John I. Carruthers

Urban sprawl and the cost of public services

One of the principle criticisms of urban sprawl is that it undermines the cost-effective provision of public services. In this paper the authors examine whether or not this is true through an exploratory analysis of the influence that alternative development patterns have on twelve measures of public expenditure: total direct, capital facilities, roadways, other transportation, sewerage, trash collection, housing and community development, police protection, fire protection, parks, education, and libraries. The objectives of the analysis are threefold. First, the authors, through a background discussion, provide a brief overview of previous research on the relationship between urban development patterns and the cost of public services. Second, through empirical analysis, they examine how the character of urban development affects per capita public outlays in a cross-section of 283 metropolitan counties during the 1982–92 time period. A separate equation is estimated for each measure of expenditure, providing substantive evidence on how density, the spatial extent of urbanized land area, property value, and political fragmentation affect the cost of services. Finally, the authors use the results of the empirical analysis to develop a set of policy recommendations and directions for future research.

The Impacts of State Growth Management Programmes: A Comparative Analysis

This paper examines the impact that alternative state planning frameworks have on five dimensions of urban development: density, the spatial extent of urbanised land area, property value, public expenditures on infrastructure and population change. The objectives of the analysis are threefold. First, the background discussion provides a brief overview of urban sprawl as a public policy problem and outlines how state growth management programmes attempt to respond to it. Secondly, the empirical analysis examines the effects of growth management in a cross-section of metropolitan counties during the 1982-97 time-period. The five outcome measures are modelled in a simultaneous equations framework in order to test several specific hypotheses about how state land-use policies affect the character of urban growth. Thirdly, the results of the empirical analysis are described within the context of previous research on the effectiveness of growth management. The findings suggest that state growth management programmes with strong consistency requirements and enforcement mechanisms hold much promise for reducing urban sprawl, while programmes that do not require consistency and/or have weak enforcement mechanisms may inadvertently contribute to it.

The American Way of Land Use

This article examines the ability of proportional hazard models to evaluate changes in land use through time. There are three specific objectives: (a) to review previous research on the complexity of urbanization and explain how the spatial hazard framework accommodates that complexity; (b); to estimate a series of spatial hazard models characterizing land use in the twenty-five highest growth core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) of the United States in 1990, 2000, and 2006; and (c) to use the estimation results to track land use change region-by-region over the 16-year time frame. Overall, the analysis reveals that the spatial hazard framework offers a highly effective means of describing land use change. Along the way, it also illustrates that the classic model of urbanization continues to hold in an evermore-complex world—albeit, in an explicitly uncertain and inherently probabilistic manner.

Amenities, Quality of Life, and Regional Development

There is an extensive literature in regional science focusing on economic and regional development in which the role of urban amenities and disamenities has been used to model quality of urban life. Modeling efforts for the most part have used secondary aggregate data and spatial econometric analysis. The chapter reviews that literature emphasizing the role that urban amenities/disamenities might play in influencing regional development and migration patterns.

Exploring Innovation Gaps in the American Space Economy

This chapter explores disparities in urban innovation, in the context of the history of city systems and advanced urban economies. The overall innovative index of metropolitan economies is estimated by first generating its score on each of the latent dimensions and then adding up those performance scores across all of the dimensions. The results produced a clear set of innovation centers, spread evenly across the United States. Not only do these findings square with contemporary theory on agglomeration economies, as explained by Mulligan et al. (Ann Reg Sci 48:405–431, 2012), they line up nicely with older, less behaviorally motivated theories of central place hierarchies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the main challenges facing regional science in the research areas of innovation and urban growth.

Through the Crisis

This article extends previous research by the authors on the spatial and temporal evolution of housing values across the United States to examine the impact of the 2007 financial crisis. The specific goals are to (a) document certain pre- and postcrisis trends in the nation’s economic landscape, (b) estimate a series of simple income capitalization models aimed at weighing the relative importance of household income versus amenities in the aftermath of the recession, (c) examine the present state of the “plane of living” that households navigate when choosing where to live, and (d) posit an observation for public and private policy. The analysis considers the role of both natural and human amenities and, holding those factors constant, evaluates the extent to which the influence of income has waxed and waned over the course of the 2000 to 2010 decade. A key finding is that through the crisis the value of the contemporary plane of living, measured as the difference between 2007 and 2010, fell dramatically in major parts of the country.

Public and Subsidized Housing as a Platform for Becoming a United States Citizen

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people immigrate to the United States seeking a better way of life, and still hundreds of thousands more become citizens. Some spend time living in public and subsidized housing, sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and, each year, thousands of these individuals attain citizenship. This paper presents an econometric analysis of the propensity of non-citizens living in HUD‐sponsored housing to naturalize. Providing housing and other forms of public assistance to non-citizens is controversial but the fact of the matter is that, under current rules, many qualify for aid so, facing that fact, an important contribution of this research is to identify the type of program that works best in the context of broader national objectives. The key finding is that the market‐based approach of the housing choice voucher program — and the spatial mobility it facilitates — significantly and substantively contribute to naturalization.

Land use regulation and regional form: a spatial mismatch?

The expert contributors illustrate that sources of regional competitiveness are strongly linked with spatially observable yet increasingly flexible realities, and include building advanced and efficient transport, communications and energy networks, changing urban and rural landscapes, and creating strategic and forward-looking competitiveness policies. They investigate long-term interactions between regional competitiveness and urban mobility, as well as the connections that link global sustainability with local technological and institutional innovations, and the intrinsic diversity of spatially rooted innovation processes. A prospective analysis on networks and innovation infrastructure is presented, global environmental issues such as climate change and energy are explored, and new policy perspectives – relevant world-wide – are prescribed.