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Measuring Sprawl and its Impact: the
Character and Consequences of Metropolitan
Expansion
identified sprawl as the
… process in which the spread of development
across the landscape far outpaces population
growth. The landscape sprawl creates has four
dimensions: a population that is widely dispersed
in low-density development; rigidly separated
homes, shops, and workplaces; a network of roads
marked by huge blocks and poor access; and a lack
of well-defined, thriving activity centers, such as
downtowns and town centers. Most of the
other features usually associated with sprawl – the
lack of transportation choices, relative uniformity
of housing options or the difficulty of walking –
are a result of these conditions. (Ewing et al.,
2002: p. 3).
Fiscal impacts of unrestrained suburban expansion
can be added to this list of factors; these land use
decisions generate direct costs for the public purse.
They require new infrastructure of roads, water
mains and sewer connections to serve undeveloped
land on the edges of urban areas. The new popula-
tions need fire and police protection – more person-
nel, new buildings, extra equipment. Suburban
families setting up home in new areas need new
schools for their children to attend. The money for
these new expenses has to come from somewhere, and
the American system of public finance demands that
most costs for community services be borne locally
through property taxes and sales taxes. Where the
costs to support growth exceed the tax income munic-
ipalities receive from new households, part of the
price to accommodate newcomers falls on existing
residents through general tax increases, often creating
friction between existing residents and newcomers. 
A study in Salt Lake City, Utah, demonstrated that
low-density sprawl would cost as much as $15 billion
in infrastructure and public services – approximately
$30 000 per household (Calthorpe and Fulton, 2001:
p. 2). Despite the protestations of the real estate
industry, growth rarely pays for itself.
This inequity has given rise to several efforts to
pass these costs of growth onto the newcomers who
have generated the need for extra services in the form
of impact fees, that is, extra fees per new dwelling
charged by the municipality to developers. These fees
are then put toward the cost of providing new
community services, thus reducing the tax burden on
existing residents. These impact fees can vary from a
few hundred dollars to several thousand, and devel-
opers (who dislike this system intensely) pass these
fees directly onto homebuyers in the form of
increased house prices. Critics of impact fees point to
the fact that this system makes new housing more
expensive, thus making it less affordable to people of
low or moderate incomes.
At a larger scale, several studies have shown that
these new costs for providing community services to
expanding suburban areas can be minimized through
compact development. A well-known examination of
comparative development patterns in New Jersey
estimated that the state of New Jersey could save
several billion dollars in infrastructure costs if its
urbanized areas developed in compact patterns
instead of extended sprawl (Burchell and Listokin,
1995). In addition to reducing the costs of public ser-
vices, other studies show that compact development
can also reduce actual housing costs by between 
6 and 8 percent (Burchell, 1997).
Another quirk in the structure of American public
sector finance that differentiates it from British
practice also causes great difficulty in creating and
funding policies of sustainable growth in metropolitan
areas. Because public funding is largely locally based
as opposed to centrally administered, there is greater
competition among municipalities for certain types
of development that generate more tax revenue than
expenditure. For example, a large new out-of-town
shopping center will generate new property taxes and
sales tax revenue from all the goods sold, with
relatively little cost to the local authority – possibly
new water and sewer connections and police and fire
protection. This type of commercial development
does not generate any need for new schools, libraries
or other expensive community facilities, and thus the
local authority makes a net profit from this kind of
development, receiving more tax money from the
project than it expends on services. This contrasts
with typical residential development, which usually
costs the municipality more money to service with all
necessary facilities than it receives in taxes.
Towns and cities therefore compete fiercely with
each other to attract large retail and office develop-
ments to their community, usually in suburban loca-
tions, and financial considerations often override all
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others. Issues of environmental impacts, loss of open
space and even traffic congestion find it hard to match
the need for local authorities to raise their own money
for community services. In this competitive context,
it’s very difficult (some would say impossible) to
undertake collaborative regional planning that coordi-
nates the design of sustainable transportation and
land-use patterns across several different local authori-
ties. Currently each municipality takes decisions that
within their own limited boundaries might be rational,
but which in the larger regional context can be exactly
the opposite.
Most American cities, while homogeneous on the
ground, are divided into different political jurisdic-
tions that compete with one another for new devel-
opment to improve their tax base. Atlanta, Georgia,
for example, is an agglomeration of 73 different local
authorities, comprising the original city of Atlanta
and a multitude of surrounding suburban towns and
counties. As Atlanta’s urban area grew, its municipal
boundaries didn’t expand with it. Instead, the new
built-up areas were claimed by the formerly rural
counties around the original city, leaving the city of
Atlanta landlocked within its suburbs, all of which
have grown into towns in their own right. The com-
plete extent of the extended Atlanta metropolitan
area, with its population of 4 112 198 (in 2003),
comprises the city of Atlanta, 20 counties and 143
independent towns!
For the British reader, a theoretical analogy might
be if the city of Birmingham were composed of many
different towns, each having its own town council,
planning staff, police force, fire brigade – and budget.
Most taxation would be local, and different councils,
say, Edgbaston and Ladywood, for example, would
have different rates of property tax on homes and
businesses, and of sales tax (VAT) on the goods
bought in the stores. ‘Towns’ nearer the center might
have larger percentages of poorer inhabitants, and
would therefore have trouble raising enough revenue
to maintain good levels of public services, while the
wealthier municipalities in the suburbs would always
have the upper hand in attracting new jobs, shopping
centers and affluent residents. What in the UK is a
unified administrative area capable of coordinated
planning and allocation of resources would thus
become a fractured metropolis of increasing disparity
between rich and poor communities. The nearest
Britain has come to experiencing this state of affairs
was in London during the 1980s, when Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher abolished the Greater
London Council and left the capital city to be run by
a series of squabbling and unequal borough councils.
