Paul, Minnesota, voters approved a 2021 ballot measure that initially lacked both vacancy decontrol and an exemption for new construction. Both places subsequently saw sharp declines in apartment construction, though the timing alone does not prove rent control was the sole cause. (St. Paul has since added partial vacancy decontrol and a permanent new-construction exemption.)

In a recent working paper, a pair of UCLA economists identified a “third generation” of rent control that is less restrictive than second-generation laws. California passed a statewide rent stabilization law in 2019, for example, that set a high ceiling on allowable annual rent increases: 5 percent plus inflation, or 10 percent, whichever is lower. It exempts new buildings for their first 15 years, and includes vacancy decontrol and just-cause eviction. Oregon passed a similar law the same year, as did Washington state in 2025. Using data from San Diego, the new paper found no discernible loss in housing supply there under California’s law. The implication is pretty intuitive: “The laxer the policy, the fewer the negative consequences,” as Phillips put it. 

The flipside, of course, is that the least restrictive laws also do the least to protect tenants — a 10 percent cap mostly just amounts to an anti-gouging measure, and landlords rarely raise rents by that much anyway. Still, double-digit rent increases do happen. And even a loose cap can offer renters peace of mind and insurance against a life-upending rent hike. 

We need a broader renter stability agenda 

Some current proposals may soon play out the tradeoffs of rent control. This November, residents of Redwood City, located between San Francisco and San Jose, will vote on a ballot measure that would cap rent increases at 60 percent of inflation, with a maximum increase of 5 percent.

Clara Jaeckel, a renter in the city and an organizer with the campaign, told me that the proposed law would allow landlords to petition for higher increases if it’s necessary to cover operating costs. It’s “designed to strike a fair balance between letting landlords have a fair return on their investment and keeping things affordable for renters,” she said. Under California law, the city would still be required to include vacancy decontrol and exempt housing built after 1995. “We believe building new housing goes hand-in-hand with rent control — so we want both of those things,” Jaeckel said.

Limiting rent increases so far below inflation, which is similar to San Francisco’s rent cap, has the potential to meaningfully reduce the quantity and quality of rental housing. But it’s also possible that its negative impacts remain muted. Gupta and Phillips both told me that vacancy decontrol substantially limits the harms of rent control, regardless of the exact percentage rent increase permitted, and the proposed Redwood City rent cap would apply to a smaller share of its rental housing than San Francisco’s law does. 

Voters and policymakers might decide that this tradeoff with housing supply is worth it if it can allow longtime residents to stay in their homes. The Bay Area has become so unaffordable that such laws right now represent one of the few ways that communities in the region can maintain some measure of class diversity. 

But it’s worth considering how to deliver the same stability and affordability without rent control, which for too long has been the fallback that expensive cities and towns reach for after allowing their housing markets to become dysfunctional. It can ultimately only offer tenants a cramped kind of security, trapping them in homes that may no longer suit their needs because leaving would mean surrendering their only affordable option. 

A better stability agenda for renters would give them genuine choices in where to live, and how long to stay. In places with broken housing markets, that means, first and most importantly, repealing exclusionary zoning laws and other barriers to building enough homes. That’s the foundation of affordability for everyone, but especially for renters, whose housing costs rise unpredictably with the market rather than remaining relatively fixed by a long-term mortgage. Renters with low incomes, meanwhile, need help affording housing even in a balanced market, and that ought to be provided far more consistently (Section 8 vouchers and other federal rental-assistance programs currently only reach a fraction of people who qualify).

Other policies can offer the long-term stability that rent control provides, too. “The ultimate issue that a lot of [rent control] interventions are trying to target is the challenge of being a renter and being faced with these cost shocks year after year,” Gupta said. Most American residential leases are one year long, but policy could encourage longer terms, which are common in some peer countries like Germany and Japan, and, Gupta noted, widespread in US commercial leases. 

Another step is to give tenants a presumptive right to remain in their homes — in the vast majority of states, landlords can refuse to renew a lease without any cause because the law simply defers to their private property rights. That is a bigger deal than it might sound like: If you’re a renter in one of the 40-odd states that don’t have a right to renewal, and you have, say, loud young children who irritate one of your neighbors, you can be forced out when your lease ends without any recourse. I’ve seen this happen firsthand as a renter in Wisconsin, and it’s one of many ways that cities can be hostile to families. Protection from arbitrary eviction would benefit renters regardless of whether their units are rent-controlled.

