Quotes About Sprawl

is a direct connection between suburban sprawl and the spiraling cost of government, and most Americans don't see it yet, including many in government. Likewise

Sprawl is bad aesthetics; it is bad economics. Five acres are being made to do the work of one, and do it very poorly.

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

One of the innate dilemmas of biography is that life is not much like a book. It rarely contains a clearly stated thesis, coherently developed. Life sprawls, stumbles, advances, retreats, gropes for the light switch, and once in a while makes intuitive leaps whose import is barely understood until later, if ever, by the leaper. Life seems to me an improvisation .

Urbanization has relied on land conversion and land financing, which is causing urban sprawl and, on occasion, ghost towns and waste.

Even at relatively low population densities, sprawl tends not to pay for itself financially and consumes land at an alarming rate, while producing insurmountable traffic problems and exacerbating social inequity and isolation.

There is currently more sprawl covering American soil than was ever intended by its inventors. While there are some people who truly enjoy living in this environment, there are many others who would prefer to walk to school, bicycle to work, or simply spend less time in the car.

I read a study once about sleep deprivation. The researchers made cat-sized islands of sand in the middle of a pool of water, then placed very tired cats on top of them. At first, the cats curled up perfectly on the sand and slept, but eventually they'd sprawl out and wake up in water. I can't remember what they were trying to prove exactly. All I took away was that the cats went crazy.

Los Angeles is seven suburbs in search of a city.

Year after year, sprawl shows itself to be hugely inefficient and a money-loser for local governments. Town halls scramble to get more tax revenue to pay for the schools and the water and sewer pipes extending to the new development, often by welcoming in big-box strip malls and office parks. But the books never balance, and the result is higher taxes, busted budgets, and more unsustainable sprawl.

Suburban sprawl has heavily damaged the balance of our cities, divorcing environmental context from design and removing the concept of scale from the creation of neighborhoods.

Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop.

The empty prairie, crisscrossed by a grid of startlingly straight roads, rolled out like a vast wasteland in front of the hood ornament of the GTO. It was remarkable, Sarah thought, how quickly the suburban sprawl of Chicago gave way to the broad gray-and-white checkerboard of the heartland at its most bleak.

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I'm out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick.

Suburban sprawl leads to social atomisation and fragmentation and is environmentally disastrous, as carbon-intensive car journeys displace local shops and replace public transport.

Environmentalists hate sprawl - except when it comes to the size of their expansive pet legislation on Capitol Hill.

You know you live in Phoenix when you can drive two hours in any one direction and never leave the Valley.

Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop. I believe that what we're developing in Denver is in no appreciable way different than what we're doing in Los Angeles - did in Los Angeles and are still doing. But I think we have developed the Los Angeles model of city-building, and I think it is unfortunate.

Partly because sprawl has forced Americans to drive farther and farther in the course of every day, per capita road death rates in the United States hover around forty thousand per year. That's a third more people than are killed by guns. It's more than ten times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The conclusion: killer drivers are so common in sprawl that the carnage they create far exceeds the damage done by killers who use other weapons. In fact, someone who walks out her door on the edges of sprawl suburbia is much more likely to die at the hands of a stranger than someone moving through most American central cities or inner suburbs. The only difference is that most of suburbia's killers didn't mean it.

Part of the problem is that sprawl's wide streets and big lots take up so much space that cities can't afford to build fire stations close by, so it takes fire trucks longer to reach each blaze.)

living in low-density sprawl puts residents at greater risk of arthritis, chronic lung disease, digestive problems, headaches, and urinary tract infections.

Ample, easy parking is the hallmark of the dispersed city. It is also a killer of street life. A cruise through Los Angeles illustrates the dynamic. The city's downtown has been said to contain more parking spaces per acre than any other place on earth, and its streets are some of the most desolate.

Meanwhile, dispersal starves the budgets of cities forced to spend sales tax dollars on roads, pipes, sewage, and services for the distant neighborhoods of sprawl, leaving little for the shared amenities that make central-city living attractive.