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Introduction: Why This
Study Is Necessary
Findings of this study vary markedly from other recent sprawl studies. Unlike
most sprawl studies that have measured for population density or urban
planning techniques, this study keeps its eye on the loss of rural land — that
is, the development that destroys natural habitat and agricultural land,
especially denying the rewards of open space near where most Americans live.
While past studies on density and urban planning are important to
understanding sprawl, they have left a gaping hole in knowledge about the
conservationist aspect of sprawl. Thus, this study is the first to shine the
spotlight on the actual loss of rural land as the result of sprawl and on the
relative importance of major factors contributing to that loss.
Table 1 ranks 49 states (excluding Alaska) according to where the most
destruction of rural land has occurred between1982 and 1997. Table 2 ranks the
states according to the greatest percentage increase in developed land. In
terms of the anti-sprawl goal of protecting rural land, the two charts provide
the best measure of which states are doing the best job (those at the bottom
of the list) and which are the greatest failures (those at the top of the
list).
Conservation Focus Draws Attention to
Population Growth
The major conclusion of this conservation-oriented study is that sprawl is
strongly linked to U.S. population growth and cannot be tamed in a practical
manner unless population growth is substantially slowed or halted.
To many Americans, that conclusion is unremarkable. After all, those new
subdivisions, industrial parks, and strip malls sprouting up like crabgrass
across the country are not being built on a whim but rather to provide housing,
places to work, and marketplaces for more and more people; around 33 million
more were added to the U.S. in the 1990s alone.1
However, our major conclusion is likely to be controversial among policy
analysts and policy makers who have largely ignored sprawl’s connection to this
country’s current, largest-ever population boom. The authors began this study
after a literature survey found that although anti-sprawlers nationwide propose
dozens of solutions to sprawl, virtually none of them include any reference to
slowing population growth. Many never even mention the concept of population
growth as they describe the devastation of sprawl, enumerate its causes, and
propose vast public policy agendas to slow the development and urbanization of
rural land and open spaces.
On the infrequent occasion population growth has been cited in sprawl studies,
it usually is in the context of minimizing the effect of population growth. Most
commonly, population growth is dismissed as being unimportant because (1) sprawl
occurs even in urban areas that have no population growth or (2) the rate of
sprawl is far greater than the rate of population growth in most areas. Both are
true. But neither contradicts this study’s finding that population growth
nationally is related to approximately half of all rural land that is lost to
development.
The Missing Factor
Population growth as a sprawl factor is particularly ignored by the Smart Growth
movement, a loose, eclectic coalition of environmentalists, local growth-control
activists, New Urbanists, municipal and regional planners, think tanks, the
federal government and many state governments, and even some home-builders and
developers.
For example, neither the website of the American Planning Commissioners Journal
nor the Vermont Forum on Sprawl identifies population growth as a source of
sprawl, let alone mentions taming it as one of sprawl’s solutions. A long
article entitled “Stemming the Tide of Sprawl” in the February, 1999 issue of
The Chronicle of Philanthropy described the growing support for combating
sprawl on the part of a number of large foundations; it omitted any mention of
stemming the tide of population growth. Similarly, in the 90-page, 1998
publication How Smart Growth Can Stop Sprawl by David Bollier for the
anti-sprawl group Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse, the words “population growth”
never appear. A four-page letter and two-page survey on sprawl and disappearing
farmland included in a recent direct mail campaign by the American Farmland
Trust failed to mention population growth once.
In a major report on sprawl issued in 2000, the National Governors Association
at least mentioned population, but only to minimize its influence: “The
development of suburban land since 1960 has far outpaced population growth in
every region of the country.” An urban policy expert at Rutgers University, a
well-known and well-regarded center of scholarly research on sprawl, did mention
population growth in comments to The Washington Post, but only to slight
its contribution to sprawl. A spokesman for the leading anti-sprawl group in
the Washington, D.C. area, Smart Growth America, denied that population growth
and immigration in the region bore any responsibility for sprawl.
