For several decades, many Americans have felt the disquieting sensation that the wide open spaces and picturesque countryside that helped to forge our national character and still form an integral part of our national and natural endowment are rapidly disappearing under concrete, asphalt, steel, and cinderblock. And for just as long, they have been assured that their fears are unfounded — that there is no current or impending shortage of land or resources.¹⁵  Reporter Gregg Easterbrook writes "…within the boundaries of the United States lies an astonishing vastness of land that has not undergone the concrete conversion experience…"¹⁶  In his conservation classic The Quiet Crisis, former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall referred to this persistent belief on the part of some Americans that our natural resources were all but inexhaustible as the "Myth of Superabundance."¹⁷

Yet the perception of swiftly spreading development and rapidly retreating open spaces is rooted in reality. In just the 15 years from 1982 to 1997, America converted approximately 25 million acres (39,000 square miles) of rural land — forests, rangeland, pastures, and cropland — to developed land, that is, subdivisions, freeways, factories, strip malls, airports, and the like.¹⁸  That’s an area about equal to Maine and New Hampshire combined. These losses occurred at an average rate of 1.7 million acres per year. And according to the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which has conducted these inventories of the nation’s ecologically productive land base every five years since 1982, in the 1990s the rate at which rural land was developed accelerated, rising to about 2.2 million acres per year. These losses are shown in Table 1.

If this rate of 2.2 million acres per year continues to the year 2050 — when today’s toddlers are middle-aged — the United States will have lost an additional 110 million acres of rural countryside. That’s 172,000 square miles, about equal to the combined areas of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. Added to the loss of an area equivalent to Maine and New Hampshire from 1982-1997, that amounts to much of the Eastern Seaboard. Anyone who has flown at night from New York to Florida and seen the vast clusters of lights below sweeping away as far as the eye can see knows just how far advanced this process of mass urbanization already is.

Moreover, the measured area of developed or built-up land per se underestimates its actual pervasiveness in the American landscape because urbanized land affects activities and environmental quality on adjacent rural areas by means of water demands, noise, views, odors, air pollution, and water pollution. For example:

Altogether, these influences convey a sense of congestion, heavy human presence, and environmental blight that extends well beyond the immediate confines of the built-up space itself. By way of further example, a study in the February 2000 issue of the journal Conservation Biology estimated that while the four million miles of roads in the United States only cover 1 percent of the country’s surface area, they directly affect the ecology of nearly 20 percent of U.S. land by blocking wildlife migration routes, helping spread non-native species, disturbing birds with traffic noise (and reducing their numbers by one-third), channelizing watercourses, and partially draining wetlands.²¹ 

Loss of Farmland. The National Resources Inventory estimates that the nation lost 44 million acres of cropland, 12 million acres of pastureland, and 11 million acres of rangeland from 1982 to 1997, for a total loss to our agricultural land base of 67 million acres.²²  (One explanation of the much higher acreage of lost cropland than pastureland and rangeland is that a larger fraction of the cropland acreage was not "lost" per se, but deliberately "retired" from active production into the so-called Conservation Reserve Program or CRP, a program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency. These were lands of marginal quality and high erodibility, lands on which modern, intensive agriculture is not sustainable.) All 49 states inventoried lost cropland. The impacts of the loss of this land extend beyond agriculture. The USDA has estimated that each person added to the U.S. population requires slightly more than one acre of land for urbanization and highways.²³  Clearly, more land is required as more people are added to our population.

A comparison of acreage — 25 million acres of newly developed land over this period and 67 million acres of agricultural land lost shows that development is not responsible for all or even half of agricultural land loss. Arable land is also subject to other natural and manmade phenomena such as soil erosion, salinization, and waterlogging that can rob its productivity and eventually force its retirement. Much of these losses are due to over-exploitation by intensive agricultural practices needed to constantly raise agricultural productivity (yield per acre) in order to provide ever more food for America’s and the world’s growing populations.

Thus, the potent combination of relentless development and land degradation from soil erosion and other factors is reducing America’s productive agricultural land base even as the demands on that same land base from a growing population are increasing. If the rates of agricultural land loss that have prevailed in recent years (from 1992-1997, so that the CRP does not bias the results) continue to 2050, the nation will have lost 53 million of its remaining 377 million acres of cropland, or 14 percent of it, even as the U.S. population grows by over 40 percent from 283 million to 420 million.²⁴  Continuing onto 2100, the discrepancy widens even further. The Census Bureau’s medium range projection is 571 million, almost a doubling of today’s U.S. population. If the same rate of cropland loss were to continue, the United States will lose approximately 106 million acres of its remaining 377 million acres of cropland, or nearly 30 percent. Cropland per capita, that is, the acreage of land to grow grains and other crops for each resident, will have declined from 1.4 acres in 1997 to 0.47 acres in 2100, a 66 percent reduction. If this happens, biotechnology will have to work miracles in raising yields per acre in order to maintain the sort of diet Americans have come to expect.

These ominous, divergent trends — an increasing population and declining arable land — have led some scientists to think the unthinkable: that one day America may no longer be able to feed herself, let alone to enjoy a food surplus for export to the world. Cornell University agricultural and food scientists David and Marcia Pimentel and Mario Giampietro of the Istituto Nazionale della Nutrizione in Rome have argued that by approximately 2025, the United States will most likely cease to be a food exporter. Food grown in this country will be needed for domestic purposes. And by 2050, the ratio of arable land per capita may have dropped to the point that, "the diet of the average American will, of necessity, include more grains, legumes, tubers, fruits and vegetables, and significantly less animal products."²⁵  While this may in fact constitute a healthier diet, it would also represent a significant loss of choice.

Traffic, Crowding, etc. With the lowest food prices in the world for the present, most Americans have more immediate concerns with sprawl, like worsening traffic, longer commutes, overcrowded schools and other facilities, rising taxes, and the loss of greenery that lends beauty and charm to urban and suburban living. These concerns have made sprawl and how to curb it a hot political issue around the country.²⁶  A February 2000 national survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates for the Pew Center for Civic Journalism found that Americans rated the complex of issues called "Development/Sprawl/Traffic/Roads" along with "Crime/Violence" as the most important local issues in the country today, ahead of such perennial concerns as the economy and education.²⁷ In rapidly growing urban areas such as San Francisco and Denver, sprawl is a "huge" issue, according to the Pew survey. Sprawl figured in 13 state and 226 local ballot initiatives and referenda in the fall of 1998, of which 72 percent were considered victories for the anti-sprawl forces.²⁸  As one newspaper reporter in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. wrote: "Voters across Northern Virginia sent a strong message to their newly elected leaders: They are fed up with their steadily increasing commute times, the clearing of what few trees are left for another house or office building and having to send their children to school in portable trailers."²⁹  In the 2000 elections, voters overwhelmingly approved referenda to fund open space protection, passing 174 of 209 (83 percent) of such ballot questions.³⁰ 

Politicians of both political parties have recognized that they stand to win or lose elections based on how voters perceive how serious they are in standing up to sprawl. Until he turned his attention to his presidential candidacy, former vice president Al Gore was the most prominent politician on the national stage who made sprawl, and its reputed solution, "Smart Growth," a centerpiece of his message.³¹  But a number of Democrats and Republicans alike at the state and local levels, like former Maryland Governor Paris Glendening and former New Jersey Governor turned EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman, have made political hay with efforts to tame sprawl.³² In January 1999, 27 governors — 19 Republicans and eight Democrats — discussed Smart Growth in their state-of-the-state speeches.³³  The Sierra Club, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the free-market, libertarian think-tank the Cato Institute each tout their own interpretations and solutions to the problem. Others are less willing to grant that there is even a problem. The Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse claims that opposition to anti-sprawl initiatives comes from "a small number of vocal critics affiliated with ‘property rights’ organizations, free market think tanks, and home builder and development interests."³⁴

The authoritative government statistics above on increases in developed land and declines in agricultural land should put to rest any uncertainty as to whether a significant shift in land use is underway in America. The U.S. Census Bureau’s decennial reports on Urbanized Land also show dramatic increases in the physical area of many towns and cities.

