Environmental amenities, urban sprawl, and community characteristics

A common feature of the urban landscape in the United States is low-density and non-contiguous development along the urban–rural fringe. This paper presents a spatially explicit model to examine the causes of this phenomenon. The model emphasizes the importance of environmental amenities in the formation of development patterns and provides a framework for analyzing the effect of major geographic features on community characteristics. It shows that both development patterns and community characteristics are strongly influenced by the spatial distribution of environmental amenities. By introducing amenities into the classic urban economic models, this paper provides more intuitive explanations for several phenomena, including leapfrog development, economic segregation, and jurisdictional fragmentation, than previous studies.