A stark demonstration of all this was evident at the 1998 annual conference of
the Society of Environmental Journalists in Chattanooga. Sprawl was a top issue
throughout the conference. One of the most popular workshops was on the coverage
of sprawl issues. Several reporters described their newspapers’ intensive
efforts in this area. When an audience member asked why none of them had
mentioned any coverage of the role of population growth in sprawl, all the
reporters on the panel acknowledged that population growth was a major factor in
sprawl. But, they said, they didn’t write about it because it wasn’t something
that public policy could affect. The same sort of fatalism pervades the National
Governors Association report mentioned above, which lumps controlling population
growth in with reducing economic growth and controlling family preferences as
impractical solutions to sprawl.
In the back of the room at the Chattanooga sprawl workshop, the Sierra Club had
a display table devoted to its massive campaign against sprawl. But the Sierra
sprawl publications did not mention U.S. population growth as contributing to
sprawl. For example, “Suburban Sprawl Costs Us All” does not include support
for population growth reduction among its list of steps to stop sprawl.
Likewise, the Club’s report “The Dark Side of the American Dream” does not list
slowing population growth among its “Smart Growth Solutions.” More recently,
under pressure from dissident members like those of Sierrans for U.S. Population
Stabilization (SUSPS), the Club’s anti-sprawl campaign materials have belatedly
recognized that population growth is an ingredient of sprawl, but still insist
that other factors are far more important.
A number of writers for environmental publications have told this study’s
authors about taboos against addressing population connections to sprawl.
Politicians have imitated the media and Smart Growth advocates as they have
taken up the anti-sprawl cause. In January of 1999, 27 governors — 19
Republicans and eight Democrats — referred to Smart Growth in their
state-of-the-state speeches. Not one noted federal policies that cause high U.S.
population growth.
In light of all of that, this study’s conclusion that population growth is the
single greatest factor in this nation’s struggles with sprawl is boldly out of
step with most public comments of anti-sprawl groups and experts.
So what is going on here? Is it really true — as the anti-sprawl movement’s
silence on the subject seems to suggest — that adding more than three million
people to the United States each year is not a significant factor in sprawl? Or
has an entire movement somehow missed one of the most important solutions to the
problem it is trying to confront?
Other Studies Address Different Sprawl Goals
An explanation as to why most other studies fail to find the population/sprawl
connections discovered here is that their analyses use fundamentally different
measuring tools with different goals in mind.
Like many mass political and social movements, the anti-sprawl effort combines
several impulses under one banner. Even the term “sprawl,” as will be discussed
in the Background section, has many definitions. “Anti-sprawlers” are not at all
united in their goals. Some primarily work for more attractive or more
energy-efficient urban planning. Others concentrate on increasing residential
density, while still others focus mainly on saving rural land from urbanization
and other development. These different branches of the anti-sprawl movement may
be outlined like this:
Conservation category
1. Land Conservation Branch
The conservation of rural land is the key measure of success and is the focus of
sprawl studies among this branch of anti-sprawlers.
Smart Growth category (divided into two branches)
2. Density Branch
Increasing the density of residents is the key measure of success for this
branch and is the focus of its sprawl studies.
3. Urban Planning Branch
Better urban planning is the key measure of success for this branch and is the
focus of its sprawl studies. Increasing density is not a primary goal.
The three branches of the anti-sprawl movement are not mutually exclusive. Each
one contains some elements of the other two and, for the most part, they are not
working at cross purposes. But because each has different goals and measures for
success, it should not be surprising that studies from the perspective of one
branch would not be sufficient for another branch.
Most in the Density and Urban Planning branches of the Smart Growth category are
not opposed to conserving rural land. But neither are they primarily concerned
with reducing the spread of cities over nearby open spaces, natural recreational
places, farmland, wetlands, woodlands, and other bird and animal habitats.
Because of that, most in these two branches are relatively unconcerned about the
current pace of U.S. population growth, which the Census Bureau projects will
add more than 130 million people over the next 50 years (nearly 300 million more
by the end of the century).2
Population growth actually can help the goals of the two Smart Growth branches.