This study will show how these increases in urbanized or developed land — that is, "sprawl" — can be mathematically divided into two factors: population growth and increases in land used per capita (or declining density), the second of which is comprised of 20 or more sub-factors.

"Sprawl" Defined and Measured
After the suffering and sacrifice of the Great Depression and the tragedy and triumph of World War II, the United States embarked on an era of good times — an era that has now endured with only minor slowdowns for more than half a century. An unprecedented economic and population boom has raised aggregate natural resource consumption and waste generation to levels without parallel in this nation’s — or any nation’s — history. This dramatic expansion in American enterprise led to a number of adverse environmental side-effects, or "externalities" in the economists’ parlance. Two one-syllable words in particular — smog and sprawl — joined America’s popular vocabulary in the post-World War II epoch to describe a set of undesirable side-effects that spectacular affluence and population growth left in their wake.

Like "smog," which entered the nation’s lexicon as a convenient, if imprecise, term for a complex phenomenon — one type of air pollution — the word "sprawl" has emerged in recent decades as shorthand for the relentless spread of cities and their suburbs. Five features of sprawl are emphasized by many of its definers:

Quantity or Quality? It is instructive to compare our quantitative measure of sprawl with the more qualitative concepts promoted by other prominent definers of the term. Former vice president Al Gore, in a December 1998 speech to the Democratic Leadership Council Annual Conference, painted a vivid "panorama" of sprawl as: "the chaotic, ill-planned development that makes it impossible for neighbors to greet one another on a sidewalk, makes us use up a quart of gasoline to buy a quart of milk, and makes it hard for kids to walk to school…"³⁵  The Sierra Club, in its 1998 report The Dark Side of the American Dream, defined sprawl as "low-density development beyond the edge of service and employment, which separates where people live from where they shop, work, recreate, and educate – thus requiring cars to move between zones."³⁶  The American Farmland Trust has characterized urban sprawl as "low density development that spreads out from cities, leaving the core hollowed out and in decline, while wastefully consuming some of America’s most productive farmland."³⁷  And the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation said, "sprawl is the poorly planned, low-density, auto-oriented development that spreads out from the edges of communities."³⁸

As stated above, the measure of sprawl used in this study implicitly incorporates the concerns about density expressed by these individuals and groups.

But most recent studies and reports on sprawl, while measuring density, have neglected the actual amount of lost rural land, even dismissing some urbanization of rural land as not constituting sprawl. For example, the 1999 publication Covering Urban Sprawl: Rethinking the American Dream weighs in that "Sprawl is associated with rapid suburban growth, but not all growth is sprawl. It’s a pattern of development that puts miles of asphalt between home and work, work and school, shops and home, Mom and the soccer-plex — and connects them with the automobile…. Sprawl is occurring when, as in most metro areas, suburban expansion consumes land at a faster rate than population grows, even as central cities and inner suburbs decline."³⁹  In like fashion, the 2001 Brookings study on "who sprawls most" specifically excluded those extended cities in which the rate of population growth outpaced the rate of land development or urbanization. By this peculiar definition, greater Los Angeles, which expanded across nearly 400 square miles of undeveloped land from 1970 to 1990, did not sprawl at all, simply because it was growing denser (from population growth) at the same time. On the contrary, a common-sense understanding of sprawl recognizes that land-devouring sprawl can be either low-density or high-density.

Some anti-sprawl activists and organizations further emphasize the density dimension by using the term "suburban sprawl" in place of merely "sprawl" or "urban sprawl," which was the term of choice in the 1960s and 1970s. The principal flaw in defining sprawl as only low-density, unplanned, or auto-dependent is that even if new development were as high-density, well-planned, and mass transit-friendly as urban cores themselves or as Smart Growth supporters advocate, considerable amounts of land would still be consumed every year by expanding cities and towns. For instance, if all of the Atlanta Urbanized Area’s 1970-1990 population growth had been accommodated at the same density as that city’s 1970 urban core (rather than at the lower suburban densities at which it actually occurred), this would still have covered 166,820 acres (261 square miles) of rural land. Much new residential development is taking place at higher densities than 20 years ago — witness the veritable explosion of townhouses, rowhouses, condominiums, and apartments — but substantial new quantities of rural land are still being urbanized.

If the term "sprawl" is to be meaningful, it must account for this loss of open space, whether to high or low-density development.⁴⁰ 

In sum, sprawl can be measured for both quality and quantity. This national-level study of sprawl, however, limits itself to quantification — measuring the amount of urban sprawl.

We use the term "overall sprawl" to refer to the increase of the total size of developed land. Overall sprawl is the loss of rural land at the periphery of a city or development in rural areas. This involves the conversion of open space or rural land into built-up, developed, or urbanized land over time, whatever the quality of that conversion.

We believe this measurement by amount most closely resembles the most common American understanding of sprawl. If 25 square miles of open spaces around a city are urbanized, most Americans would consider that to be 25 square miles of sprawl, regardless of whether it was developed tastefully or not. They might be more offended by the sprawl if it included ugly or garish development, but the amount of sprawl — and the number of rural acres lost — would be the same. Thus, using this measure, it is possible to have well-planned sprawl or chaotic sprawl, to have high-density or low-density sprawl, to have auto-dependent or mass-transit-oriented sprawl. But regardless of the quality of the sprawl, the bottom line is that the amount of sprawl is measured by the square miles of rural land converted by development into built-up, urban land.

The quantity of sprawl is of great importance to environmental and agricultural considerations. But it also is significant in the quality of life of urban dwellers. The larger an urban area, the more difficult it will be for the average resident to reach the open spaces beyond the urban perimeter; increasing urban distances can also affect commuting time, mobility, and a resident’s feeling of being "trapped." The vaster the city, the greater one’s sense of estrangement from nature and the greater the illusion that the world was built by and for humankind alone.

