What is Sprawl?

I think there will forever be a fight between those who argue over what sprawl is and isn’t. Even now the debate rages on in New Urbanist circles and other professional forums. In my personal opinion it doesn’t have to do necessarily with street design or the compactness of development but the degree to which you depend on driving a car to get to your destinations.

I applaud places like Daybreak in Utah, which Rob Steuteville mentions in his article in Public Square linked above, for moving in the right direction. They have bones that can be redeveloped in the future to actually support less car use, but only if they are allowed to evolve. Aerial photos tell stories, and the grocery stores and hospitals with wide swaths of parking there belie the true nature of the place in this moment.

And as that development marches to the edges of the valley, often a place choked by smog in thick inversion layers, the real work begins to keep that region affordable, accessible. Cities all over the country are running out of space to sprawl and our development and finance systems aren’t ready for it. Our politics aren’t ready for it. We claw at the answers in legislatures, but can’t agree on a solution.

Huge tracts of land are available now, pumping out tens of thousands of housing units until there are no tracts left. California’s major cities know what happens when you run out of land for sprawl. Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas will find out soon as well. Federal land releases will push the problem further down the road, figuratively and literally.

So in the end perhaps it doesn’t really matter what the definition of sprawl is and our current arguments about it. Now it means “cheap” housing and more driving, but it will come at a cost because we didn’t manage our land supply and growth more intelligently.