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In New Orleans, 1 million people live in just under 200 square miles. The other 200 thousand live farther away. the Land area of the metro area is about 3800 square miles. So, about 85 percent of the residents live in an area that is only about 5 percent of the entire metro area. If that's not the least sprawly then I don't know what is.
Due to its jagged hills, Pittsburgh has a lot of natural growth boundaries in place, which makes development denser and discourages sprawl, but ironically decreases population density because of all the undeveloped area within the developed area.
Yeah, but kidphilly made a good point earlier about whether the NE type of sprawl is good or bad. I haven't answered yet because I'm not sure. I think that having an infrastructure that supports the sprawl does tend to mitigate its downside. For example if the sprawl is based around commuter rail stations. Or if the sprawled communities are somewhat self-sufficient with at least some jobs and most of the needed businesses, then maybe it's not really comparable.
The short answer is neither singularly as there are good and very bad aspects to it. Many areas in the exurbs are laden with with 1 acre tract housing all over while others have doen a better job with more focused development and preservation. One big issue in the NE in general (DC actually may be the standout and a different tact) is that the municipalities are very small area wise and the zoning codes can change in just one or two miles. I wish there was better regional planning/zoning overall which in absence of creates widly varied developement within the sprawled areas.
I don't necessarily believe what you say about urban planners. I think perhaps you've misunderstood something you read somewhere.
But in any case, it's simply absurd that they should be able to redefine a well-known word and it's absurd for you to expect a public forum to follow that illogical redefinition.
Des Moines, Iowa. The farmland around the city is very fertile and very intensively farmed. Mostly corn. It's the best farmland in the world. That keeps the sprawl down. The downtown core is dense. The city of Des Moines itself is quite compact and does not annex rural areas extensively like other cities of its size usually do. City population is about 200,000, with about 500,000 in the metro. Compare this to cities like Omaha, Wichita, and Tulsa, which extensively annex rural and suburban areas to grow their population. There are some growing suburbs around the DSM metro, especially on the west and north sides, but like I said, suburban development is very cautiously approached because the land has so much value as farmland.
I love Des Moines, but the metro area is certainly sprawled out to the max. There are no physical barriers or water issues. If you look at a map, the sprawl on the western burbs and northern burbs is going gangbusters in no apparently pattern. There is farmland skipped over and random subdivisions everywhere. The city isn't particuarly dense, and most of the new development is in the form of thousands and thousands of single family homes and apartments/retail areas going up in dozens of random developments all over the metro.
The metro grew by around 90,000 people in the past 10 years, and all of it was in the suburbs which have spread for miles in every direction.
Developers love to gobble up farmland. It's easy to build on, there aren't a lot of trees or pre-established buildings or infrastructure. It's very easy to parcel off and develop. Farm prices mean nothing to the millions you can get out of building a few hundred houses and selling them for $300,000 a pop. They just throw the cost of the land into what the owner pays for the property. As long as the economy is red hot there with good schools, low unemployment, a low cost of living and a high salary base - that metro is going to keep growing quite fast.
I love Des Moines, but the metro area is certainly sprawled out to the max. There are no physical barriers or water issues. If you look at a map, the sprawl on the western burbs and northern burbs is going gangbusters in no apparently pattern. There is farmland skipped over and random subdivisions everywhere. The city isn't particuarly dense, and most of the new development is in the form of thousands and thousands of single family homes and apartments/retail areas going up in dozens of random developments all over the metro.
The metro grew by around 90,000 people in the past 10 years, and all of it was in the suburbs which have spread for miles in every direction.
Developers love to gobble up farmland. It's easy to build on, there aren't a lot of trees or pre-established buildings or infrastructure. It's very easy to parcel off and develop. Farm prices mean nothing to the millions you can get out of building a few hundred houses and selling them for $300,000 a pop. They just throw the cost of the land into what the owner pays for the property. As long as the economy is red hot there with good schools, low unemployment, a low cost of living and a high salary base - that metro is going to keep growing quite fast.
You say that because you're from Iowa, so you're familiar with Des Moines but not as familiar with other places that you could compare it to. Compare it to other cities in the south, the west, Midwest, even the northeast, and you'll see that Des Moines doesn't sprawl as much. Any metro area over 500,000 is going to have suburbs.
I think it's funny how people are saying New York is the least sprawly, because it's so "dense". New York is massively sprawly. The suburban development extends well into Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
In Des Moines, you can go from a dense urban downtown to the middle of a cornfield in 20 minutes.
MiamiDade County has 2.5 million people in less than 500 square miles of developed land (the rest is basically swamp). Even with the inclusion of the more sparsely populated suburbs in the southern part of the county, that's still a bit over 5000 p/sm average for the county. Miami and many of its immediately surrounding cities are over 10,000 p/sm. That's not too shabby for a city/county that was pretty much nothing at the beginning of the 20th century with most of its development since the advent of the car culture in the 50s.
In New Orleans, 1 million people live in just under 200 square miles. The other 200 thousand live farther away. the Land area of the metro area is about 3800 square miles. So, about 85 percent of the residents live in an area that is only about 5 percent of the entire metro area. If that's not the least sprawly then I don't know what is.
This.
New Orleans is as densely packed as it can possibly be.
Believe it or not, in metro Los Angeles there's actually a lot less sprawl than you might expect.
In the Midwest and in the Southeast, any kind of suburban business usually has a comically large amount of parking. These parking lots are built to accommodate Black Friday crowds, and still have parking left over. Land is cheap. In the subdivisions, people's homes (even small homes) are built on huge lots. Both these things are what creates low density "sprawl". Just try walking from point A to point B in the suburbs. Most of your journey will be through huge housing lots and huge empty parking lots.
In the LA suburbs (even in the distant exurbs), I was surprised by how small people's homes were and how tightly packed they were onto lots. If you go to a Target on a Saturday afternoon, you might have to drive around looking for parking, because they build far fewer spaces there. Because the housing lots and parking lots are much smaller, there's effectively less sprawl and much higher population density in suburban LA. Even if LA stretches for miles and miles into the desert, everything there (including the suburbs) is packed together much more tightly than you see out East, even compared to places like Long Island, NY.
Believe it or not, in metro Los Angeles there's actually a lot less sprawl than you might expect.
I know it's a real pain to read the whole thread when it's this many pages but what your saying has already been pointed out here..... several times so yes, some of us get it.
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I love Des Moines, but the metro area is certainly sprawled out to the max. There are no physical barriers or water issues. If you look at a map, the sprawl on the western burbs and northern burbs is going gangbusters in no apparently pattern. There is farmland skipped over and random subdivisions everywhere. The city isn't particuarly dense, and most of the new development is in the form of thousands and thousands of single family homes and apartments/retail areas going up in dozens of random developments all over the metro.
