This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus changes in residential land per household. Between 1976 and 1992 the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.7% while population only grew 17.8%. At first glance, this suggest an important role for per-household increases. However, the calculations in this paper show that only 24.5% of the growth in residential land area can be attributed to state-level changes in land per household. 37.3% is due to overall population growth, 22.6% to an increase in the number of households over this period, 6% to the shift of population towards states with larger houses, and the remaining 9.6% to interactions between these changes. There are large differences across states and metropolitan areas in the relative importance of these components.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 38 (2008) Issue (Month): 5 (September) Pages: 487-497 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Duncan Black & Vernon Henderson, 1997.
"Urban Growth,"
NBER Working Papers
6008, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Edward L. Glaeser & Matthew E. Kahn, 2003.
"Sprawl and Urban Growth,"
NBER Working Papers
9733, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Glaeser, Edward L. & Kahn, Matthew E., 2004.
"Sprawl and urban growth,"
Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics,
in: J. V. Henderson & J. F. Thisse (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 56, pages 2481-2527
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Did you know? Citation analysis on IDEAS includes online papers that are freely accessible and whose text could be automatically analyzed, currently about 210000 papers.