A recent Brookings study found population density generally increases when the
population of an area is growing rapidly.3 If one’s
chief goal is to increase the density in which Americans live, rapid population
growth can be very helpful. Likewise, additional population growth can help
urban planners carry out desired projects by providing more consumers and
residents to share the costs of renovation, or for in-filling to make desired
transportation projects more feasible.
But population growth almost never has a positive impact on the conservation
goal of protecting rural land. Thus, on the issue of population growth, the two
categories of the anti-sprawl movement appear to be at odds.
Furthermore, the way that the Density and Urban Planning branches measure sprawl
often leaves out any concern for preserving actual acreage of rural land:
• Density branch: Using population density as a chief measure of the
success of anti- sprawl efforts can lead to results that have no connection to
the conservation of rural land. One example is a major study conducted and
published by USA Today in 2001.4 It focused
on density and defined sprawl as straggling, disorderly, haphazard growth. Like
many studies and reports from the Density branch, it did not label the
destruction of rural land as sprawl if the new development was densely
populated. The newspaper created a “USA Today Sprawl Index” to rank cities by
“how densely developed a metro area is today, and how that changed during the
‘90s.” By stressing density, it could hold up Los Angeles as a pretty good
model. Even though the Los Angeles urbanized area expanded to cover another 394
square miles of natural habitat and agricultural land from 1970 to 1990, it
could be considered “not so sprawling after all,” because the residents of the
area were living more densely.
• Urban Planning branch: Although plenty of urban planners are concerned
about increasing population density, the main concern of this branch is to have
more attractive and more energy-efficient development. Eben Fodor, author and
community planning consultant, notes: “Smart Growth is simply a more orderly and
less chaotic process of land development. It may or may not involve greater
density and therefore greater efficiency in land use. For example, a great deal
of Smart Growth is focused on having growth occur near existing services to
reduce costs to taxpayers. This alone doesn’t reduce per-capita land consumption
to any significant degree. In the worst-case scenario, Smart Growth is merely
the planned, orderly destruction of our remaining natural environment.”5
One part of the Urban Planning branch is dominated by developers, builders, and
real estate people who want to bring higher standards to their industries. Far
from wanting to preserve rural land, they strongly favor its development. They
simply want the transformation of rural to urban to occur in tasteful,
well-planned ways. Another part of the Urban Planning branch is more neutral
about destroying rural land, reflected in the statement of the head of Smart
Growth America about that national group’s 2002 study of sprawl: “the study does
not look at the rate of land consumption — the conversion of rural land to
suburban subdivision.”6
Smart Growth America is a nationwide coalition of over 80 national and regional
business, government, and environmental organizations. Its study and general
approach to sprawl reveals the main reason until now that the need to reduce
population growth to control sprawl has been missing from the debate: Most
sprawl studies have defined sprawl in such a way as to exclude population growth
as a factor. The Smart Growth America study ranked sprawl in metropolitan areas
based on four factors:
(1) residential density;
(2) strength of activity centers and downtown areas;
(3) the mix of home, jobs and services; and
(4) accessibility of street networks.
Actual loss of rural land was not considered. And what was the definition of
sprawl? Sprawl is “the process in which the spread of development across the
landscape outpaces population growth.” Thus, any rural land that is destroyed at
the same rate of population growth is not sprawl under the non-conservationist
approach to sprawl. If our population grew by 50 percent, and the additional 145
million Americans caused the developed area to expand by 50 percent over 49
million additional acres, none of that would be sprawl under the Smart Growth
America study’s definition.
Looking at Sprawl with a Concern for
Protecting Rural Land
Clearly, the definitions and measurements of sprawl vary because of the
differing goals of those doing the measuring. Because of that, it is easy to
misinterpret results of studies that operate in different contexts. If one is
interested in reducing ugly, inefficient developmental sprawl, the Urban
Planning branch studies will be of most assistance. If one is interested in
increasing the density at which Americans live, the Density branch of the Smart
Growth movement will have the most helpful studies.