These sorts of policies also need to be balanced with reliable processes for removing tenants who seriously damage property, endanger their neighbors, or repeatedly violate their leases. “Sometimes landlords are taken advantage of. Sometimes they are lied to,” Phillips said. It’s rare to find a jurisdiction in the US that’s both “very concerned about tenants and very concerned about landlords,” he said. Instead, US housing policy tends to oscillate between either extreme, but protecting the rights and interests of both need not be mutually exclusive. 

America will remain stuck with a housing shortage for the foreseeable future, which not only makes housing unaffordable in our highest-demand cities and suburbs, but also gives landlords a structural advantage over renters because they’re shielded from competition. Until that changes, a limited form of rent control can redistribute some of that power back to renters. That may be a bargain worth making, but, Phillips said, cities should make it knowingly: with a clear idea of which renters they intend to protect, and who will bear the cost.

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

America’s housing supply was built for a world we no longer live in. But what will replace it? 

As the nation turns 250, that is one of the most important questions we face in the coming decades. Building enough homes, of the right kind, and in the right places is a prerequisite for economic opportunity and growth. Our crippling housing shortage is upstream of many of the problems that ail the US, from our cost of living and increasingly zero-sum politics to our seemingly intractable national bad mood. 

The root of the problem is that the United States governs housing under a nearly century-old paradigm that’s been cracking under growing strain. Since the end of the Great Depression and World War II, when the baby boom massively increased the country’s population and millions of Americans sought relief from derelict urban housing, suburbia has been the country’s default blueprint for development. Big single-family homes, two-car garages, and giant strip malls were not merely consumer preferences. They were also written into law by rigid zoning codes — the rules that dictate what kinds of things can be built where — incentivized by midcentury lending standards, and absorbed into the professional common sense of planners and builders. 

The system shaped not just the suburbs, but also many cities, and has kept homes scarce, expensive, and sprawling, resulting in a housing affordability crisis that has come to dominate politics. And in the decades ahead, this pattern will become even more misaligned with the reality of American life. Households are getting smaller, and Americans are getting older. If today’s low immigration rates continue, the US Census Bureau projects the country in 2076 will have fewer families with children and working-age adults, and far more seniors — the inverse of the demographic transition that drove the great suburbanization. Climate change and new technology, such as driverless cars, will also force cities and suburbs and populations to adapt.

US history offers reasons for optimism, showing repeatedly that we can reorganize ourselves with extraordinary dynamism when the occasion calls for it. Our cities have already lived many lives, growing from tiny outposts into world-leading metropolises, before receding again in the wake of suburbanization and de-industrialization, and then more recently gaining new life with influxes of younger generations.

The transformations ahead may not be as physically dramatic as those of the American past, but they call for equally monumental cultural and political shifts in our approach to housing. We’re already making progress: The ascendant “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) movement has persuaded states and localities to roll back restrictive policies that make it essentially impossible to build enough homes. The effects of those reforms are slowly making themselves felt in more affordable neighborhoods. 

But there is still far more to do. Housing reformers will need to turn their attention not just to removing bad regulations like single-family zoning and minimum lot sizes, but also toward reviving a role for government in shaping our communities through real, big-picture planning. Doing so would supply a missing piece in America’s housing agenda — making US cities and suburbs not just more affordable, but more vibrant and livable and helping us better use our existing infrastructure. That will matter even more as a shrinking working-age population makes endless outward sprawl harder to sustain.

A more abundant, more varied, and even more fun housing future is not inevitable, but it is decisively within reach. Here is what the future could look like by America’s 300th birthday, if we commit to making ourselves anew. 

Suburban retrofit abundance

Arthur Nelson, a professor emeritus of urban planning and real estate development at the University of Arizona, has a few words of warning for anyone trying to report on what cities might look like in a half-century: “You’re not going to be right.” 

Urban planners tend not to project many decades into the future because what that future will look like invariably hinges on factors we couldn’t possibly imagine today. The most important unknown for our future population and housing needs will be whether the US opens its doors to many more immigrants, as it has done at times in the past. Assuming immigration rates remain low, however, US population is projected to peak somewhere around the mid-21st century and fall thereafter; by 2076, it will have dropped back to today’s size, on the way to declining further. 

