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I'd say Pheonix has the biggest "problem" with sprawl cause the region can't supply enough water for its growing population.
Actually, it can. Last winter there was above normal rainfall that replenished the Colorado River to above normal levels. The monsoon season also provided much above normal rainfall. With continued winter snowpack in the mountains and summer rain in the deserts, Phoenix will be fine.
It confuses me why people only point out Phoenix when talking about water when Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Tucson get a lot, if not all, of their water from the same source. If the Colorado River were to ever run out of water ALL of these cities would face catastrophe, not just Phoenix.
SEAandATL said it best when he referred to how people consider sprawl to be a bad thing when they have to commute long distances to work.
People consider sprawl to be tacky, energy absorbing, and unsophisticated. European cities are quite walkable; the high society snobs of today consider almost anything European to be cosmopolitan. Thus, anything that is the opposite is "tacky". But these people do make a good point when they lament the dominance of the car-culture in American society. There seems to be too much energy consumption going on in sprawled cities.
So much is made of the density of European cities but. 1. Europe as a whole has more than twice the number of people as America crammed into about the same amount of space. 2. European cities are hundreds sometimes thousands of years older than American cities and were designed and built when roads and means of transportation were very primitive and thus everything had to be close together.
Based on these two facts it is only common sense that European cities would be less sprawling than American. But along with this higher density comes much more expensive real estate, less agriculture and higher food prices, fewer large national parks. Is that really something we want to be envious of?
Actually, it can. Last winter there was above normal rainfall that replenished the Colorado River to above normal levels. The monsoon season also provided much above normal rainfall. With continued winter snowpack in the mountains and summer rain in the deserts, Phoenix will be fine.
It confuses me why people only point out Phoenix when talking about water when Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Tucson get a lot, if not all, of their water from the same source. If the Colorado River were to ever run out of water ALL of these cities would face catastrophe, not just Phoenix.
Actually, Atlanta gets far far more rain than any of these cities but yet struggles to have enough water more than them because it depends mostly on local lakes for water.
But it's useless to point this out. So many people who have never even been to Atlanta have already made up their mind that it is the mother of all sprawl based on old statistics and figures that include counties that are so far away from Atlanta that us real Atlantans don't even consider them part of the area.
Regardless of whether you think they're part of the "real" Atlanta, you can't selectively pick counties from the metro area in order to prove your point of comparable density. The MSA is defined by the Office of Management and Budget, and the fact of the matter is the current definition of the Atlanta MSA spans 28 counties based on commuter trends -- 8,376 sq. miles in total with a population density of 630/sq mile.
In comparison, Boston's metro area as defined by the OMB is 4,674 sq. miles with a population density of 976/sq. mile.
I'm not claiming that sprawl cannot be found in metro areas such as Boston, but you can't manipulate statistics if you want to prove a valid point about sprawl.
Regardless of whether you think they're part of the "real" Atlanta, you can't selectively pick counties from the metro area in order to prove your point of comparable density. The MSA is defined by the Census Bureau, and the fact of the matter is that the Atlanta MSA as currently spans 28 counties based on commuter trends -- 8,376 sq. miles in total with a population density of 630/sq mile.
In comparison, Boston's metro area as defined by the CB is 4,674 sq. miles with a population density of 976/sq. mile.
I'm not claiming that sprawl cannot be found in metro areas such as Boston, but you can't manipulate statistics if you want to prove a valid point about sprawl.
But the fact remains as I pointed out just earlier. If someone were looking for a dense urban environment to live in, they could live in one of Atlanta's six central counties (along with more than three million other people) and experience the same density as someone living in Bostons five most central counties. Nobody's gonna put a gun to their head and force them to live way out in Paulding or Hall counties.
Actually, it can. Last winter there was above normal rainfall that replenished the Colorado River to above normal levels. The monsoon season also provided much above normal rainfall. With continued winter snowpack in the mountains and summer rain in the deserts, Phoenix will be fine.
