A Housing-Unit-Level Approach to Characterizing Residential Sprawl

Abstract

This article reports on a study that used five spatial metrics at the housing-unit level for analyzing spatial patterns of urban growth in order to better identify the characteristics and qualities of urban sprawl. A multi-temporal land-use/land-cover dataset for Hunterdon County, New Jersey was utilized to measure new housing units developed between Time 1 (1986) and Time 2 (1995) for five traits defined as in the planning and policy literature: density, leapfrog, segregated land use, accessibility, and highway strip. The resulting housing-unit indicator measurements are summarized by municipality to provide a sprawl report card. The authors conclude that indicator measures calculated at the housing-unit level provide an advantageous set of tools for evaluating and informing the development process. Measuring at the housing-unit level also facilitates investigation into other political and geographic factors that results in different grown at the municipal level or for any geographic unit of interest (such as neighborhood, census track, zoning region, congressional district, county, etc.).