Urban Growth Boundaries: Be Careful What You Wish For

Sprawl-haters often lobby for urban growth boundaries, where a
municipality draws a circle around its core and places restrictions on
development taking place outside the circle. Open space must be
preserved, they claim, lest the march of development encroach on
distant farmlands. Such spaces also have positive aesthetic and
environmental benefits for the municipality, things that sprawl-haters
tend to value.

But urban growth boundaries and other growth controls, far from
stopping decentralization, actually might encourage it even more,
according to William Fischel. In his paper, "Do Growth Controls
Matter," Fischel agrees that urban growth boundaries might make
individual municipalities more compact, but they probably cause
metropolitan regions to spread out.

Here's why. If one municipality institutes an urban growth boundary,
and the metro region is attractive enough that developers want to
build, those developers will simply go somewhere else where their
presence is more welcome. Those places tend to be exurban and rural
communities, where there will be less political resistance to new
development. Such communities are even further from the metro
region's urban core.

Over time, as these communities are settled, their residents will also
call for growth controls, pushing developers elsewhere. As more and
more new development takes place further from the metro region's
traditional core, a larger percentage of residential, employment, and
commercial hubs will be scattered over a larger area. In other words,
you will have sprawl, the very thing growth controls were trying to
rein in.

Though there might be good-sounding rhetoric that convinces people
that sprawl is a problem, there are no easy solutions. Urban growth
boundaries, for one, might not be the slam-dunk people think it is.