But if one is interested in slowing the destruction of natural habitat and
farmland by developmental forces, studies from the Urban Planning and Density
branches will be of limited help. Instead, one needs to look at
conservation-oriented studies that focus on the actual loss of rural land.
This is just such a conservation study. It does not define away any destruction
of rural land. No matter what the cause of the destruction, this study considers
it to be sprawl to be measured. The authors began with the hypothesis that
adding large numbers of new residents to a state is a significant factor in the
development of additional rural land. The purpose of the study was to find an
objective way to test that hypothesis. The authors worked with scholars and
experts around the country to devise a credible means of measuring the impact of
population growth on the development of open spaces, relying entirely on
governmental surveys of rural land loss and time-tested mathematical analysis.
(The methodology is presented in Appendices D and E of this report.)
The findings are unambiguous: Population growth not only is a significant
factor in sprawl but is roughly equal to all other factors combined. Massive
population growth may sometimes be helpful to Smart Growth goals of density and
better urban planning, but it is a profoundly negative factor in trying to stop
the spread of cities over the countryside.
The general principles behind the findings are not without some prior support.
That is, our series of studies (including earlier ones on California and Florida
urbanized areas) may be the first to attempt to systematically quantify the role
of population growth in sprawl, but the general principle that population growth
is related to sprawl has been endorsed in many places outside the advocacy
pronouncements of the Smart Growth groups and politicians.
The U.S. General Accounting Office in 1999 issued a study on sprawl and noted
that suburban growth “began in response to a number of social, economic,
demographic and technological factors, including the postwar population boom… .”7
As one might expect, the population control organization Population Connection
(formally, Zero Population Growth) also sees a strong connection: “The driving
force behind sprawl is population growth.”8 In the
last few years, a number of Sierra Club chapters passed resolutions urging their
national organization to incorporate U.S. population stabilization as an
anti-sprawl strategy. Their resolution stated in part: “WHEREAS population
growth is a major factor in sprawl… .”9 Club
population activists forced the Sierra Board of Directors to hold a national
referendum of members early in 2001 on whether to integrate population into the
Club’s anti-sprawl campaign. Opposed by the national Board of Directors as
micromanaging the Club’s staff, the referendum was narrowly defeated 54 percent
to 46 percent.
Developers Recognize Role of Population. Especially forthright in
recognizing the connection between population growth and the urbanization of
rural land are homebuilders and land developers. “Growth in population creates
a need not only for housing but also for supporting real estate facilities such
as shopping centers, service stations, medical clinics, schools, office
buildings, and so on,” explains one real estate development manual.10
“Demand for real estate at the national level is influenced by national
population growth and demographic change, coupled with expanding employment
opportunities and rising per capita incomes,” points out another.11
The president of the National Association of Home Builders chided the Sierra
Club for not giving population growth its due in the Club’s 1999 sprawl report:
“…the Sierra Club failed to acknowledge the significant underlying forces
driving growth in suburban America – a rapidly increasing population and
consumer preferences. The U.S. needs to construct between 1.3 and 1.5 million
new housing units annually during the next decade simply to accommodate an
anticipated 30 million increase in the nation’s population.12
The bulk of leaders in the home-building and real estate development industry
applaud the development of farmland, natural habitat, and open spaces as a sign
of economic prosperity, although many call for new urbanization to occur in a
more compact and esthetically pleasing manner. And they are pleased with the
high U.S. population growth that drives that development. A demographer from
Boston Financial expressed excitement to a packed room of real estate
professionals at an October, 1999, Urban Land Institute meeting in Phoenix that
Hispanic and Asian immigrants constitute groups that would continue to grow into
the biggest consumers of new homes in the U.S. through 2030: “Through 2030, as
much as 60 percent of the United States’ population growth will come from new
U.S. residents … Bolstered by a huge influx of immigrants. … That flow of people
could create 1.2 million more households each year, which is welcome news for
businesses with a product to sell.”13
In a recent feature story on a NumbersUSA study titled “Weighing Sprawl Factors
in Large U.S. Cities,” the Home Builders Association of Northern California
declared that: “Local officials should reject no-growthers’ ‘sprawl’ label and
OK smart-growth projects needed for an expanding population.” And the
association’s CEO declared that “population growth is a fact of life.”14
So, those who welcome sprawl have readily acknowledged the connection to
population growth, while most leaders who oppose sprawl from the Density and
Urban Planning branches of the movement have been silent about it or have
greatly minimized its importance.
