Understanding Smart Growth Savings: Evaluating Economic Savings and Benefits of Compact Development, and How They Are Misrepresented By Critics

How communities develop can have many direct and indirect impacts. Smart growth policies, which result in more compact, multimodal development, reduce per capita land consumption and the distances between common destinations, which reduces the costs of providing public infrastructure and services, improves accessibility and reduces per capita motor vehicle travel, which in turn provides economic, social and environmental benefits. This report examines these impacts. It defines smart growth and its alternative, sprawl, summarizes current research concerning their costs and benefits, investigates consumer preferences, and evaluates smart growth criticisms. This report should be useful to anybody involved in development policy analysis.

• Record URL:
  https://www.vtpi.org/sg_save.pdf
• 
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Todd Alexander Litman © 2004-2015. This report is periodically updated. The document link is to the latest version.
• Corporate Authors:

  Victoria Transport Policy Institute

  1250 Rudlin Street
  Victoria, British Columbia  Canada  V8V 3R7
• Authors:
  • Litman, Todd
• Publication Date: 2015-5-28

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Photos; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 47p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Benefits; Consumer preferences; Costs; Development; Economic impacts; Policy; Smart growth; Urban sprawl
• Subject Areas: Economics; Policy; Transportation (General); I10: Economics and Administration;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01579896
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Oct 28 2015 10:21AM