Study: demand for urbanism is higher than supply
New Urban News Article with images and tables, 12/1/2004
Atlanta analysis shows substantial gap between where people live and what people want.
If you live in the Atlanta area, the odds are very high that you live in sprawl. And, there is also a good chance you would prefer to live in a different sort of neighborhood but simply can’t find it within your price range. “In many instances, the preferences of consumers don’t match the choices available in the market,” says researcher Lawrence Frank of the University of British Columbia, who in collaboration with Dr. Jonathan Levine of the University of Michigan and James Chapman, formerly with Georgia Tech, conducted the $4.6 million SMARTRAQ project.
Other studies have indicated a fairly strong demand for smart-growth neighborhood characteristics. The new survey may be the first in which participants defined their own neighborhoods as having different qualities from the ones they are seeking. “If you are looking for sprawl in Atlanta, you will find it,” Frank says. “If you are looking for smart growth, chances are that you won’t be living in it.” The community preference survey had 1,466 participants.
Respondents were confronted with a series of choices representing characteristics of urbanism and conventional suburban development (CSD). Each question was accompanied by a set of drawings (see examples on this page). Participants also were asked to report which of the two environments was more like their own. The results are clear (see table on page 11): More people live in CSD than would like to, and significantly fewer people report living in urban places than would prefer them. If you average all of the responses, fewer people report living in places possessing characteristics of traditional neighborhoods than in CSD — 36 versus 50 percent. Yet traditional neighborhoods are more popular — 53 compared to 41 percent. Every question shows an undersupply of urbanism — on average, 53 percent want urban characteristics and only 36 percent report having them. By contrast, there is an apparent oversupply of sprawl.
