New Urbanism and Sprawl

This article presents an approach that has not been previously used for assessing claims regarding a development's impact on urban form and sprawl. The analysis shows that the Cornell new urbanist development increases suburban densities but not by nearly as much as would be inferred by analysis that simply compares the density of the development with that of the surrounding conventional suburbs. Most households living in the higher-density building types plan to eventually move to detached houses. If new urbanism, as it is expressed in the planning and design of Cornell, is to be a generalizable substitute to conventional suburban development, its projects will have to have a much larger proportion of single-family detached houses than the Cornell's 37 percent. New urbanists may best help reduce city spread by inducing households to move to and then to stay in single-family detached houses on smaller lots.