Why Americans Don’t Like Sprawl
In recent years, on top of the loss of natural habitats and farmland documented in the introduction, sprawl has been blamed for a wide array of societal maladies ranging from urban decay and suburban alienation to increased taxes and flooding. Surveying the colorful but overheated rhetoric of sprawl’s harshest critics, one could be excused for thinking they regard the freedom of millions of individual homebuyers to settle into detached houses with yards in the suburbs as no more wholesome than the freedom of millions of cigarette smokers to court lung cancer and emphysema: An "unrelenting pathogen…sucking the marrow from our cities and towns;" "A strange collection of objects flung across the landscape;" "It creates the conditions for social decay and behavioral pathology." According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation report Challenging Sprawl: Organizational Responses to a National Problem, these quotes come from a businessman, a real estate developer and a clinical psychologist.⁴¹ 

The most strident anti-sprawl activists argue passionately that the country desperately needs to awaken from the American Dream before it produces nightmarish consequences. Impassioned denunciations aside, however, sprawl does indeed entail a number of environmental, economic, and social effects, which are mentioned in turn below. For the most part, we do not treat these exhaustively because there is a burgeoning popular and scholarly literature on the consequences — real and alleged — of sprawl.

Environmental Effects
Conversion of Farmland, Natural Habitats, and Open Space. This ongoing, accelerating loss of undeveloped countryside around the fringes of cities and towns is perhaps the greatest direct effect of urban and suburban growth, and the one that causes the greatest consternation. The Madison, Wis., based Biodiversity Project, for example, has identified sprawl as a top concern: "…human settlements are nibbling at the edges of what was once productive habitat. Roads are carving up the core areas and cutting off the natural corridors. In some cases, new development simply swallows up the natural landscape, and malls and houses stand where there were once productive fields and forests. Poorly controlled development — sprawl — is a primary cause of habitat loss…."⁴²

The loss of suitable natural habitat is perhaps the main threat to endangered species and biodiversity in the United States. Habitat loss generally, though not always, accompanies conversion from rural to urban land, depending on the intensity of development and the particular habitat needs of a given species. A report by the National Wildlife Federation found sprawl and associated habitat loss to be the leading cause of species imperilment in California – the state with the greatest richness (after Hawaii) of endemic species (those which occur nowhere else). Sprawl is responsible at least in part for the precarious state of 188 of the 286 species of plants and animals listed by the federal government as threatened or endangered in California.⁴³  Thus, sprawl has helped turn the state into one of the Earth’s "biodiversity hotspots." That is, comparatively speaking, a very high fraction of the state’s unique and endemic plant and animal species — and the living communities and ecosystems they comprise — are jeopardized by human activity and development associated with Californians’ vast numbers and consumption.⁴⁴ 

Not just natural habitats are at risk from sprawl. Indeed, farmland may be even more susceptible to urbanization pressures, because the best cropland is flat — just where development is easiest and least expensive. Furthermore, cities often were located in or near the richest farmland, both to act as centers of agricultural commerce and to have an ample supply of "truck crops" to feed the populace. Not surprisingly, cities cannot spread out without destroying some of the nation’s prime farmland. California’s Central Valley, which cultivates the most valuable agricultural product of any comparably sized area in the world, is extremely vulnerable to sprawl.⁴⁵  Agricultural scientist David Pimentel has estimated that the state of California (which lost 385,000 acres of agricultural land in 2001) as a whole could lose half of its cropland to development over the next two decades if current conversion rates continue — more than 120,000 acres per year, jeopardizing its $13 billion in annual agricultural production.⁴⁶  Similarly, half of Florida’s agriculturally productive land will be lost during the coming half-century if existing conversion rates continue.⁴⁷

According to Urbanized Land Area statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, from 1970 to 1990, the largest 100 cities in America collectively consumed more than 14,500 square miles of rural America. In just 20 years, they grew in area by over 50 percent. From 1960 to 2000, the total number of all urbanized areas in the country (i.e. built-up areas with a population of 50,000 or more, as defined by the Census Bureau) grew from 213 to 465, an increase of 118 percent. More telling is that over the same 40-year period, total urbanized land area (i.e. the sum of all land in all urbanized areas) nearly tripled — from 24,979 square miles to 73,763 square miles.

In terms of development in both rural and urban-edge areas, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service estimated that 39,000 square miles (almost 25 million acres) of rural land — an area larger than Pennsylvania — was newly developed in just the 15 years between 1982 and 1997. Developed lands accounted for 6 to 7 percent of the nation’s non-federal land in 1997 and the percentage was growing at an accelerating rate. In 1982, only 15 years before, developed lands had accounted for just 4 percent of non-federal land. The ratio of rural acres to developed acres plummeted from 26-1 to 14-1.

Furthermore, as discussed more fully in the introduction, noise, sights, odors, pollution, and other effects from activities and structures on developed land spill over into wide swaths of undeveloped land nearby. Moreover, the "ecological footprint" of Americans — the amount of ecologically productive land needed to furnish each consumer with food, fiber, energy, and other resources — is much greater (roughly 40 times) than the area of built-up land itself.⁴⁸  A typical American has an ecological footprint of about 24 acres.⁴⁹  Again, this is "green land" that is effectively co-opted to provide for resource consumption and to assimilate or sequester the waste generation of American consumers. The American population of 290 million would thus have an aggregate ecological footprint of almost 11 million square miles, about three times the U.S. land area of 3.7 million square miles.

Those critics of anti-sprawl efforts who point out that two centuries of urban/suburban development have still consumed less than 10 percent of the country’s land base miss a fundamental ecological reality — that the only reason dense human population centers can exist at all is that they draw heavily upon abundant resources from thinly populated hinterlands, like forests, farmlands, pasture and rangelands, watersheds, and marine areas. In ecological terminology, cities display an "obligate dependency" on the resources of the biosphere. The notion that our spreading cities have the entire land area of the country or planet at their disposal is inaccurate. Long before humanity could ever envelop this surface with buildings and pavement, the biosphere upon which human survival and economic well-being ultimately depends would be overtaxed, and would cease to function in a healthy and viable manner.

In the meantime, natural habitats that furnish sanctuaries for wildlife and the human spirit are at risk from sprawl. The National Wildlife Federation considers sprawl one of the top threats to wetlands nationwide.⁵⁰  More than half of the nation’s and nearly 99 percent of California’s wetlands have been filled, drained, or dredged.⁵¹  The Chesapeake Bay Foundation declares that "…quite simply, the Bay cannot afford to continue down the path of sprawl."⁵² 

The "fragmentation" of wildlife habitat by sprawling development has been implicated in recent population declines of a number of species. Fragmentation is the splitting up of large, unbroken blocks of, say, forest or native grasslands, into many smaller blocks, without necessarily reducing substantially the overall area of habitat.⁵³  Although eastern North America actually contained more forest in the year 2000 than it did in 1900, many tracts of forest have been bisected by highways, power line rights of way, and development.⁵⁴  At risk are those animals with large habitat requirements, such as many larger predators, as well as others adversely impacted by "edge effects," which increase along with fragmentation. Edge effects include changing micro-climate, predation, and parasitism.⁵⁵  Many songbirds and "neo-tropical migrants" (birds which nest in North America and winter in Central or South America and the Caribbean), including many warblers and vireos, the wood thrush, scarlet tanager, and Baltimore oriole, are subject to these pressures.⁵⁶  As a brochure from the coalition "Partners in Flight" explains: "Midwestern and tropical landscapes have both drastically changed over the years, leaving less habitat for migrant songbirds. When a forest, wetland or grassland is lost or fragmented, birds return to find part of their habitat missing. They must locate another suitable area or perish."⁵⁷ 

