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Sprawl can have a devastating impact on the poor and racial minorities who are often concentrated in inner city neighborhoods. Not only does sprawl lead to the dispersal of job opportunities, but it absorbs large amounts of government spending (on new infrastructure) which might otherwise be used to deal with inner city problems. In addition, sprawl may well sharpen racial segregation within metropolitan areas.
The Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University has available a report by Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres, Race, Equity, and Smart Growth: Why People of Color Must Speak for Themselves. The report provides one of the few assessments available on the Web of the impacts of sprawl (and smart growth) on minorities and on low-income individuals. As the authors note:
"Urban sprawl impacts the daily lives of people of color. The smart growth movement also influences what happens in and around communities of color. The politics of metropolitan and regional development, suburbanization, and urban sprawl are intertwined. Both race and class are implicated in white flight, residential segregation, and urban infrastructure decline. Smart Growth involves expanding opportunities and breaking down artificial barriers (i.e., housing, employment, education, transportation, land use and zoning, health and safety, public investments, etc.) that limit social and economic mobility of racial and ethnic groups."
-- see also, How Smart Growth Can Address Environmental Justice Issues, a report prepared by the National Governors Association
American Zoning & the Physical Isolation of Uses, by Laurence Gerckens (from the Planning Commissioners Journal). In his look at how zoning led to the isolation of land uses, planning historian Gerckens also notes some of the socio-economic consequences.
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