urban sprawl is a costly convenience for those who can afford it.

Highways as the single means of transportation have encouraged urban sprawl.

Phoenix, Arizona --above-- is among the top ten most sprawling cities in a national study based on 1990s data

Charts & Graphs of Census Data

Per Capita Sprawl Compared with Population Growth in USA's Ten Largest Sprawlers

(1970-1990)

Urbanized Area	% Growth in Population	% Growth in Land Consumption
1. Atlanta, GA	42%	84%
2. Houston, TX	26%	73%
3. New York City, NY-NJ	24%	1%
4. Washington, DC-MD-VA	41%	36%
5. Philadelphia, PA-NJ	48%	5%
6. Los Angeles, CA	8%	37%
7. Dallas-Fort Worth, TX	15%	59%
8. Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL	13%	98%
9. Phoenix, AZ	18%	132%
10. Minneapolis-Saint Paul, MN	21%	22%

Denver Denver-- pictured on the right-- although not among the top ten cities with the greatest area per capita, is still an example of the sort of cities that characterize the United States and Canada, where individual automobile ownership has fed the growth of suburbs and "controlled access," express, highways have extended the single family housing units at ever greater distances from the central city. Contemporary western industrialized cities are really service providers to teh surrounding suburban communities in that water, streets, sewage and sanitation, electricity and municipal facilities (such as police, fire-safety, schools and traffic signals) must me provided for and paid by property taxes to cover the cost of the many public structures that maintain residences, commercial areas, and industrial facilities.

In some communities, the levy on property in the form of a millage (a penny per one thousand dollars) rate is used to figure the tax. But such property taxes may be insufficient to cover the cost of preventive maintenance, repair and building of public services. Geographers call the central city the urban core or central business district, (CBD). In those communities where property taxes fail to cover existing or new costs of public services, sales tax, which relies on the prosperity of the commercial districts is an essential part of civic budgeting. Critics charge that in compact densely settled areas, the cost of services pwr capita is less than in larger metropolitan areas. They argue that a sprawling city is thus a costly city and very often the costs are subsidized by the densely settled sectors for the benefit of the farthest flung and most expansive populations.

Vocabulary:

Growth in Population is determined by adding the number of migrants into a place to the number of births in that same place and then subtracting the number of deaths and the number who move from the area over a set period of time.

per capita literally means, with respect to each person; but is a measure based on the number of people in relation to some other factor, such as land area, number of physicians, schools, or police in a community.

sprawl, a term given to the character of urban communities that occupy a large amount of land with respect to the number of residences and the corresponding reliance of those residents on automobile transportation. ierally sprawl means to scatter a population or spread out services over a comparatively large area of landscape. Cities like London, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Moscow, or Beijing are the international equivalents to Atlanta, Houston and Los Angeles, in the United States.