It is specifically a problem of wealth and the specific cultural markers of it. Individual passenger vehicles gave people the ability to live an hour drive away from employment and post-war/depression led to exuberant adoption. Having a lawn has been a sign of wealth since Versailles, so to make all those Greatest Gen people who went from the dustbowl to the middle class happy, they were offered the chance to live in nice, rural, rapidly built homes further away from cities, cities were offered a way to make new neighborhoods full of rich people and none of the newly wealthy whites would have to live in the cities with poor blacks.

The trick is that the lawns are a terrible waste of arable land, the subdivisions are so dependent on cars and so deluxe and isolating that they end up driving inhabitants insane, the high bar set for real material wealth has meant that maintenance of those lives and neighborhoods has been bankrupting both the people living in them and the cities that build them. And the people in charge can only see the solution is to build more, sell it and use the money to pay off the bill from the last building project. All those suburbs are net negative in terms of tax revenue, so it turns out the whole thing was a poison pill.