Increasing Energy (Especially Gasoline) Consumption. Sprawl tends to increase reliance upon private automobiles (as opposed to public transport, bicycles, and walking), and increases average trip distances — to work, shop, attend school, and recreate.⁵⁸  In 1947, before the age of significant sprawl, 26 percent of Americans commuted to work by walking or bicycling, compared to just 4 percent in 1999.⁵⁹  Also in 1947, 32 percent drove to work, while 88 percent did in 1999. At the same time, public transportation dropped in popularity as private auto ownership soared, cheap gasoline became readily available, and jobs dispersed from the urban center to throughout the metropolitan region (making commutes by bus, train, trolley, or subway much longer and more complicated).⁶⁰  According to the California Energy Commission, between 1970 and 1990 the total number of miles driven by cars and trucks in that state grew by 100 percent.⁶¹

More cars are on the road, traveling greater distances within expanded urban areas. As traffic congestion inevitably worsens, average speeds and engine efficiencies drop, and fuel consumption increases. The average driver in Los Angeles wastes 82 hours a year caught in traffic. Residents of the National Capital region that includes Washington, D.C., and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs are close behind at 76 hours.⁶² 

A sort of "chicken and egg" debate has developed over whether building more roads and widening existing ones in the outer suburbs is the cause or the solution to worsening traffic congestion.⁶³  On the one hand, expanding capacity would seem to offer at least a short-term fix for too many vehicles crowding the highways. On the other, this strategy may be self-defeating if it encourages the use of ever-more vehicles to exploit the expanded capacity. As an EPA official observes, "…it is increasingly accepted that road capacity expansion creates its own demand, known as ‘induced demand.’" ⁶⁴ The familiar pattern has become:

congestion...

expand capacity....

facilitate more vehicles.....

congestion......

expand capacity even further.......

facilitate still more vehicles........

congestion........

expand capacity........

As long as growth in the number of vehicles and average distance traveled continues unabated, there never will be a permanent solution to the congestion problem.

Additional energy consumption is also incurred by more luxurious suburban lifestyles: the heating and air conditioning of the larger, detached houses homebuyers can typically afford in outer suburbs; the mowing of larger lawns; the pumping of water to irrigate those lawns and to fill swimming pools; and so forth.

At present this energy is largely supplied with fossil fuels (especially the petroleum-derived liquid fuels used in transportation), the combustion of which releases carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. There is a broad (though not undisputed) scientific consensus that average temperatures have risen in the last century at least in part from man-made emissions, and that rising CO2 levels will cause further global warming.⁶⁵  In the mid-1990’s, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, an international committee of climatologists and other earth scientists) predicted that in the absence of a concerted international effort to reduce CO2 emissions, moderate population and economic growth over the next century will raise average global surface temperatures by 2°C (4° F) and sea levels by 0.5 meters (1.7 feet).⁶⁶  In 2001, the IPCC revised their temperature predictions upward, to as high as 10° F.⁶⁷  The U.S. Global Change Research Program predicts that warming of such magnitude would lead to more extreme weather events and major stresses on certain vulnerable natural ecosystems in the U.S. Unique habitats and treasured landscapes, such as alpine meadows in the Rocky Mountains, glaciers in the West, and mangroves and coral reefs in Florida, may vanish altogether.⁶⁸

Increased Air Pollution. Pollution occurs in tandem with the increasing energy consumption just discussed, as a result of greater vehicular emissions due to longer distances traveled and less efficient transport. Major tailpipe emissions are carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons or VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds), and nitrogen oxides. The latter two react in the presence of sunlight to form ozone (O3), a key constituent of smog. In contrast to stratospheric ozone (i.e. the ozone layer much in the news in recent decades), which protects living organisms on the earth’s surface from harmful ultraviolet (UV-B) radiation, ground-level or tropospheric ozone is harmful to human health and even some kinds of vegetation.

Although major strides have been made in reducing automobile tailpipe emissions in recent decades, improving ambient urban air quality in urban areas across the country, the dramatic increase in the number of vehicles and the number of miles traveled by those vehicles has offset many air quality gains.⁶⁹  While Los Angeles’ legendary smog levels have been cut back to the point where federal health-based ozone standards are now exceeded on "only" one of every three days, and Stage II smog episodes are all but eliminated, the South Coast Air Quality Management District estimates that some 1,600 people still die annually in the L.A. basin due to smog.⁷⁰ 

Increased Water Pollution and Flooding. Increasing the area of paved or impervious surfaces causes water pollution and flooding. Instead of soaking into the ground, where it can replenish an aquifer or be gradually released to surface streams, rainfall runs immediately along paved surfaces, where it picks up contaminants ranging from pet dung to oil and asbestos residues. This storm runoff then surges into drainage ditches, flood control channels, or streams, where it may cause erosion or, if it overtops banks, flooding to adjacent structures.

In general, wetlands can also serve to reduce the intensity of flooding by absorbing and holding onto water.⁷¹  The loss of wetlands to development thus exacerbates the flooding problem. Building on the floodplains of rivers both diminishes the ability of those areas to contain water and exposes the built-up properties to flood hazard.

Contaminants, like fertilizer, that originate from widespread, dispersed sources associated with broad land uses are known as "non-point sources" and are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency as the major threat confronting water quality in the United States today. Pollutant "loadings" to sensitive aquatic habitats can even occur from atmospheric fallout, as happens with nitrogen oxides emitted by vehicles.⁷² 

Economic and Fiscal Effects
Burden to Taxpayers. Over time, population growth in and around cities almost invariably raises the tax burden on existing residents to pay for more complex infrastructure, larger facilities, and more services.⁷³  Per capita taxes rise more or less proportionately with city size.⁷⁴  Water and sewage systems exemplify facilities that are typically collectivized as an area urbanizes — and are funded by raising property taxes or other assessments on residents and property owners. Although rural residents often have their own drinking water wells and septic systems, these private facilities are usually replaced with much more complex public water supply systems (including reservoirs, treatment plants, water tanks, raw and treated water transmission mains, and distribution lines) and public sewage collection and treatment systems (including sewer lines, sewage treatment plants, sludge disposal operations, etc.) as the area grows. All of this comes with a hefty price tag.

