About

Many people, especially those who are in their twenties or thirties today, are less enamored with the drive-everywhere culture that previous generations embraced so readily. Nielsen—considered the top market research firm in the world—surveyed millennials and found that 62 percent of them want to live in, “vibrant, creative energy cities offering a mix of housing, shopping, and offices right outside their doorstep.”

This translates into 51 million people in just one generation alone: a sizable chunk of the population who want to live in places where they can comfortably and safely use their own two feet to get everywhere they need to go.

What these millions seek is good human habitat that offers a high quality of life. It’s instinctual. And behind the millennials are younger Americans who, it’s reasonable to assume, would also prefer to live and raise families in safe, attractive, vibrant, walkable environments if they were available.

But they are difficult to find. At least for many of us.

The U.S. is the only major Western nation in which the middle class is not found in large numbers raising families in a majority of its cities. It’s also the only major Western nation in which variants of slavery have been practiced inside its present-day borders for over three centuries, through the early 1940s. Most walkable American cities built out before World War Two serve as receptacles of a trauma that’s been building up for centuries, and the vast majority of municipalities build places for the automobile rather than the human being.

Good Human Habitat speaks to the difficulties people can have in finding a home in an affordable, safe, walkable urban community. The principal focus is on understanding how urban sprawl and an unresolved racial past intertwine to as to improve quality of life in the United States.

I split my undergraduate years between Annapolis and Drexel University, receiving a BS in Computer Science. Starting at AT&T Bell Laboratories, I spent several years focused on internetworking and eventually landed a position implementing Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards.

My field of work provided flexibility in terms of job location. Over time, a growing dissatisfaction with the impact of auto-dependency on quality of life led me to exercise this flexibility and explore a handful of places around the country, looking for the “right place” to live.

This discontent led me to return to school to study urban planning at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thesis identified approaches local governments in the United States were taking to overcome barriers to getting walkable, human-scale development built.

After working as a policy planner in Halifax, I took a position as a legislative planner in Baltimore County, MD. They had expressed an interest in my thesis and were ostensibly planning to take steps to “modernize” outdated zoning laws.

There, I conceived of a redevelopment policy to incentivize the creation of human-scaled development. Through this experience, I witnessed how organizational dysfunction and the political process can co-opt a good idea, dilute it, and ultimately render it impotent.

Experience as an urban planner led me to understand why so little changes regarding creating the human-scale places surveys say that a majority of people want. Twenty years after my leaving municipal planning, most local governments still build horizontal sprawl (i.e., suburban sprawl) outside established city centers and vertical sprawl (i.e., high rises) inside.

I wrote Escape from the Sunlit Prison of the American Dream and created Good Human Habitat to help explain why auto-dependency prevails and explore what can be done differently. Both the book and Good Human Habitat advocate for two specific actions to improve quality of life.

The first is for municipalities to adopt best practices that allow them to realize four specific achievements required to consistently produce human-scale development.

The second is to advocate for changes in education that help Americans to take responsibility for understanding an unresolved racial history that mars the present not only for Black Americans, but all Americans.

We’ve been decrying urban sprawl’s ill effects for decades. Yet in the 20+ years since I finished planning school, little progress has been made outside a handful of municipalities that serve exceptions. Within many local governments, corruption, inertia, indifference, and willful ignorance play a role in maintaining that status quo.

I’m under no illusion that the material presented here will support even a single municipal government’s decision to take the steps required to consistently produce human-scale development. Regardless, exceptional municipalities offer best practices worthy of emulation and refinement.

Change regarding education strikes me as equally unlikely, given that what I’m advocating for appears to contradict the growing emphasis in America on “patriotic education.” Florida, for example, has recently altered its public school curriculum to emphasize the “blessings of liberty.”

Notably, Communist China has also recently enacted a law that establishes a mandate for a similar path for its students. In late 2023, the Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of China announced the passage of its “Patriotic Education Law.”

Legislation of the sort passed by Florida flows from the fear that a truthful account of the past somehow poses a threat to society. My personal experience suggests otherwise. I am named in honor of a family member named Lewis Cass, who was central to slavery’s expansion. In 1848, he narrowly lost the U.S. presidential election as the Democratic party’s nominee due to splintering within the party over the same caustic subject.

As Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of War, Cass had overall responsibility for executing the Indian Removal Act, which opened up millions of acres of new land to enslavement. Before narrowly losing the presidency, he conceived of a racial doctrine to facilitate slavery’s slavery westward expansion. Implementation of this “Cass doctrine” in 1854 triggered the creation of the Republican Party and produced a civil war.

Learning what Lewis Cass did to create dysfunction in the present day did not produce in me a feeling of shame or contempt for America. On the contrary, the better I understood our unresolved racial past, the more deeply American I felt in a positive sense. I do not take responsibility for a past I had no part in. I do, however, feel a responsibility to understand the past to make sense of the present. At the individual level, our problems cannot be solved until they are well understood. The same holds true for a nation.

If quality of life is to improve, two seemingly two disparate subjects, urban sprawl, and our racial history, must be addressed together. The ultimate goal is to address the aforementioned difficulties the middle class has finding home in a safe, vibrant, walkable community. It’s a pursuit that demands a lot of politicians, urban planners, developers, educators, and citizens alike.

Patrick Cass Moan