Endless Space to Build and Move: The role of the frontier myth in housing economics and politics

Abstract

The notion of the "frontier" is central to American representations of their geographical history. The frontier hypothesis was first formalized by Frederick Jackson Turner, who extolled the virtues of American territorial expansion and conquest as bringing "civilization" to "wild" areas of the continent. Turner and his acolytes also noted, more correctly, that expansionism and conquest of the frontier served as a safety valve from class tensions in developed areas of the country. For White people, the frontier offered a deregulated space for open violence against enslaved Africans, indigenous peoples, and Mexicans, while providing them cheap land as an asset and source of livelihood. Housing and land development are integral elements of the "modern" versions of the frontier. The USA has used its land abundance to offer cheap housing supply expansion around its existing cities and through incorporation of new areas in the South and West. This has smoothed the economic tensions from wage and wealth inequality and poor urban governance in established areas. Today, the internal urban frontier is closing, due to higher population and the disappearance of cheap land. Yet the dominant housing models proffered by economists continue to be based on the incorrect assumptions that it is either possible, or good, to return to a golden age of abundant cheap new housing in and around cities, especially in the South and West. In so doing, they deflect attention from the structural reforms of housing provision and urbanization needed to solve the housing crisis.