Suburban Sprawl, originally uploaded by Joe_13

In The Atlantic Monthly Virginia Postrel has an article, A Tale of Two Town Houses, about two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. Furthermore,

The Dallas model, prominent in the South and Southwest, sees a growing population as a sign of urban health. Cities liberally permit housing construction to accommodate new residents. The Los Angeles model, common on the West Coast and in the Northeast Corridor, discourages growth by limiting new housing. Instead of inviting newcomers, this approach rewards longtime residents with big capital gains and the political clout to block projects they don’t like.
…
The unintended consequence of these land-use policies is that Americans are sorting themselves geographically by income and lifestyle—not across neighborhoods, as they used to, but across regions. People are more likely to live surrounded by others like themselves, creating a more-polarized cultural map. In the superstar cities, where opinion leaders congregate, the perception is growing that the country no longer has a place for middle-class life. Yet the same urban sophisticates who fret that you can’t live decently on less than $100,000 a year often argue vociferously that increasing density will degrade their quality of life. They may be right—but, like any other luxury good, that quality commands a high price.

It is a very interesting article, but Postrel is completely wrong concerning constricting housing market in the Northeast, especially New York City. Granted, New York City is an edge case, but I can’t throw a rock without hitting a residential development in NYC. All up and down the Northeast Corridor urban cores are repopulating and density is growing. In the last six years, the Boston-NYC-Washington Corridor added over 1.59 million residents.
Postrel’s point about the difficulty of building new housing in the Northeast Corridor has merit. Yet, both Los Angeles proper and NYC the limiting factor is geography: Manhattan is an island and LA is a series of valleys. NYC is rapidly populating parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island creating dense pockets of high rise buildings next to tenements. While Los Angeles is a product of its history and zoning, a series of monochromatic suburbs, I was just in Dallas, and there was little measurable difference between the suburban wasteland of the LA Valley and DFW. Postrel’s comparing Dallas/Ft. Worth to Los Angeles noting that DFW was a place where things got done and cheaply are interesting, as if housing prices aren’t intrinsically bound to irrational concepts of “livability.”
See also Big-Media-Matt’s take on Zoning Ourselves to Death.