Is urban sprawl good for state?
By Samuel R. Staley This article first appeared in The Detroit News on April 2, 1998. Yes. It’s a simple but effective comparison: During the last 35 years, Michigan’s central cities lost one million residents while suburban communities grew by 20 percent. At the same time, Michigan experienced record land consumption rates, according to the Michigan Society of Planning Officials. In other words, “urban sprawl” — the ongoing process of families moving outward to live on their quarter-acre lots in single-family, detached homes — is gobbling up land and sapping central cities of people, especially in Metro Detroit. Stop sprawl, conventional wisdom says, and you help revitalize big cities. Those who directly link sprawl to urban revitalization misunderstand the forces that shape the growth of new cities and the decline of traditional ones. Planners David Varady and Jeffrey Raffel analyzed the behavior of people who move from one suburban or central city neighborhood to another. The subu