Oregon planning consultant Eben Fodor estimated that in Oregon, each new single-family house cost taxpayers more than $33,200 to pay for the expanded public facilities and infrastructure needed to accommodate this permanent increase in the size of the local population. This comes to about $16,300 for each new resident. Items included in this tally were schools, sanitary sewerage, transportation facilities, water systems, parks/recreation facilities, stormwater drainage, fire protection facilities, library facilities, and electric power generation and distribution facilities.⁷⁵ Only the capital costs of these public sector facilities, not the operation and maintenance costs, were included in Fodor’s analysis. Other types of costs — such as police, jail and corrections facilities, solid waste disposal facilities, and general government facilities were omitted from the study due to budgetary constraints. Privately-funded costs, such as local streets, sidewalks, water and sewer lines, were also excluded. Fodor concluded that existing communities acted as "cash cows" for the new development.⁷⁶ 

Carrying Capacity Network extrapolated Fodor’s findings to 730 municipalities around the United States.⁷⁷  The national average cost of each person added to the population was approximately $15,400, or $31,400 for a typical, new three-bedroom single family house. Costs per new resident ranged from about $12,600 in several towns in the South to almost $24,000 in King Salmon, Ala.

The costs of low-density population growth in particular have been documented in a number of studies since the publication of the now-classic report The Cost of Sprawl in 1974.⁷⁸ Rutgers University’s George Sternlieb, Robert Burchell, and colleagues pioneered the development of analytical techniques to measure the fiscal impacts of low-density sprawl.⁷⁹ 

In a nutshell, the cost of providing facilities and services to low-density residential development is higher because more miles of roads, sewer, water, and other utility lines are needed to serve a more widely dispersed population.⁸⁰  School facilities are used less efficiently and buses must travel further. As the Bank of America points out, many of these costs are "hidden" from the family purchasing what seems to be a cheaper house in the suburbs.⁸¹ 

The Maine State Planning Office released a study in 1997 documenting how the dispersion of that state’s residents was helping to force upward state and local government expenditures per household.⁸²  Between 1975 and 1995, Maine state government alone committed $727 million to new school construction and additions at a time when the state’s K-12 student population was actually decreasing. This capacity was redundant — needed to serve students whose families had moved outward into suburbs and rural areas. During the 1980s, highway expenditures by state and local government grew by one-third in response to the 57 percent increase in total miles driven within the state over the same time period (at a time when the state population grew by less than 10 percent). Finally, in the 1980s total government expenditures in the state on police protection rose by 40 percent even as crime was declining, in part because of the dispersal of the population, criminals, and crime. "It just costs more, on a per-unit basis, to serve families who are widely dispersed than it does to serve families who live in traditional neighborhoods," concluded the report.

Similar findings have been obtained in a number of places. For instance, a study of low-density residential development in the suburban fringe of Chicago found that these subdivisions did not contribute enough in taxes to pay for the cost of maintaining public roads.⁸³  The deficits were covered both by state taxpayers and homeowners and commercial property owners of adjoining municipalities.

The Hidden Cost to Inner Cities and Suburbs. The shift of public and private investment away from urban centers and toward the outer fringes of cities and metro areas generates economic winners and losers. Generally speaking, the residents and businesses of newer suburbs on the periphery are the beneficiaries of generous subsidies on the part of federal and state taxpayers and nearby established municipalities. As one scholarly research paper observes, "…sprawl is not only a land-use issue but also an egalitarian issue. Within the community, high-density subdivisions subsidize low-density subdivisions….politically disadvantaged and financially weak communities are subject to negative financial impact by politically favored and financially healthy
communities."⁸⁴ 

When the lion’s share of private investment in job creation abandons urban cores for the suburbs and satellite cities, economically-distressed, minority communities are stressed further. Urban expert David Rusk sees a direct link between sprawl, race, and poverty, with sprawl contributing to increased segregation and increased poverty in the inner city neighborhoods left behind.⁸⁵  In a 1999 report on the Washington, D.C., area, the Brookings Institution found a widening chasm between "haves" and "have-nots" and a link between the social ills of urban areas and aggressive growth on the fringes. "The Washington region is divided by race, income, jobs, and opportunity," the report concluded. "The problems of hyper growth on the one hand and social distress on the other are intertwined."⁸⁶ One of the report’s co-authors, Minnesota state legislator Myron Orfield, said that its findings gave both inner and outer suburbs and the District of Columbia reason to cooperate in creating more jobs and affordable housing near the region’s center and better planning on the perimeter.⁸⁷

The Cost to Business. Some business leaders are apparently coming to realize that stopping sprawl can "boost the bottom line."⁸⁸  They worry about sprawl-induced traffic jams, air pollution, and a lack of open space, all of which can rob companies of the best workers, who opt to live in places with more amenities and fewer inconveniences. Thus, some executives are supporting anti-sprawl ballot measures and urban growth boundaries. So professed a study of Smart Growth by the National Association of Local Government Environmental Professionals, representing 120 local governments in 35 states.⁸⁹ 

Among many others, Kentucky executives were lauded for protecting the rural character of that state; DaimlerChrysler for promoting urban redevelopment; South Florida developers for overcoming barriers to infill development; and the MCI Center in Washington, D.C., for revitalizing the District’s downtown. On one hand, the report found: "In recent years, more and more business leaders have begun to realize that sprawl can be bad for their bottom-lines and economic competitiveness." On the other, it also found that "most businesses are not aware of the negative impacts of sprawl on business competitiveness and profitability."

In its study of sprawl in California, the Bank of America concurs on sprawl’s impact on the private sector, noting:

          • Adverse impacts on the state’s business climate;

Social and Cultural Effects
Traffic Congestion. Perhaps nothing exemplifies the stress and frustration of modern urban living more than the daily battle with local traffic congestion. Americans are driving more and enjoying it less. The average American drove 4,485 miles annually in 1970. By 1993, the number had increased 41 percent to 6,330 miles.⁹¹  And there were tens of millions more drivers on the road.

In 1996, congestion cost Americans 4.6 billion hours of delay, 6.7 billion gallons of excess fuel, and $74 billion in fuel and time, according to the Texas Transportation Institute, which conducts an annual survey of congestion nationwide. The Institute, which has evaluated travel conditions and operations of freeways and principal arterial networks in 68 urbanized areas across the nation from 1982 to 1997, found that uncongested areas declined from 65 percent in 1982 to 46 percent in 1990 to 36 percent in 1997. Meanwhile, the percentage of areas with "severe" and "extreme" congestion climbed from 14 percent in 1982 to 30 percent in 1990 to 36 percent in 1997.⁹² 

There is no consensus on the role of sprawl in increasing traffic congestion. Population growth by itself increases the number of potential drivers. But the density at which a given population lives and its pattern of spatial dispersion can have direct and indirect effects on the ability to create viable mass transit systems and on the distance people must commute between home and workplace.

"Anyplace USA" — The Homogenization of America. One of the greatest if less tangible costs of sprawl is the blurring and erasure of the unique qualities that gave communities their own character and distinguished them from thousands of other towns and neighborhoods across America. Until sprawl’s relentless spread began in earnest after World War II, each city, town, district, and village was distinct in its own way. Now, more and more, virtually every corner of the country "is under assault by forces that want to turn it into another version of Paramus, New Jersey, with all the highway crud, chain store servitude, and loss of community that pattern of development entails," grumbles architecture critic James Howard Kunstler.⁹³  He continues his harangue in another article: "We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban boulevards of commerce, and we’re overwhelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying ugliness of absolutely everything in sight…as though the whole thing had been designed by some diabolical force bent on making human beings miserable. And naturally, this experience can make us feel glum about the nature and future of our civilization."⁹⁴ 

While Kunstler may be overly glum, his overarching argument about the loss of community and a "sense of place" in America today is a compelling one. Most Americans would probably agree, even as they drive to shop at the local Wal-Mart after supping at McDonald’s. Since World War II, the United States has come into its own as the land of mass consumption and has emerged as the ultimate "throwaway" society. Kunstler and other "New Urbanists" argue persuasively and passionately that our throwaway society extends its habits not only to beverage containers but also to our blighted and abandoned urban cores. Instead of picking up after ourselves, instead of designing, building, maintaining, and loving our buildings, neighborhoods, and districts, it’s easier to jettison them and head for the horizon. Perhaps this is a modern version of Americans’ "frontier ethic."

