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Urban sprawl is a burden on local government because it forces limited resources to be allocated to the creation of new infrastructure rather than to maintaining existing infrastructure. As sprawl encourages populations to move outside of older established communities, the tax base of these communities is diminished requiring a reduction of services to the remaining population. Ironically, many state and local government policies actually end up subsidizing a sprawl pattern of development.
The Sierra Club has available for downloading a report called Sprawl Costs Us All: How Your Taxes Fuel Suburban Sprawl examining the many ways in which government has subsidized a sprawl pattern of development.
Eastward Ho!, a planning organization in South Florida has available online a February 1999 report, Development Futures: Paths to More Efficient Growth in Southeast Florida, prepared Dr. Robert W. Burchell of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University documenting the costs of continued sprawl versus savings from an alternative pattern of development. Both the introduction to the report and the full report are available to download.
Confronting the Issue of Sprawl in Maine, an article by Evan Richert, Director, State Planning Office, focuses on how state government policies have helped encourage sprawl -- and why this has resulted in huge costs to taxpayers.
Community Choices: Thinking Through Land Conservation, Development, and Property Taxes in Massachusetts. A report by the Trust for Public Lands that examines whether new development covers the cost of needed municipal services.
Interestingly enough, it's not just state and local governments that are being hit by the costs of sprawl. The Archdiocese of Detroit (along with religious groups elsewhere) is being hurt by sprawl. As reported by Arlin Wasserman in the Michigan Land Use Institute newsletter (Oct. 11, 2001):
"The Archdiocese’s focus on sprawl is prompted by the factors that also are driving local government leaders and citizens to take action. The Archdiocese provides many of the same services as local governments -- hospitals, schools, social services, and churches that serve as public meeting places. In recent decades the Archdiocese has made a painful choice to close some inner city churches as congregants move to new suburbs. Cardinal Maida, preparing for a revival in Detroit, has chosen to mothball the buildings for future use rather than sell them.
Meanwhile, developers who build the best housing at the urban fringe are taxing the Archdiocese in the same way that other governments are. The church, forced to provide services ever farther from city centers, is spending limited funds to build new schools and churches."
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Paying for Growth, Prospering from Development, a report prepared by the Rocky Mountain Institute looks at the costs of development to local governments.
The Three Myths of Growth, by Eben Fodor (from the Planning Commissioners Journal) argues for closer scrutiny of claims that growth pays for itself.
A short, but interesting article, How Government Highway Policy Encourages Sprawl, available on the Cato Institute web site (August 18, 1998) states that:
"Taxpayers shouldn't have to pick up the tab for other people's preferences for suburban living, yet that has been the effect of the federal interstate highway program since the mid-1950s. ... The construction of free beltways and expressways has subsidized suburban development. The "correct" or efficient amount of suburban development is the amount that consumers are willing to pay for so long as they bear the incremental costs of land acquisition and expressway construction. ... the financing of urban beltways and radial expressways from the Federal Highway Trust Fund represents a subsidy to suburban sprawl ..."
See also a 2001 report by the USDA's Economic Research Service, Development at the Urban Fringe and Beyond: Impacts on Agriculture and Rural Land (then download Chapter IV of the report for information on the tax impacts of different land use policies).
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