| There’s no doubt that most of the nation’s metropolitan areas are consuming land more rapidly that they are adding population. But researchers for the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy have found that conventional wisdom about “sprawl” in the U.S. is just plain wrong.
A big surprise in the study is that the densest areas of the United States are actually in the West, especially in California, Arizona and Nevada. Areas of the Northeast and Midwest that have historically have had high densities at their cores, on the other hand, have sprawled dramatically over the past 15 years, dispersing their populations significantly.
“According to conventional wisdom, Western cities are sprawling because they are so auto-oriented and older Northeastern and Midwestern cities are dense because they are dense in the aging core,” writes William Fulton, Rolf Pendal, Mai Nguyen and Alicia Harrison, the report’s authors.
In one sense, those perceptions are correct, they say. But the Northeast and Midwest are gobbling up land at a much greater rate than they are gaining population. And cities in the West are growing at much higher densities than their counterparts anywhere in the nation.
The authors conclude that there are major regional differences in the phenomenon of “sprawl,” and addressing the problem will require a variety of approaches.
For more information on this and other planning issues, visit www.cyburbia.org and www.ap.buffalo.edu/pai. | 