The Maine State Planning Office points out that the flight from city to country harms both settings – abandoned town centers have lost historic buildings, department stores, and churches, even as rural areas have lost their working farms, forests, and fisheries.⁹⁵  As observed elsewhere in this report, many newcomers to the countryside see traditional rural activities merely as "nuisances" and may even oppose them on environmental grounds. "The active, working landscape of farms, mills, fishing boats, and gravel pits, where land means livelihood, is being replaced by subdivisions and laws – land as passive scenery," concludes the Maine report sadly.

Lost Sense of Community. This is one of the most hotly debated issues in the entire sprawl debate.⁹⁶  However, it is an open-ended discussion that cannot be focused on sprawl alone, because it must invariably reckon with a wide range of forces and trends that have transformed the United States in the last half-century. These include technological innovation, increasing mobility and transience, the rise of corporations, globalization, the advent of women in the workforce, the Baby Boom, the aging population, racial integration, school busing, and immigration. The first of these alone, technology, has delivered many new electronic products and gadgets that have all but revolutionized how Americans relate to their neighbors and conceive of "community," from garage-door openers to television, cable TV, satellite communications, personal computers and now the Internet and e-mail.

Anti-sprawlers and New Urbanists argue that the residents of new suburbs are more interested in their own jobs, careers, commutes, individual house features, appreciating real estate value, and school quality than they are in forming a tight-knit community with neighborly interaction. Journalist David Goldberg writes they must "…spend all their waking hours commuting to and from work, running errands, chaperoning children, and tending to their homes and lawns."⁹⁷  There is little leftover time or energy to share a cup of coffee with the next-door neighbors or volunteer in community organizations. And before long, these transients have moved on to a bigger house in a "better," if similarly atomized area, or have been transferred by their company to another city altogether. This is not exactly a recipe for forging close, lasting ties.

This negative characterization is sharply disputed by defenders of the suburbs. They claim that, if anything, home-owning suburbanites display greater neighborly and civic virtues than their counterparts elsewhere. There is less turnover, more interaction with neighbors, and greater participation in everything from PTAs to soccer and little leagues. In any case, some argue new technology has offered Americans the ability to choose whom to associate with, based on common values and interests, and to form "virtual" communities independent of geography and physical proximity.

Moreover, the "loss of community" criticisms, while perhaps correct to some degree, are really best directed at a much broader swath of contemporary American society than just the suburbs. The much-debated article by Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone," laments the alleged decline in civic engagement across the board by Americans. Putnam argues that the "vibrancy of American civil society has notably declined over the past several decades."⁹⁸  We appear to have withdrawn from civic life and from our neighbors. By way of example, one of the authors of this report recently lived for five years in a moderately upscale apartment complex in Washington, D.C.’s northern Virginia suburbs. With its high density and considerable ethnic, racial, and even linguistic mixture (with many immigrants), this situation reflected the compactness and multicultural diversity touted by the anti-sprawl movement. Yet there was little sense of broader community; each group tended to associate only with its own kind. And in spite of such amenities as attractive landscaping, playgrounds for small children, a tennis court, and two swimming pools, the turnover rate was very high, perhaps just two years on average. For many upwardly mobile professional immigrants who passed through, it was but a way station on the route to ownership of a private, single family dwelling, a la the American Dream.

Pro-Sprawl vs. Anti-Sprawl: Other Evaluations
To be sure, sprawl critics have their own critics. As the anti-sprawl movement has gained momentum, a number of libertarian and free-market media columnists, think tanks, and politicians have risen not only to oppose anti-sprawl measures but to extol the virtues of sprawl.

Not one of the items listed earlier is uncontested. That is not to say that each and every point is rebutted, but that their significance for society is called into question by the defenders of the sprawling status quo. For instance, are existing rates of farmland and natural habitat loss really all that significant in the larger scheme of things, in view of the vast amounts of rural land in this country, the long-term gains in agricultural productivity, the promise of biotechnology, and the increasing land areas dedicated to parks and wilderness? ⁹⁹ 

In our own view, nay-sayers have the luxury of doubting these long-term trends in loss and degradation primarily because they have not yet run their course. The trends are truly long-term, occurring on a time scale of decades and centuries. While the nay-sayers properly deflate the most extravagant predictions of environmental "doom-sayers" — and certainly there have been many of these — this does not in any way justify an attitude that there are virtually no limits to human expansion and appropriation of the biosphere.

Very few agricultural scientists would have the hubris to claim that humanity can make do without prime soils and water; no biologists believe biotechnology from the lab will be able to replace biodiversity in the landscape. It is telling that a large majority of critics of the anti-sprawl movement on natural resource grounds do not themselves come from a natural resources management or environmental science background. Rather, they tend to emerge from the social sciences, such as economics and business, fields with completely different orientations and, one might say, a vested interest in "business as usual."

The "anti-anti-sprawlers" are on more solid ground when they emphasize popular American values that are threatened by anti-sprawl proposals. Cherished concepts like individual freedom are especially vulnerable to anti-sprawl tools that attempt to restrict or channel where people live, how they live, and how they travel. While there is a growing body of evidence that government subsidies and developer choices sometimes force or entice people into contributing to sprawl, the pro-sprawlers also can point to major evidence that Americans gravitate to the suburbs because the suburbs provide just what they want in affordability, free parking, mobility, space, yards, and proximity to greener surroundings.