On the other hand, nothing in this study suggests that the anti-sprawl movement,
including its Smart Growth subset, has been wrong in trying to tackle poor
planning, inefficient development and a couple of dozen other factors causing an
increase in land consumption per person. This study finds that trends toward
higher per capita land consumption are responsible for around half of all
sprawl. Obviously, the anti-sprawlers are correct to lend their attention to
that half of the problem.
But the authors believe that for those leaders and organizations who truly
desire a brake on the irrevocable loss of farmland and natural habitats, this
study provides powerful new information that will result in their opening up
significant additional fronts in their battle against sprawl. Until now, they
have been handicapped by the lack of a credible statistical rationale for trying
to tame the nation’s population growth.
The authors hope that this effort to quantify population’s role will serve as a
“lest we forget” reminder that, nationwide:
(1) population growth is a major factor behind sprawl, associated with roughly
half of all sprawl nationwide;
(2) that simply ignoring population growth will not make it go away, and;
(3) that unless it is addressed forthrightly, all other efforts to stop sprawl
are likely to fall short over the long term. These efforts will only slow
sprawl, not stop it. A given stretch of open countryside will take 10 years to
fill up instead of just five. Is this good enough? We think not.
Continue to Background
Back to Table
of Contents Center for
Immigration Studies Home Page
Endnotes
1 U.S. Census Bureau, "Largest
Census-to-Census Population Increase in U.S. History as Every State Gains."
April 2, 2001.
2 U.S. Census Bureau. March 2003.
Revised Census Bureau Projection for 2050.
3 William Fulton, Rolf Pendall, Mai
Nguyen, and Alicia Harrison. 2001. Who Sprawls Most? How Growth Patterns
Differ Across the U.S. The Brookings Institution.
4 El Nasser, Haya and Paul Overberg.
"What you don’t know about sprawl. Controlling development a big concern, but
analysis has unexpected findings" USA Today. February 22, 2001.
5 Fodor, Eben V. 1999. "Better Not
Bigger: How to Take Control of Urban Growth and Improve Your Community." British
Columbia: New Society.
6 Chen, Donald. "Study says Vegas has
less sprawl than many big cities," by Launce Rake, Las Vegas Sun. October
17, 2002.
7 Community Development: Extent of
Federal Influence on ‘Urban Sprawl’ Is Unclear. April 30, 1999.
www.gao.gov/archive/1999/rc99087.pdf
8 Quote from ZPG website article
entitled "Sprawl is Bustin’ Out All Over." Retrieved 1 March 2000 at
www.zpg.org/education/writingcontext/sprawlbustin.html
9 Sierra Club 2001 ballot question.
See
www.susps.org/sprawl/sb1_sbq.html.
10 L. Goodkin. 1974. When Real
Estate and Home Building Become Big Business: Mergers, Acquisitions and Joint
Ventures. Boston: Cahners Books. p. 14.
11 J. McMahan. 1976. Property
Development: Effective Decision Making in Uncertain Times. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
12 National Association of Home
Builders. 1999. "Sierra Club Report Ignores Underlying Forces Behind Urban
Growth." News release distributed on 5 October by PR Newswire. Remarks of
Charles Ruma, president of the 200,000-member National Association of Home
Builders.
13 Catherine Reagor. "Immigration will likely propel
home building in next 30 years." The Arizona Republic. October 24, 1999.
14 Home Builders Association of Northern California.
‘Green’ researchers show builders have curbed per capita land consumption. HBA
News, July/August 2001.
www.hbanc.org/news2000/JulAug2001/JulAug01feat1.html
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