It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the process of
restoring unified local government for London was
commenced under Tony Blair’s administration with
the election of a new Mayor for the whole metropol-
itan area.
Profligate patterns of suburban expansion also
bring with them problems of air and water pollution
that cross America’s myriad municipal boundaries.
Polluted surface water run-off from a large suburban
shopping center in one town may flow into the river
that supplies drinking water for the adjacent commu-
nity. But if the upstream town desperately needs the
taxes from the shopping center to pay for new
schools it may very well pay no heed to the pleas of its
downstream neighbor. Problems of pollution are
well-documented in American technical literature
(Benfield et al., 1999) and we don’t wish to duplicate
facts and figures here to an unnecessary degree, but a
few instances will help drive home the need for dra-
matic changes to current attitudes and policies.
The expanding nature of America’s suburbs
requires that most people drive everywhere for every-
thing they need in their normal daily lives. In a coun-
try dominated by large distances and large vehicles
with low gas mileage, it is quite possible to spend a
gallon of gas to buy a gallon of milk. Using the 
20-year period between 1970 and 1990 again as a
reliable benchmark, vehicle miles travelled (VMT)
increased at four times the increase in the driving-age
population (Benfield et al., 1999). For many people
today, it’s virtually impossible to live without a car.
There is no alternative, for the widely spaced suburbs
cannot be served conveniently or economically by pub-
lic transportation. Some wealthier families ‘need’ three
or four vehicles to support their suburban lifestyle.
Twenty-first century Americans drive so much
because the goods and services they require each day are
separated into single-use zones, and the roads between
them have been designed for vehicle use only. Walking
in this environment often requires walking in the road-
way, endangered by traffic, or on some muddy, scruffy
unpaved verge. America is increasingly becoming a
land of private affluence and public squalor, as the pub-
lic realm decays through lack of use, or use by only
those members of society whose mobility is limited.
All this driving translates directly into unhealthy air
quality caused by carbon monoxide exhaust, nitrous
oxides, and other carcinogenic and toxic air pollutants.
Many American cities regularly have ‘bad air’ days, or
smog-alert days when health authorities advise citizens
not to go outside if they have respiratory problems.
CHAPTER TWO
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CITIES, SUBURBS AND SPRAWL
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European cities are by no means immune from this
problem, but there is one crucial difference: alterna-
tive, less polluting types of transportation are often
available. In most American cities, the car is the only
realistic means of moving around. Every American
suburban area has places where office workers eat
lunch at restaurants within a quarter-mile from where
they work, but where it is physically impossible or
unsafe to walk. In twenty-first century America, even
going for lunch with a group of colleagues involves a
multitude of car trips.
The haphazard, spread-out development patterns
of sprawl dramatically affect air quality; equally dra-
matic is their impact on the quality of water in
America’s creeks, streams and rivers. It’s now fairly
well understood that natural landscapes are generally
permeable, allowing rainwater and snowmelt to per-
colate slowly into the ground and filtering out most
pollutants naturally. In cities and suburbs, by contrast,
large areas of ground are paved or built over with
impervious materials, thus forcing stormwater to run-
off quickly into waterways without benefit of any nat-
ural filtration, and picking up man-made pollutants
such as car oil and other everyday chemicals as it
flows. Even when tallying densities as low as one
house per acre, the math adds up to approximately 
10 percent of the site being covered with buildings
and concrete driveways, paths and patios. Shopping
centers typically cover between 75 and 95 percent of
their site’s area with this impervious construction. As a
result, run-off pollution is now America’s main threat
to ecologically sound water quality. Forty percent of
the nation’s rivers are significantly polluted, leading to
diminution of fish stocks, public health problems and
loss of recreational venues (Benfield et al., 1999).
Added to these serious environmental problems
are the visible attributes of suburban sprawl. Much of
it, especially the commercial areas, is incredibly 
ugly
(see Figure 2.13). The caustic critic James Howard
Kunstler sums up this American dilemma:
We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic subur-
ban boulevards of commerce, and we’re over-
whelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying
ugliness of absolutely everything in sight – the fry
pits, the big-box stores, the office units, the lube
joints, the carpet warehouses, the parking lagoons,
the jive plastic townhouse clusters, the uproar of
signs, the highway itself clogged with cars – as
though the whole thing had been designed by
some diabolical force bent on making human
beings miserable. (Kunstler, 1996a: p. 43).
It is interesting to compare Kunstler’s 1996 critique
of the suburban environment to that of British
architectural critic and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster,
writing in 1959:
If an architect of enormous energy, painstaking inge-
nuity and great structural knowledge, had devoted
years of his life to the study of how best to achieve
the maximum of inconvenience … and had the
assistance of a corps of research workers ransacking
architectural history for the least attractive materials
and building devices known to the past, it is just pos-
sible, though highly unlikely, that he might have
evolved a style as crazy as that with which the specu-
lative builder, with no expenditure of mental energy
at all, has enriched the landscape on either side of
our great arterial roads … Notice the skill with
which the (buildings) are disposed, that ensures that
the largest possible area of countryside is ruined with
the minimum of expense. (Lancaster: p. 152)
Medical and psychological evidence reveals that ugly
surroundings are not good for us. University research
in Texas and Delaware indicates that our reactions to
visual clutter ‘may include elevated blood pressure,
increased muscle tension, and impacts on mood and
work performance’ (Benfield et al., 1997). Recent
studies have also linked health problems such as obesity
and diabetes to a badly-designed, unwalkable environ-
ment (Killingsworth et al., 2003; US Dept of Health
and Human Services, 2001; Srikameswaram, 2003).
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES