New Study: Anti-Sprawl Strategies are Good for Construction Jobs (Nov 20, 2003)

http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/backintown_release.htm

SPRAWL BASICS

Sprawl is the diffusion of a city and its suburbs over increasingly more rural land at the periphery of an urban area. This inevitable involves the conversion of open space into built-up, developed land. Sprawl, however disliked and avoidable the subject matter is, must be discussed when the topic of transportation arises. New highways are the number one cause of sprawl, according to the American Farmland Trust. New highways result in $10,000- an-acre subsidies for sprawl developers. This can be translated into money out of taxpayers pockets and into developer’s pockets, with no benefits to us other than strip malls, threatened floodplains, wilderness and farmland, and polluted air and water.

It may be that such continued urban growth is inevitable, but that does not mean that growth has only to leave us with paved landscapes, complete gridlock, and monotonous suburban strip malls and oversized subdivisions.

Each of the nation’s sprawling Urbanized Areas has been expanding in one of these three ways:

1. The municipality’s citizens may have expanded their per capita land consumption. This happens by households dividing by children leaving home or by divorce. The departed start new households, by people expanding the size of their houses and yards, by constructing additional public and business buildings, and by abandoning homes and stores within the old boundaries to move just outside those boundaries, perhaps adding a shopping mall and large parking lot on the town¹s edge.

2. OR the per capita land consumption may not have risen at all while additional people moved into the municipality, causing an increase in population.

3. OR there may have been some combination of both population growth and per capita land consumption growth.

St. Louis’s sprawling area can be described through data collected by the United States Bureau of Census Data of Urbanized Areas: While the St. Louis and the Metro East’s population has only increased by 3.4%, their per capita land consumption has increased by 52.9%.

When concerning ourselves with the effects of such conversion on the natural environment and agricultural resources, it is this obscene amount of land that has been urbanized that is the overall measure of sprawl. This increase in consumption is exactly what is referred to when it is said that sprawl is out-of-control, irresponsible building and that it is poorly planned overdevelpment. Madison County’s percentage of farm, forested, and floodplain lands that are increasingly turning into urban expansion provides a key indicator of the threat to the natural environment, to the nation's agricultural productivity and to the quality of life of people who live in cities and in the small towns and farms that are near cities.

It must be said that per capita urban land consumption is not limited to the size of a person's house lot or to a person's proportion of the land covered by an apartment complex. According to the organization, Sprawl City, per capita urban land consumption also includes a portion of all the other land that has been converted from rural to urban use to provide for the following: jobs, recreation and entertainment, shopping, parking, transportation, storage, government services, religious and cultural opportunities, waste handling, and education.

”The level of per capita land consumption is based both on direct individual decisions and behavior, and on collective decisions made through the government and the marketplace,” Roy Beck of the Sprawl City organization.

There are a myriad of factors that influence per capita land consumption in Madison County: urban planning, zoning, transportation, storm water systems and other infrastructure investments, the local consumer and builder preferences (sometimes this is the City, not the community), and the vitality of central cities and affluence.