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.

Recent years have witnessed widespread expansion of state and regional planning programs in the United States. A major purpose of these efforts is to reduce urban sprawl-low density, discontinuous, suburban-style development, often characterized as the result of rapid, unplanned, and/or uncoordinated growth- by promoting jurisdictional cooperation and regulatory consistency across metropolitan areas. This paper evaluates the efficacy of this approach by examining the relationship between governmental fragmentation and several measurable outcomes of urban development: density, urbanized land area, property value, and public expenditures on infrastructure. The four dimensions are modeled in a simultaneous equations framework, providing substantive evidence on how fragmentation and other exogenous factors affect metropolitan growth patterns. Fragmentation is associated with lower densities and higher property values, but has no direct effect on public service expenditures; less fragmented metropolitan areas occupy greater amounts of land due to the extensive annexation needed to bring new development under the control of a central municipality. The findings of the analysis lend support to state and regional planning efforts aimed at increasing cooperation among local governments, but also suggest that further research is needed in order to evaluate whether or not they produce their intended effects. Copyright 2002 Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky.

This paper examines the impact that alternative state planning frameworks have on ve 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 ve outcome measures are modelled in a simultaneous equations framework in order to test several speci c 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 ndings 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.

This paper addresses four fundamental questions about the relationship between `smart growth', a fiscally motivated anti-sprawl policy movement, and public finance. Do low-density, spatially extensive land use patterns cost more to support? If so, how large an influence does sprawl actually have? How does the influence differ among types of spending? And, how does it compare with the influence of other relevant factors? The analysis, which is based on the entire continental US and uses a series of spatial econometric models to evaluate one aggregate (total direct) and nine disaggregate (education, fire protection, housing and community development, libraries, parks and recreation, police protection, roadways, sewerage, and solid waste disposal) measures of spending, provides the most detailed evidence to date of how sprawl affects the vast sum of revenue that local governments spend every year.