The Costs of Sprawl Reconsidered: What the Data Really Show

Abstract

The Costs of Sprawl? The “anti-sprawl” movement has received much attention in recent years, and has been successful in implementing its “smart growth” policies in some areas. Much of the justification for the current campaign against the lowdensity (sprawling) urban development that Americans and Western Europeans prefer is based upon assumptions that it is more costly than the more dense development of central cities. A federally financed research project (Costs of Sprawl) concluded that we can no longer afford sprawling development and that failure to force more dense development in the next quarter-century would impose more than $225 billion in additional costs.