It confuses me why people only point out Phoenix when talking about water when Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Tucson get a lot, if not all, of their water from the same source. If the Colorado River were to ever run out of water ALL of these cities would face catastrophe, not just Phoenix.
Vegas and El Paso, TX probably have the biggest problem of all when it comes to water issues -- both are engaged in ground water wars with their rural neighbors to the north in order to grab more water to support more sprawl.
This poster is correct in that Phoenix' water resources are sufficient for much more sprawling in the future. It's a misconception that Phoenix has limited water resources. It does have ample water, because Phoenix is built in the middle of Arizona's agricultural belt. Agriculture actually uses more water than sprawl, and agricultural land usually has secured water rights already. This means that subdivisions can simply take over agricultural land with water rights already attached. Of course, it bears to be pointed out that it might not be a good thing to permanently destroy Arizona of agriculture for the sake of sprawl.
It confuses me why people only point out Phoenix when talking about water when Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Tucson get a lot, if not all, of their water from the same source. If the Colorado River were to ever run out of water ALL of these cities would face catastrophe, not just Phoenix.
That's a very good point. There are over 20 million people who live in the greater LA or SD metro areas-- 20 million people in what is essentially an overglorified desert. LA is actually drier than Phoenix in the summer, since LA has no summer monsoon season. LA goes for even longer stretches of times of the year without water than Phoenix does. There are even some years in which LA gets LESS rainfall than Phoenix. LA's water in part comes from aqueducts pumping in water hundreds of miles away from the Owens Valley on the east slope of the Sierras. It's amazing how Phoenix is the whipping boy when it comes to people complaining about water when 5x bigger SoCal is conveniently ignored.
WHAT?? First off it's not people in LA or any other city that decide how much emphasis is put on metropolitan numbers. Statisticians, the census bureau, business', etc. all place a lot of stress on metro stats because these numbers tell the story of how big an urban area really is, how much it's growing, how it's doing economically etc. much better than just city stats alone.
And L.A. doesn't need metro stats to make itself look big. It's just a hugemongeous, dense, sprawling incredibly massive urban area anyway you look at it. The city of L.A. by itself without it's surburbs has three and a half million people with 8,000 people squeezed into each square mile ( that's higher density than most big midwestern cities ) over more than 500 square miles of land. That's big and crowded compared to most anywhere. In fact L.A. county has I think more people in about the same amount of land as metropolitan London, England.
So many people just love to go strictly by old stereotypes without doing the research to realize L.A. has been getting rapidly more and more dense for over 30 years now.
That's another excellent point. LA is actually the most dense metro area as a whole in the US-- even more than the NY-NJ-CT tristate area. People who still think of LA as some kind of quiet, suburban, low density environment are living about 40 years out of date. You don't have to have tons of skyscrapers to have density; this city is infamous for having illegals pack in 10 or more people in a one bedroom apartment, turning even one and two story buildings into slums. This is a city full of overpacked crummy apartment buildings. It's about as dense as it gets!
The image many people have of L.A. city is tree lined streets with single family homes everywhere, but the reality is, many of those homes have been razed, and turned into apartment buildings, or have been turned into duplexes - same situation in suburbs immediately bordering L.A.
Regardless of whether you think they're part of the "real" Atlanta, you can't selectively pick counties from the metro area in order to prove your point of comparable density. The MSA is defined by the Office of Management and Budget, and the fact of the matter is the current definition of the Atlanta MSA spans 28 counties based on commuter trends -- 8,376 sq. miles in total with a population density of 630/sq mile.
In comparison, Boston's metro area as defined by the OMB is 4,674 sq. miles with a population density of 976/sq. mile.
I'm not claiming that sprawl cannot be found in metro areas such as Boston, but you can't manipulate statistics if you want to prove a valid point about sprawl.
And sprawl certainly IS NOT all about density...there are many factors that contribute to sprawl.
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