Undiscovered country.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Effects of sprawl

Buzzwords such as sprawl and smart growth have seeped into Washington politics, as Al Gore and other pols attempt to assemble a national consensus on land use policy. But anyone hoping to fashion a sensible program to deal with the byproducts of growth will have to get around a pretty big obstacle: After years of study, hardly anyone can agree just what the effects of sprawl, for good or for ill, really are.

For evidence, examine The Costs of Sprawl - Revisited, a new report sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration. In 268 pages, it reviews virtually all the serious research on sprawl done during the last several decades and attempts to distill all the areas of agreement it can find. In its words, it seeks "to break down the phenomenon of sprawl into its basic alleged impacts, both positive and negative, and to detail deliberately the strengths and weaknesses of each impact statement with specific citations from the literature." If you're looking for a clear picture, expect to be disappointed.

For example: While there is general agreement that the cost of infrastructure is linked to the density of new development, researchers are in far less accord as to how much this has to do with sprawl, and many make the very reasonable argument that subsequent waves of development will fill in enough areas to recoup the initial costs. How legitimate is this argument? It's hard to say, since hardly anyone's tried to tabulate the relevant data or, for that matter, to decide just how the data should be tabulated. That raises another point, which the study neglects: whether the values in question are too subjective to be quantified at all.

Usually, scholars can't arrive at even that much consensus. Consider the issue of public operating costs - that is, whether the splintered mini-governments that characterize suburban sprawl are "duplicative" and, thus, spend public money inefficiently. This is a popular contention within the smart growth crowd, but there turns out to be little real evidence for it. As the study notes, public services in large and dense areas "are more complex and individualized than those in smaller, more sparsely populated jurisdictions." Given that the smart-growthers...