The individuals and organizations in the anti-anti-sprawl camp tend to emphasize the freedom of private consumers to make their own housing choices free of "social engineering." They also play down environmental, economic, and social costs, and play up the potential for techno-fixes, the costs of sprawl’s solutions, and the argument that sprawl is an inevitable, if not entirely desirable, consequence of a robust economy. Some go as far as saying that, as a sign of economic vitality, sprawl should actually be encouraged.¹⁰⁰ Still other critics of sprawl’s critics contend that efforts to bottle up sprawl are an overblown concern of an intellectual elite supporting exclusionary zoning in disguise. "One person’s greenspace preservation is another’s denied housing permit," writes journalist Gregg Easterbrook.¹⁰¹

Perhaps one of the most objective evaluations of the pros and cons of sprawl was compiled by a team led by sprawl scholar David Burchell of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University for the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.¹⁰²  These were summarized in a much-anticipated 1999 report by the federal General Accounting Office (GAO), Extent of Federal Influence on ‘Urban Sprawl’ Is Unclear.¹⁰³  The studies reviewed were examined for their assessment of sprawl’s alleged impacts on five areas:

The GAO report was not about its own study of sprawl but its evaluation of numerous other studies by diverse authors. The GAO looked for signs of agreement among the sprawl studies. This is what it found:

The Multiple Factors in Sprawl
Like most observers of the phenomenon, the authors do not subscribe to a single "silver bullet" theory of cause and effect when it comes to sprawl. We believe the evidence points to a number of interdependent factors which, with one major exception, are difficult to isolate from one another. As the GAO said in its 1999 report Extent of Federal Influence on "Urban Sprawl" Is Unclear, "…so many factors contribute to it [urban sprawl] and the relationships among these factors are so complex that researchers have had great difficulty isolating the impact of individual factors. As a result, researchers have generally been unable to assign a cost or level of influence to individual factors."¹⁰⁴ 

As mentioned earlier in this report, it is possible to divide sprawl-promoting factors into two broad categories:

Per capita land consumption, or land area per resident of a given city, is the mathematical inverse of population density. It is a measure of how thinly or thickly a population is spread across the landscape.¹⁰⁵

The amount of land taken up by a city, town, metropolitan area, developed area, or urbanized area is the simple product of the number of residents times the amount of land consumed per resident, as shown in the following expression:

A = (P) * (a)

Where:

A = Area of urbanized/developed land in acres or square miles

P = Population of the urban/suburban area

a = urbanized land per person

Declining Population Density and Increasing Population
Here we briefly describe a number of the factors put forth by various observers, analysts, and Smart Growth proponents that contribute to the declining population density which, in turn, leads to sprawl. As with the effects of sprawl discussed earlier, there is not unanimous agreement among observers that each of the factors mentioned below is a significant cause of sprawl. Indeed, the April 1999 GAO report quoted above disappointed some activists because it did not find emphatic evidence, no "smoking gun," that certain federal policies encourage sprawl, as Smart-Growth advocates claim.¹⁰⁶ Neither the order of the factors listed below, nor the space given to each, is intended to indicate relative importance:

Greater Public Subsidies for Development in Peripheral Regions. It is suggested that massive taxpayer-funded subsidies for infrastructure and facilities like roads, public buildings, water, sewer, and schools in the outer suburbs reduces the cost of development to private developers, businesses, and residents. Thus, more sprawl takes place than otherwise would because the beneficiaries are not paying the true cost of development on the fringe. Some municipalities charge development fees in an effort to recover at least some of the public costs incurred.

Zoning Ordinances that Prohibit Higher Densities and Mixed Uses. New Urbanists contend that overly restrictive zoning ordinances in cities and suburbs contribute to sprawl by prohibiting the higher population densities and mixed residential and commercial uses that occurred in traditional American towns and cities. The earliest application of land-use zoning power by local government occurred in San Francisco in 1867, "to isolate obnoxious land uses in such a way as to protect the environment, both physical and social, of existing residences."¹⁰⁷

Widespread adoption of zoning occurred in the second decade of the 20th century as an explicit response to inner city overcrowding exacerbated by "unbelievable numbers of immigrants crowded into cities totally unprepared to cater for their basic needs" and technological innovations such as the steel frame and elevator, which enabled taller buildings and much higher densities in city centers.¹⁰⁸ New York City passed the country’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916; by 1929, 754 local governments containing 60 percent of America’s urban population had adopted zoning ordinances.

The complete exclusion of industrial, commercial, and high-density residential land uses from exclusive low-density residential zones and their isolation by large distances came about during the era of prosperity and the automobile that followed WWII. "This increased exclusion of uses from zones, coupled with a penchant for low development density (low-density-is-best-density) resulted in vast spread cities of huge zones of developmental uniformity and life-style conformity," observed Lawrence Gerckens in the Planning Commissioners Journal.¹⁰⁹ 

Racism, "White Flight," Culture Shock. "White flight" from the cities and inner suburbs as blacks and other minorities began integrating neighborhoods and schools is often put forward as a root cause of sprawl. How much of this was due to racism or a desire for racial homogeneity on the part of whites versus a fear of declining educational standards, social tensions, and rising crime is impossible to quantify. Historian Kenneth T. Jackson argues that, "reflecting the racist tradition of the United States," the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), established in the 1930s to improve housing standards and provide mortgage insurance, "was extraordinarily concerned with ‘inharmonious racial or nationality groups.’ It feared that an entire area could lose its investment value if rigid white-black separation was not maintained."¹¹⁰  Thus, "…FHA insurance went to [largely white] new residential developments on the edges of metropolitan areas, to the neglect of core cities" that were disproportionately black.

The advent of court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance probably instigated substantial white flight to the suburbs for reasons that included racial ones.

Since the 1980s, another type of racially and ethnically motivated flight to the suburbs has arisen among not just whites but also among blacks and other minorities who flee heavy urban concentrations of recent immigrants from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. An aversion to living in a different, unfamiliar culture appears to be pervasive among large parts of the population and likely provides significant impetus to movement toward newer suburbs.

Crime. This has been and remains a key reason urbanites pack up and head for the suburbs. In a 1999 National Association of Home Builders survey on growth issues, respondents ranked the local crime rate higher than any other factor in buying a new home, even higher than the price, size, and features of the home, with 84 percent rating it as "very important."¹¹¹  The perception and the reality are that urban cores have much higher crime rates than the suburbs.

Crime (and the next two factors) are major reasons that the flight to the suburbs long ago ceased to be simply "white flight." The phenomenon of "black flight" from cities to suburbs has emerged as a strong trend. From 1980 to 1990, the black population in the suburbs grew 34 percent.¹¹²  Blacks have left South-Central Los Angeles in droves for the outlying towns and suburbs on the fringes of the L.A. basin. They have also left Washington, D.C., in large numbers for the surrounding suburbs, in particular those of Prince George’s County, Maryland, where they now constitute a majority.

Both Hispanics and Asians are following suit. From 1980 to 1990, the suburban Latino population grew by almost 70 percent, and the suburban Asian population by over 125 percent. "Members of minority groups, like others who choose to flee the cities, move to the suburbs for a variety of reasons: affordable housing, better schools, lower cost of living, and amenities like space and greenery. But most often they say they move to escape the violence and incivility associated with cities," wrote New York Times reporter Karen DeWitt.¹¹³ 

Quality of Schools. Public perception (and often the reality) is that inner cities and inner suburbs have major problems in their public school systems. Conscientious parents unable to afford private schools often make the decision to move to the suburbs so that their kids will obtain a better education, access to better facilities, better and higher-paid teachers, association with peers whose parents tend to be better-educated and motivated, greater personal safety, and the assumption of less exposure to such injurious influences as drugs and gangs. The movement of these highly motivated families helps ensure and accelerate the educational deterioration from which they flee.

