Is Sprawl Affordable for Americans?

Abstract

Housing affordability has been one of the most persistent national concerns in the United States, mainly because housing costs are the biggest item in most household budgets. Urban sprawl has been proved by previous studies to be a driver of housing affordability. Previous studies, however, were structurally flawed because they considered only costs directly related to housing and ignored the transportation costs associated with a remote location. This study sought to determine whether, after transportation costs were taken into account, urban sprawl was still affordable for Americans. Multilevel modeling and the recently released location affordability indexes (LAIs) and metropolitan compactness indexes tested the relationship between sprawl and housing affordability. By controlling for covariates, this study found that in compact areas, the portion of household income spent on housing was greater but the portion of income spent on transportation was lower. Each 10% increase in a compactness score was associated with a 1.1% increase in housing costs and a 3.5% decrease in transportation costs relative to income. The combined cost of housing and transportation declined as the compactness score rose. As metropolitan compactness increased, transportation costs decreased faster than housing costs increased, creating a net decline in household costs. This is a novel finding, conditioned only on the quality of the data on which the LAI is based.

Solutions to the problem of drinking water service affordability: A review of the evidence

“…Second, despite attempts at quantitative definitions, affordability is an inherently normative concept with a social objective of ensuring sufficient access to a vital good or service for residential households in need. We see similar disagreements over definitions of household affordability in the housing and transportation sectors (Haffner & Hulse, 2019;Hamidi & Ewing, 2015). Since affordability is a social construct, we agree that "debates over definitions, methods, and metrics, as well as the complexity of residential water service regimes, have made comprehensive assessments of household water affordability elusive," and do not propose a new or unifying definition in this review .…”

Multilevel effects of urban form and urban functional zones on housing prices: evidence from open-source big data

“…area. For example, localized high density reduces the surrounding housing prices (Fesselmeyer & Seah, 2018), and increasing the compactness contributes to increased land values and may cause increased housing prices, especially in newly developed urban areas that must accommodate migrant populations (Hamidi & Ewing, 2015). However, with the increase in compactness, transportation costs have dropped faster than the housing costs have increased, resulting in a net decrease in household costs.…”

A New Method for Identifying Key and Common Themes Based on Text Mining: An Example in the Field of Urban Expansion

“…e connotations of urban sprawl include the following: (1) urban sprawl is a unique way of urban growth that usually occurs when the land development rate exceeds the population growth rate; (2) urban sprawl is characterized by low density, fragmentation, unsustainability, single-form development, excessive reliance on motor vehicles, and massive consumption of agricultural and ecological lands [62]; and (3) urban sprawl has a series of negative effects on traffic flow, plant and animal habitat, the ornamental nature of natural landscapes, and water circulation mechanisms [63,64]; An in-depth study of urban sprawl has resulted in the formulation of three main theories in the field of urban expansion, namely, compact city theory [65], smart growth theory [66], and new urbanism theory [67]. Urban sprawl control methods can also be divided into two categories.…”