Despite that uncertainty, many of the housing abundance advocates, policy experts, and urban planners I spoke to for this piece expressed striking optimism that the future of housing will be better than the present, and enthused about how much can be transformed in 50 years. Start with the suburb, where the majority of Americans live today, and where the future of American housing will be decided. 

Imagine that, in 2076, you’re walking through a residential neighborhood in La Mirada, California, a midcentury, southeastern suburb of Los Angeles, one of the regions at the epicenter of today’s housing crisis. The bones look much like the suburbs we know today — gently curving streets, sun-baked yards, low-slung buildings set back from the sidewalk — but the old single-family monoculture in many neighborhoods has loosened: Houses built during the region’s mid-20th-century building boom now have small cottages, also known as accessory dwelling units (ADUs), tucked beside them. Some bigger houses have been subdivided into two homes. Other lots now hold triplexes, fourplexes, and small apartment buildings that sit comfortably among single-family homes. A few houses have become shared homes for seniors who want support and companionship without being cordoned off into a retirement community. (In 50 years, that will include people born in the 1980s, 1990s, and ’00s — me, and perhaps you, too.)

Even as the overall US population has plateaued, this late-21st century Greater Los Angeles might be home to millions more people than today, but it has not had to push all of them farther into the arid desert or the fire-prone hills. Because as many as two to three times more people are living on each acre of land, housing costs have eased. Many people rely on shared driverless cars, freeing up the space that would be needed for car storage, so land that had been parking can be put to better uses.

Perhaps most strikingly different from today’s suburbia, the hard wall between home and commerce — which is near-universally mandated by local zoning codes today — has softened. Near the neighborhood’s edge, where local streets meet a larger main road, a neighborhood grocery and clinic have opened on what used to be strictly residential lots. And, yes: That is a donut shop running out of a neighbor’s garage. A few doors down, an old three-bedroom has become a small co-working space, and a converted garage houses a bicycle repair shop. Housing has not only become more affordable, but with more of the rituals of daily life mixed in, the suburb has gained a richer, more connected public sphere. There are simply more people around — walking, talking, and lingering. 

Could we get there? Some experts I consulted predicted that simply easing regulations on what can be built in these neighborhoods will unlock a long-suppressed capacity for creative adaptation, allowing suburban areas to evolve in precisely this way. In the suburbs of superstar cities like LA, San Francisco, and Boston, land values are so high that property owners have strong incentives to redevelop single-family lots into more economically valuable uses, like multiple housing units. They just need to be legally allowed to do so. 

The YIMBY movement’s recent legislative successes have already put much of the country on that path. More than a dozen states, including California, have passed laws to allow building ADUs on residential home lots, and many others have new laws allowing denser housing, like townhomes and small apartment buildings in these areas too.

“I suspect it’s just a matter [of time] before the rest do the same,” M. Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research for the advocacy group California YIMBY, told me in an email. The upshot for the far future of housing is that “detached single-family zoning is dead,” predicts Gray, who is also an urban planner by trade. “I think the typical lot in a (non-HOA) suburb of a typical US city in 2076 will have at least a second unit; perhaps a manufactured ADU plopped in the back, perhaps a McMansion that has been converted into a duplex.” 

Such reforms also offer important tools for a graying population. As Nelson has argued, the number of senior households in the US is already growing faster than younger ones, and without zoning flexibility to redevelop single-family homes into smaller units or adapt them to the changing market in some other way, older homeowners would face the prospect of being stuck with large, hard-to-maintain houses. 

Even more dramatic suburban retrofits might come in commercial districts — think aging, abandoned malls, strip malls, and “power centers” built around big box stores and even bigger parking lots. As Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth has written, there is a growing movement to turn those sites into housing. 

An increasing number of states have started allowing apartments in commercial districts, where building multifamily housing is an easier sell politically than allowing it in residential areas where neighbors might resist. 

Meanwhile, Gray added, communities across the country have been very rapidly repealing parking minimums — the fixed number of parking spots required at every residence and business. As minimums are phased out, parking lots can be redeveloped  into housing and other uses better than acres of underused, heat-trapping asphalt.

“I expect most of today’s strip malls and shopping malls will gradually be converted into mixed-use pocket neighborhoods,” Gray predicts — a distinctly American version of a much older human pattern of development, where homes, shops, services, and public life are allowed to coexist. 