Cheap Gasoline. When inflation is taken into account, even with recent hikes, gasoline in the United States is inexpensive both historically and in comparison with other developed countries, which tax it much more heavily. Low prices at the gasoline pump have not only discouraged the use of mass transit, but encouraged outward expansion by keeping the cost of commuting by car (and SUV) very affordable.¹¹⁴ It is often pointed out that U.S. gasoline taxes do not come close to paying the full price of building and maintaining highways and streets. Rarely addressed, however, are the wider social and environmental costs that gasoline combustion imposes in the form of smog, acid rain, global warming, oil spills, and military expenditures to keep oil flowing from distant or dangerous places like Alaska and the Middle East.¹¹⁵  Some analysts have suggested that a "user tax" to recover these public costs ("externalities") would cause prices at the pump to jump, which would discourage waste of this non-renewable resource, and in the process, help discourage sprawl.¹¹⁶

Lower Land Prices in Peripheral Areas. Undeveloped land on the suburban fringe is cheaper than most land in city cores and inner suburbs. Thus, homebuyers naturally gravitate outward instead of inward, because they can get "more house for their dollar."

More Red Tape and Regulations in Inner Areas. Developers have been known to complain that the onerous regulatory apparatus of core cities and inner suburbs is a disincentive to redevelopment there. The National Association of Home Builders refers to "local governments that have erected barriers to higher density development" as an impediment to more efficient development in older suburbs and inner cities.¹¹⁷ Presumably some of these barriers respond to pressure from residents "opposed to higher density development in their own backyards."

Environmental and Liability Concerns Related to "Brownfields." Brownfields are former industrial sites, many of which are tainted with toxic waste. The intent of the "Superfund" law or CERCLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act), enacted in 1980, was to protect the public from past improper hazardous waste disposal (e.g. the infamous case of Love Canal) and impose cleanup costs on liable parties, such as land and business owners.¹¹⁸ An unintended consequence of this law has been to discourage new ownership and development of thousands of contaminated or potentially contaminated sites, many of them within cities, and many which could be rehabilitated at reasonable cost if the liability questions could be resolved. Removal of these sites from the real estate market removes one source of urban land and increases pressure on outlying areas.

Consumer Housing Preferences. Whether due to an innate human or a uniquely American desire for "elbow room" and greater freedom, or to the success of a relentless propaganda campaign over the last 50 years, there is a undeniable desire on the part of consumers for suburban or semi-rural lifestyles with larger homes and large yards, a safer environment, more contact with nature, and less traffic congestion.¹¹⁹  A 1948 General Motors advertisement in Life magazine carried the headline "Give a Man some room to Roam in!" beside a drawing of a boy and his dog playing in the "wide open spaces." The text of the ad boomed: "…as cars grew better and more useful, cities and towns changed. They ‘exploded’ into the countryside, spreading real estate developments, suburbs and smart new neighborhoods all over the local map."¹²⁰

In an April 1999 "Consumer Survey on Growth Issues" of 5,000 households nationwide, the Smart Growth Task Force of the National Association of Home Builders found that "Americans overwhelmingly prefer a single-family detached home on a large lot in the suburbs to any other type of home." According to this survey, which was carried out by a trade organization with a strong vested interest in building high-value houses, 83 percent of the respondents prefer to live in a single family detached home, 6 percent in a townhouse, and just 2 percent in an apartment in a multifamily building.¹²¹

Preferences of the Private Business Sector. Some analysts believe that business and industry, including commercial tenants, have expressed a preference for easy highway access and plenty of free parking for their employees and customers. Commercial lending practices for building construction loans are also claimed to favor suburban locations.¹²²

More and more businesses are moving their bases of operation from core cities to suburban office parks and "campuses." For example, in 2001, the offices of the nationally-distributed newspaper USA Today and its parent company Gannett moved from Rosslyn, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from downtown Washington, out to the Tyson’s Corner area just beyond the Capital Beltway. In part, businesses are making themselves more convenient to where their executives and many of their employees live. But their moves also confound expensive hub-and-spoke mass transit systems and provide yet another disincentive for their employees to live in the core cities and inner suburbs.

Telecommunications Advances. The personal computer and the Internet, e-mail, and World Wide Web, in addition to telephones, cellular telephones, and the capability of teleconferencing have all enabled employees and the self-employed alike to sever the link that formerly bound them to their work places on a daily basis. With the ability to work at home and not have to face the daily commuting grind, some workers are being released from having to live within a certain distance of their workplaces. The home itself becomes a secondary or primary workplace. This phenomenon not only makes it easier to live in the outer suburbs, but also contributes to the exurban explosion in some areas. Workers can live beyond the confines of urbanized areas altogether, in scenic, rural settings like California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, the Colorado Front Range, or Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley.

Rising Affluence. There have been suggestions that greater affluence itself fosters sprawl. Simply put, consumers of greater means consume more, and one way of consuming more is to purchase a larger home on a larger lot with two or more expensive cars in the driveway, and perhaps even a pool in the backyard, all in a more spacious, park-like, low-density neighborhood. The desire for greenery and open space now seems deeply imbedded in our culture: witness the number of upper middle class families with second homes or cottages in the country, and the number of celebrities with ranches or homes in the likes of Jackson Hole, Aspen, and Taos. Should the affluent continue to become even more affluent in the 21st century, there is likely to be an ever-intensifying land rush in the more scenic parts of the country, as seen in the Rocky Mountain West.

Freeways and the Interstate Highway System. "While the Interstate Highway System has had a multitude of impacts, many positive, it has also led to dispersal of growth and development," notes the Planning Commissioners Journal.¹²³  The President who launched the extensive development of interstates, Dwight D. Eisenhower, wrote of how it transformed the face of America:

Eisenhower’s "pivotal" role in launching the interstate highway system was acknowledged in 1990 when President George H. W. Bush signed legislation that changed its name to the "Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways."¹²⁵

"The construction of free beltways and expressways has subsidized suburban development," insists transportation writer Howard P. Wood in a publication of the free-market, libertarian-oriented Cato Institute.¹²⁶ One of the unexpected side-effects of the new subsidized highway networks has been the sprouting of so-called "edge cities," auto-dependent centers in the suburban fringe with substantial office space, leasable retail space, and more jobs than bedrooms. A classic example is Tyson’s Corner, adjacent to the "Beltway" (Interstate 495) in Washington, D.C.’s, northern Virginia suburbs, with its bustling office buildings, shopping (including two large malls), restaurants, hotels, and entertainment.¹²⁷

The American love affair with roads and cars symbolizes the mobility and freedom we cherish. Even if our means of expressing these values have advanced remarkably in the last century, the values themselves are not new. Walt Whitman wrote of them in the 1800s in his poem "Song of the Open Road." Writers as diverse as Robert Frost and Jack Kerouac have used roads as metaphors for life in their poetry and prose. Some have gone as far as to suggest that roads "symbolize the essence of our culture."¹²⁸ The bitter irony of course, is that with sprawl comes traffic congestion — and roads that come to resemble parking lots more than freeways. The more drivers there are chasing the freedom of the open road, the more it vanishes like a mirage.

Housing Policies. Federal housing policy since the 1930s has helped facilitate the movement of the middle-class out of the city centers into an ever-widening suburban periphery.¹²⁹  The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created in 1934 to encourage improvements in housing standards and conditions and provide