Chip Taylor

The beginning of the end of sprawl?

Researchers at Rutgers find that "sprawl" may be self-limiting. I haven't read the study yet, but here is Otis White's summary:

Hughes and Seneca emphasize the tentativeness of their research, saying this may be “a short-term pause in the inexorable long-term pattern of deconcentration” rather than a fundamental change in growth, but clearly they don’t think so, and the data they marshal is convincing. Looking at the 23 suburban counties of the New York metro area and the eight counties of its “regional core” (the five boroughs of New York plus three urban New Jersey counties), they find that four important economic indicators — population, employment, income and housing growth — changed direction in the 1990s as the region’s urban core stopped losing ground and, in some ways, started regaining it.

Examples: From 1969 to 1990, the region’s suburbs added 11.2 percent in population while the urban counties lost 7.8 percent. But since then, the city and the suburbs have grown at almost exactly the same rate, 9.1 percent from 1990 to 2001. Urban income gains have been even more impressive. In 1987, per capita income in the nine inner-city counties was 91.8 percent of incomes in the region as a whole. By 2001, it was up to 93.3 percent. (Income gains in Manhattan were astonishing: from 165.6 percent of the regional average in 1987 to 228 percent by 2001.)

What could account for this shift? Two big factors, the academics say: Traffic congestion has turned suburban commuting into a nightmare, and suburbanites are increasingly resistant to more growth. Result: People and companies are turning to urban areas as places to live and do business. Footnote: The big change was the end of highway construction, Hughes and Seneca say. The freeways and toll roads built after World War II were the enablers of suburban growth, and by the mid-1990s road construction was, for all intents and purposes, finished in the New York area. “This already is constraining further suburban growth,” they write, “and it is making areas served by public transit more desirable as workplace locations.”