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A Companion to Urban Economics - Arnott and McMillen - Chapter 5

C H A P T E R F I V E The Spatial Pattern of Land Use in the United States 5.1 INTRODUCTION There is currently great interest in understanding and managing the impacts of land-use changes on individual and social well-being. | A Companion to Urban Economics Edited by Richard J. Arnott Daniel P. McMillen Copyright 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd CHAPTER FIVE The Spatial Pattern of Land Use in the United States Elena G. Irwin and Nancy E. Bockstael 5.1 Introduction There is currently great interest in understanding and managing the impacts of land-use changes on individual and social well-being. This interest stems from concerns over fiscal economic environmental and social issues related to changes in the spatial pattern of urban land use including urban decentralization and the conversion of rural land to low-density urban uses. Understanding the forces that affect land-use change requires first getting the facts right. In this chapter we attempt to describe changes in land-use patterns in the United States over the past several decades and to a lesser extent link them to economic theories designed to explain these changes. In pursuing this course we draw on papers that have empirically measured land-use patterns or empirically tested economic theories about those patterns. With regard to some issues the results are robust. But with regard to others most notably those related to low-density development considerable uncertainty remains uncertainty that can be traced to data problems that continue to plague land-use analysis. The chapter begins by presenting data on the major land uses of the USA and changes in those land uses in the recent past especially conversion of rural to urban land. Some basic facts are examined regarding urban land including its amount regional variation and density and questions are raised about the ability of current data to measure current land-use phenomena accurately. To illustrate the potential problems we draw on high-resolution land-use data available for the state of Maryland. We then review what we believe to be major trends in urban land-use changes that have received both theoretical and empirical attention in 78 E. G. Irwin and N. E. Bockstael the .