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Costs of Sprawl Development Throughout the State
Statewide sprawl development exacerbates inequality primarily through the construction of high cost housing in outlying areas that is too expensive for low- and moderate-income households. These households instead remain in urban and older suburban areas, where they are far from employment centers and where the lower tax base negatively affects the provision of critical services - especially education - and infrastructure. Statewide action is needed to overcome these problems of housing affordability, the jobs-worker spatial mismatch, and urban disinvestments and school financing.
Sprawl's Impact on Statewide Housing Prices
Spacious, single-family detached dwellings on large lots are usually the most expensive form of housing. Construction of this housing throughout the state causes average housing prices statewide to rise. Burchell modeled statewide development scenarios for New Jersey. He found that residential development costs would fall by up to 10% if the density of housing increased, structure sizes decreased, and development was contiguous to existing infrastructure. Other studies show that growth controls that restrict the number of housing units supplied can almost exactly counter these benefits; where such growth controls have restricted the supply of housing, costs rose by approximately 9%.
The same characteristics that increase housing prices also reduce the availability of affordable housing in the suburbs. This increases the concentration of poor households in core cities and inner suburbs. Such a concentration of poor households leaves many of these households unable to move to attain better employment or schools. Low-income workers must overcome a spatial mismatch as they are unable to buy affordable housing close to entry-level jobs in the suburbs. Concentrating low-income households also increases the educational cost burden in these areas, especially given the current reliance on local property taxes to finance schools.