In urban planning news from the Boston Globe:
The virtues of sprawl
Sprawl isn't what it used to be, some experts contend. Is it time we stopped worrying and learned to love the subdivision?...despite rising gas prices that make it increasingly expensive to get around these spread-out landscapes, some scholars and commentators have been stepping up to say that sprawl really isn't so bad.
Some recent developments outside Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas are far-flung but quite dense, for example, suggesting a kind of creeping efficiency in America's continuing suburbanization. A Brookings Institution study on the Los Angeles area found an average of nine people per acre of newly developed land from 1982 to 1997, three times the rate of the New York metropolitan area. By the measure of people per square mile, Los Angeles--hemmed in, for all its expanse, by mountains and the ocean--is more dense than Chicago, according to the Census Bureau. The lines of single-family homes packed in close together have even prompted some grumbling that this fresh brand of suburbia doesn't provide enough elbow room.
