Dead End

More than five decades have passed since Jane Jacobs wrote her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and since a front page headline in the New York Times read, "Cars Choking Cities as 'Urban Sprawl' Takes Over." Yet sprawl persists, and not by mistake. It happens for a reason. As an activist and a scholar, Benjamin Ross is uniquely placed to diagnose why this is so. Dead End traces how the ideal of a safe, green, orderly retreat where hardworking members of the middle class could raise their children away from the city mutated into the McMansion and strip mall-ridden suburbs of today. Ross finds that sprawl is much more than bad architecture and sloppy planning. Its roots are historical, sociological, and economic. He uses these insights to lay out a practical strategy for change, honed by his experience leading the largest grass-roots mass transit advocacy organization in the United States. The problems of smart growth, sustainability, transportation, and affordable housing, he argues, are intertwined and must be solved as a whole. The two keys to creating better places to live are expansion of rail transit and a more genuinely democratic oversight of land use. Dead End is, ultimately, about the places where we live our lives. Both an engaging history of suburbia and an invaluable guide for today's urbanist, it will serve as a primer for anyone interested in how Americans actually live.

Benjamin Ross was president of Maryland's Action Committee for Transit for 15 years, which grew under his leadership into the nation's largest grass-roots transit advocacy group. He is a consultant on environmental problems and served on committees of the National Academy of Sciences and EPA Science Advisory Board. He writes frequently on political and social topics in Dissent Magazine and is the author of The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment.

Introduction - Escape from the suburbs
Part I - Getting Hooked
Chapter 1 - The strange birth of suburbiaChapter 2 - Planners and embalmersChapter 3 - Government-sponsored sprawlChapter 4 - Ticky-tacky boxesChapter 5 - Jane Jacobs vs. the plannersChapter 6 - Saving the cityChapter 7 - The age of the nimby
Part II - The Sprawl Addiction
Chapter 8 - Spreading like cancerChapter 9 - The war of greed against snobberyChapter 10 - A new thirst for city lifeChapter 11 - Backlash from the rightChapter 12 - The language of land use
Part III - How to Kick the Habit
Chapter 13 - Struggles for smart growthChapter 14 - Democratic urbanismChapter 15 - Affordable housing in an ownership economyChapter 16 - On track toward livable cities
Afterword