Maybe we need an urban planning revival

Despite early signs these reforms are nudging American housing toward a better future, the national rate of new home construction has barely moved, and forecasters expect little change in 2026. That owes less to the reforms than to the broader economy: mortgage rates largely stuck above 6 percent since 2022, which raise borrowing costs for builders and freeze existing owners in place; rising material and labor costs; and a thinning construction workforce worsened by President Trump’s immigration policies. Where YIMBYs have passed new laws, many local governments prove adept at finding ways to flout them. Housing advocates will have to commit themselves to a long fight, until change exists not only on paper, but also in the real world.

Even then, unleashing the free market alone won’t solve every problem with how American cities and suburbs are built and organized, or how they feel to live in.

Those failures are visible everywhere: Have you ever wondered why so many residential streets wind around in aimless, circuitous patterns, disconnected from the town around them? Or why you are forced to endure a nightmare commute to drive just 10 miles? These are all failures not just of too much regulation in the form of rigid zoning, but also of an absence of coherent urban planning. 

Robert Goodspeed, an associate professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, points to good planning as an essential missing element in today’s housing reform movement. “I think that the YIMBY movement has completely missed the importance of planning,” he told me. “Even if we repealed all zoning, it still doesn’t realize a well-designed, well-planned community that has high quality of life.”

The zoning approach works so poorly because it micromanages what can or cannot be built on any given parcel of land. It’s a set of prohibitions on what the private market is allowed to do (made without regard for how people actually want to live): No apartments can be built on this street, even if there’s an enormous amount of demand to live there; no coffee shop may be opened on that corner, even if it would fill up with neighbors delighted to make it part of their daily routine.

Urban planning, on the other hand, at its best is concerned with the public realm. It oversees the larger body of a city or area and provides the connective tissue of its infrastructure — roads, transit, parks, sewers, and other utilities — that links up the space, something the private sector can’t provide. It allows cities to function as a cohesive whole and has the potential to give the public access to what a community has to offer. 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American planners were animated by real civic ambition, laying out future-minded street grids that could continue to grow and connect the residential and the commercial. One reason more recent development has been so poorly designed, Gray argues, is that planners have become so bogged down enforcing the tedious minutiae of zoning codes. “Zoning has utterly consumed planning, to the point that many city planning departments now do little that would resemble what a normal person might think of as planning,” he writes in his book Arbitrary Lines. Gray calls for abolishing zoning altogether, and freeing up municipal planning offices for more useful work that can accommodate the changes we know we need to make to our housing stock. 

Easier said than done, of course. The US comprises thousands of individual cities and suburbs, each with its own zoning code, and they will not surrender that authority willingly. 

But it’s not crazy to imagine that, in 50 years, planning in the US looks very different from today. Local governments derive their authority to zone from states, Gray points out. And just over the last few years, states from Montana to Maine to Oregon have been wresting certain zoning powers away from cities and suburbs. That shift could provide the seeds for a future where planning is run on a more unified, regional level, much like it is in peer countries like France and Japan. Local planners might then be empowered to focus on what matters — facilitating humane growth in places that people want to move to, and creatively solving the challenges that will arise from retrofitting a built environment that was not designed to accommodate that sort of evolution. 

Could we just…start over with all-new cities? 

One of the country’s most audacious attempts to revive American urban planning is unfolding in Solano County, California, roughly an hour north of San Francisco. There, a controversial, billionaire-backed company is advocating an iconoclastic solution to the Bay Area’s housing affordability crisis. 

Instead of fighting through red tape to get permission to add a few homes in Palo Alto or Marin County, the startup California Forever wants to build a new city from scratch. Forty years after construction begins, the company hopes, it would be more populous than the St. Louis, Orlando, or New Orleans of today, providing homes to around 400,000 people and jobs in advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, and other industries. 

The project has not yet broken ground, and, ironically enough, likely won’t be able to for several more years, as it moves through environmental review and other required regulatory steps. But it eventually hopes to prove that it’s still possible to build physical things in the world’s tech capital, the place that has transformed everyday life at extraordinary speed but still struggles with the elemental task of making room for people to live. The project has won support from many prominent housing reform advocates, who welcome it as a bracing challenge to an untenable status quo that has meaningfully damaged the US economy. (According to one widely cited study, restrictive housing policies in superstar metro areas, including San Francisco and San Jose, lowered overall American GDP growth by around 36 percent between 1964 and 2009 because they prevented more people from moving to those highly productive cities.)

