Dear Colleague:

Believe it or not, one can accurately call suburban sprawl the "1% issue."
 It is no more important than that.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
15 September 2006
Vol. 8, No. 36


The Small Problem of Suburban Sprawl
By Joseph A. D'Agostino


As America's population nears 300 million, she faces the small problem of
suburban sprawl.  Why small?  Because contrary to the impression made by
the mainstream media, environmentalists, and suburban home-owners opposed
to letting others become suburban home-owners, sprawl is consuming a tiny
fraction of America's land.  The hysterically environmentalist Sierra Club
estimated a few years ago that developers build on an additional 400,000
acres of land annually (they since inflated their estimate since it
apparently wasn't scary enough).  That is 0.02% of America's land area.
Thus, over the next 50 years, sprawl will consume an additional 1% of
American land.  This is less than a crisis.

Right now, only 4.7% of America is built up (20% is farmland).  Many
forget that as more and more people move to growing metropolitan areas,
America's small towns and rural areas continue to empty out, freeing up
land in some areas just as land is developed in others.

In addition, sprawl is becoming more efficient.  Between 1950 and 1990,
metropolitan land use increased by 66% while the number of people living
in metro areas grew by 89%.  Americans are consuming less and less space
per capita.  And since 1990, many states and localities have imposed
"smart growth" policies that direct developers to redevelop land rather
than build on virgin soil and employ more efficient building patterns.  In
addition, the rise in real estate prices of recent years has prompted
people to make better use of this resource.

Other techniques have been and will continue to be employed in mitigating
the effects of sprawl.  More people commute suburb-to-suburb instead of
into choked cities.  The Internet and e-mail enable a growing number of
people to avoid commuting at all, and even to avoid sprawl: They continue
to work for city-based companies while living in the countryside, keeping
in touch via phone, fax, e-mail, Internet, and occasional package shipping
as America's free market has reduced the costs of each one to easily
affordable levels.

Most of those reading this who reside in metropolitan areas will think
something along these lines: "How can this be true?  I have seen a huge
amount of development in my area in the past few years.  The roads are
much more congested than they were ten years ago.  My friends in Los
Angeles, Atlanta, and Washington say the same about their areas."

Such perceived suburban sprawl is then used as an argument to push the
American subset of the overpopulation myth, the idea that our country has
become too crowded.  Yet the fact remains that sprawl is taking up only a
tiny proportion of our land.  According to the United Nations, the United
States' population density is 31 people per square kilometer, well below
the world average of 48 and far below those of comparable nations in
Western Europe, almost all of whose population densities are more than
triple our own.  The UN projects that our population density will reach a
still-small 41 by 2050.  In contrast, right now, Britain's is 246 and
France's is 110.

So any problems from suburban sprawl cannot result from too many people
overall or too much land development overall.  Sprawl is simply too small
a problem for that.  In fact, sprawl is too small a problem to afflict the
United States overall: Since such a small amount of land, almost always
next to previously developed land (developers rarely start building in
virgin forest miles from any city), is affected, sprawl is not directly
affecting the USA as a whole.  Whether population growth, separate from
sprawl, is adversely affecting America is a topic for a future article.

Yet poorly planned sprawl can adversely affect the areas in which it
occurs.  Gripped by environmentalist-based anti-car fervor, states and
localities slackened their road-building decades ago-and after all, roads
without tolls don't generate income for local governments whereas
businesses and homes can be taxed.  Both mass transit rail and bus systems
lose money, making them another drag on localities' finances.  It is this
failure to plan roads and mass transit that has most obviously degraded
the quality of life in areas with substantial amounts of sprawl.  (Note:
Pollution emitted by cars has dropped dramatically over the past 40 years,
making the increasing number of vehicles on the road an ever-shrinking
environmental concern.)

It's true, too, that many schools are overcrowded.  This again is a
failure of local governments to plan for growth that everyone knew was
coming.  With more people come more taxpayers to pay for more schools and
roads; it is not as if population growth didn't increase the tax base.  If
much of population growth is due to illegal immigrants who don't pay taxes
and commit a disproportionately large amount of crime, well, that's not a
problem with the size of population per se, but with the kind of people
who live in an area-and is due to the deliberate failure of the federal
government to secure America's borders.

And what of the advantages of sprawl?  Sprawl allows more American
families to live in detached homes with yards.  It allows people to move
out of unsafe cities with incompetent governments and schools to safe
areas with better-run institutions.  These are major advantages.  A longer
commute is a trade-off.  And those who wish can still live in the city, a
legitimate freedom to choose.


Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.


NOTE: We wrote in our July 14 Weekly Briefing that the Family of the
Americas Foundation (FAF) teaches the Billings Ovulation Method of natural
family planning.  The Ovulation Method taught by FAF is based on the
Billings method, but with some changes that the World Organisation of the
Ovulation Method Billings (WOOMB) considers significant.  Summaries of
each method can be found at www.familyplanning.net and www.woomb.org.

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