Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Jul 9, 2001

Most metropolitan regions are expanding faster than they are adding people, leaving many aging suburbs particularly in the Midwest and Northeast with thinning populations, a new Brookings Institution study finds.

The report, to be released this week, shows that the high rate at which U.S. land development is outstripping population growth is resulting in declining population densities in all but 17 of the 281 metropolitan areas examined. The findings promise to fuel a debate over the effects of sprawl that has been gathering intensity for the past five years.

Between 1982 and 1997, about 25 million acres of farmland and open space, roughly the size of Indiana, was developed in metropolitan areas, according to an analysis of Agriculture Department statistics by Brookings. That is a 47% increase in developed land, during a period when the population in those areas rose 17%, the study says.

This disparity reflects the centrifugal force at work in most metropolitan areas. While some cities such as Chicago and Boston have been successful at attracting more residents, the prevalent land-use pattern in the country remains growth at the fringes at the expense of core regions and inner suburbs, Brookings analysts say. Fueled by a range of economic and social forces, this trend is putting at risk scores of communities, which are facing the same kind of flight of capital and people that devastated the inner cities in the 1960s and 1970s.

"What you're doing is undermining the core," says Bruce Katz, director of Brookings's Center on Urban & Metropolitan Policy.

The sprawl issue has been gathering intensity. Frustrated over traffic, disappearing open space and other problems, a growing number of states and local governments have been enacting more restrictive land-use regulations. In recent elections, voters approved numerous measures to preserve open spaces.

Surprisingly, the study found that the decline in density is much greater in Midwestern and Northeastern urban areas than those in Western parts of the country most synonymous with sprawl, such as Los Angeles and Phoenix. Those fast-growing areas expanded, but the growth in land use has generally kept pace with population growth.

In fact, density in the Los Angeles region grew by 2.8% between 1982 and 1997, as its developed area grew by 27.6% and its population swelled by 31.2%. Phoenix became 21.9% denser while Las Vegas's density increased 50.8%. Development in many of these regions is being hemmed in by physical barriers such as mountains and government-owned land or water-access issues.

Not facing these constraints, Midwestern and Northeastern metropolitan areas have sprawled at a greater rate. For example, Toledo, Ohio's population grew only 0.3%, but its developed area increased 30%. The Pittsburgh area's population declined 8% while its urbanized land grew 42.6%.

Many booming regions in the South also witnessed declining density between 1982 and 1997, because they sprawled at a much faster rate than their population grew. Atlanta's developed area grew more than any other region in the nation, growing 81.5%, or 571,000 acres, about three-quarters of the size of Rhode Island. During the same 15 years, the Atlanta region's population also spurted, but by a smaller 60.8%.

Declining population density in most U.S. metropolitan regions bolsters the argument that population pressure is only one of sprawl's causes. Many analysts of U.S. land-use patterns say sprawl also is a product of other forces, including race relations, transportation planning, land speculation, school-financing systems, the movement of jobs from core areas to employment centers outside cities and competition among municipalities for tax revenue.

Home builders say they build on the fringes largely in response to demand from people seeking the American dream of large homes with big yards. "The quandary we face is that demand is still predominantly for single-family detached homes," says Gary Garczynski, spokesman for the National Association of Home Builders on the smart-growth issue.

Whatever the causes of declining density, it is draining people, businesses and investment from communities that are losing population to the newer fringe suburbs. Many cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, are surrounded by blighted areas that 30 and 40 years ago looked like classic all-American suburbs.

There is little hope of recovery, because once a community starts spiraling downward, its property-tax rate tends to rise to make up for the decline in real-estate values and the loss of businesses.

Communities near the bottom of the spiral include Harvey, Ill.; East Cleveland, Ohio; Darby Township, outside Philadelphia; and Black Jack, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, according to Myron Orfield, executive director of the Metropolitan Area Research Corp., a Minneapolis think tank that studies sprawl. Scores of others are at varying stages of decline. Mr. Orfield says 40% of the population in the 25 largest metropolitan areas live in such "at risk" suburbs.

"It's like the country is building new cities to escape itself, and it can't afford to," Mr. Orfield says.