Despite its Silicon Valley provenance, California Forever’s most interesting ambition is less futuristic than throwback. It hopes not merely to add a mass of badly needed housing stock to the Bay Area, but to deliver it in the form of a pedestrian-centered city of the kind that hasn’t been built in the US in a hundred years. Its architectural renderings show handsome mid-rise townhomes, apartments, and single-family homes along shaded, walkable streets with a bus rapid transit system, all organized around a traditional grid network of streets. Gabriel Metcalf, the head of planning for California Forever, told me he predicts the city will eventually have the lowest per capita rate of car travel anywhere in the US other than New York City.

Of course, the project in its full form might not get past regulatory hurdles. Even if it does, it could end up being too expensive for the people who work in its schools, grocery stores, and coffee shops to live in, especially with California’s high labor costs, environmental review, and other expenses baked in. It’s also very difficult to build a successful city from the top-down. 

But whatever becomes of this movement to build entirely new cities, it is tapping into a real gap that already exists in the US housing market: Despite our reputation for being car-loving suburbanites, many Americans want something different. A 2026 Pew Research Center survey, for example, found that 44 percent of respondents say they prefer to live in a walkable area — even if the homes are smaller (other estimates actually put the number higher). The surest prospect for making that a reality might not be new cities, but repairing existing ones. 

Alicia Pederson, a Chicago-based writer, researcher, and founder of the organization Courtyard Urbanist, predicts that, with good urban planning, we could in 50 years see a “golden age of American city-building.” With a graying and eventually shrinking national population, many cities will have to work harder to attract and retain residents by offering a better quality of life, she told me in an email. That might mean providing better housing options that make vibrant, walkable life accessible to more Americans without sacrificing the benefits of suburban single-family homes: spacious, sunny housing units and abundant green space. The kind of courtyard blocks common in some European cities offer one elegant solution: They occupy an entire city block, with a perimeter of mid-rise buildings and an interior yard. And they can accommodate homes in a range of sizes, which are more flexible and easier for aging people to maintain than detached houses. 

The future is still up for grabs

It’s entirely possible that sheer inertia keeps the US on its current sprawling trajectory as it approaches its 300th birthday, with reforms producing only a scattering of ADUs and boxy apartment buildings often derided as “gentrification buildings,” rather than any deeper transformation of the American built environment. 

Arpit Gupta, an associate professor of finance at New York University who I consulted because of his talent for poking holes in urbanist orthodoxies, predicted that the US by 2076 will actually see “a dramatic increase in sprawl” thanks to the future adoption of autonomous vehicles. That’s because he and many other transportation researchers believe many people would be willing to tolerate longer commutes in self-driving cars than they do in cars they have to drive themselves, providing one more reason to push housing ever outward. Minus the self-driving cars, that’s what’s happening in the hyper-sprawling and still growing Sunbelt, where new housing continues to be built farther and farther from city centers. 

But there are many other paths we might take. Domestic migration may begin shifting northward in the coming decades, amid a warming climate and water scarcity in the Southwest. Many Midwestern cities are showing signs of renewed growth (may I recommend moving to Madison, Wisconsin?), offering a chance to build more and better housing on the region’s extensive pre-war urban bones. And it’s much too early to assume that AVs will massively increase the amount we drive, Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, cautioned me. Different policy choices could lead to shared self-driving systems that encourage less car ownership and more density.

The future won’t vindicate every utopian blueprint — nor should it. Our housing system ought to be open and capacious enough to accommodate the country’s diverse and evolving preferences. The way we’ve organized housing for much of the last century has given us not only pervasive unaffordability, but also too few choices, too few versions of the American dream. That very scarcity is part of why Americans today are so angry at one another: It feeds the sense that we’re fighting over scraps. 

But if we make room for more ways of living together and think big about how to get there, we may find ourselves less trapped by the failures of the present than we think. Cities often surprise us: Fifty years ago, who could have predicted that places like New York City and Boston, then battered by population loss and disorder, would recover so dramatically? 

The trajectory we take in another 50 years will surely confound our predictions, too. And that’s reason enough to build something less brittle than what we inherited — a housing approach with enough room, variety, and imagination to enable American life to change again.