Yes, I know it’s primary election day, but a post chewing over those results will have to wait.
In the meantime, here’s at item by Robert Bruegmann in Forbes that says urban sprawl may be waning. Snip:
Even many of the most basic facts usually heard about sprawl are just wrong. Contrary to much accepted wisdom, sprawl in the U.S. is not accelerating. It is declining in the city and suburbs as average lot sizes are becoming smaller, and relatively few really affluent people are moving to the edge. This is especially true of the lowest-density cities of the American South and West. The Los Angeles urbanized area (the U.S. Census Bureau’s functional definition of the city, which includes the city center and surrounding suburban areas) has become more than 25% denser over the last 50 years, making it the densest in the country.
This fact, together with the continued decline in densities in all large European urban areas, coupled with a spectacular rise in car ownership and use there, means that U.S. and European urban areas are in many ways converging toward a new 21st-century urban equilibrium. In short, densities will be high enough to provide urban amenities but low enough to allow widespread automobile ownership and use. The same dynamics are at work in the developing world. Although urban densities there are much higher than anything seen in the affluent West, they are plummeting even faster.
Is this the case in Virginia? I can’t say. But this article seemed a bit contrarian, and just the sort of thing to post while Jim is in God’s country (also known as the Free Republic of Wyoming…or at least it used to be, when the drinking age was 19, fireworks were available just about everywhere and highway speed limits were more suggestions than hard-and-fast rules).