Cost assessment of urban sprawl on municipal services using hierarchical regression

Abstract

In Europe, especially in the Valencian Community, Spain, the growth of cities in the last few decades has brought with it a major paradigm change, shifting from a compact to a sprawling urban model. Although it is known about its important environmental, social, and economic effects, there is no clear and unequivocal measurement of the impact of urban sprawl on municipal spending. The impact of the sprawling city on public finances and on the cost of local public services is clearly one of the conditioning factors that should be assessed when making urban development decisions. Based on a measurement of the sprawling city, our aim is to calculate the effect of urban sprawl on the local administration’s expenditure and particularly on the cost of basic public municipal services. These are obtained through a statistical model with cost functions that can assess the increase in spending prompted by urban sprawl for municipal current expenditure. The proposed model is novel in the field of urban planning and is based on a Bayesian hierarchical model with the ability to include modeling constraints among the expenditures variables and handle missing values accurately. With this paper, we show that urban sprawl has a significant and positive effect on the unit cost of local public services, which results in an inefficient urban growth model from the economic point of view. The effect is not transferred homogeneously to the budget. There are spending items that are more sensitive to urban sprawl like expenditure on security and public transportation and community wellbeing, which primarily covers waste collection, elimination, and treatment; sanitation, and water supply and distribution; road cleaning; and public lighting.

Urban sprawl and the cost of providing local public services: Empirical evidence for Brazilian municipalities

“…Over the past decade, the effects of land patterns and urban sprawl on local finances became an important issue for other cities in developed countries. For example, some studies addressed this issue for Spanish cities (Benito, Bastida, & Guillamón, 2010;Gielen, Riutort-Mayol, Miralles i Garcia, & Palencia Jiménez, 2019;Hortas-Rico, 2014;Hortas-Rico & Solé-Ollé, 2010); and Japanese cities (Ida & Ono, 2019;Nakamura & Tahira, 2008). Although these studies used different measures for urban sprawl and different data and methods of estimation, all of them found evidence supporting the hypothesis that sprawl increases the cost of providing some categories of spending.…”

“…Because urban sprawl is a multidimensional phenomenon (Galster et al, 2001), a composite index would present a more complete characterization of it (Gielen et al, 2019). However, the use of a composite index has the disadvantage of being more difficult to interpret than their components and so is not very informative for policy development and evaluation (OECD, 2018).…”

“…The selection of the local spending variables is based on previous studies that have addressed the effect of urban sprawl on local public finances (Benito et al, 2010;Carruthers & Ulfarsson, 2003Gielen et al, 2019;Hortas-Rico & Solé-Ollé, 2010;Libertun de Duren & Guerrero Compeán, 2016;Nakamura & Tahira, 2008). Apart from this, the selection of the dependent variables also reflects the structure of spending of the Brazilian municipalities.…”

Reducing public transit compounds social vulnerabilities during COVID-19

“…Access to public transit is particularly crucial for marginalized communities to reach and utilize essential services due to their low levels of automobile access. However, urban sprawl, low-density development, and multi-jurisdictional governance in US cities have made the provision of public transit services less cost-effective (27)(28)(29). The expansion of highways and continued development outside of urban cores have led to residents, jobs, and services moving to suburbs with more reliance on private vehicles.…”

Development and analysis of land-use/land-cover spatio-temporal metrics in urban environments: Exploring urban growth patterns and linkages to socio-economic factors

“…Later on, the European Environmental Agency (EEA) in response of the increasing concern of sprawl in Europe developed a detailed report highlighting the importance of monitoring urban sprawl, its effects, drivers, how to measure it, and its policy relevance and implications, with the ultimate aim of increasing policy awareness and ensuring a healthy environment and well-being (EEA, 2016a). Gielen et al (2019) quantified the added cost of sprawl at the municipal level, showing a higher expenditure in security, public transport and community well-being (i.e., providing services of waste collection, sanitation, water and light supply, etc.). Regarding inequality, this is higher in urban areas than in rural areas and it affects both developed and developing countries.…”