Urban Sprawl Research Paper

suburban communities was Riverside, Illinois, located along a railway nine miles west of the Chicago Loop. It was designed by landscape architect Frederick Las Olmstead and became what one Olmstead biographer called an “agreeable” community, “knit in upon itself by curving streets, a place apart but in the convenient reach of a great city.” (Mitchell) Then, at the end of World War II, the U.S. was faced a critical housing shortfall as young G.I.’s sought a place to start a family, and quickly declared war on that. Communities like Levitt and Sons’ Levittown began to spring up and homes were purchased almost as quickly. Loan programs formerly established by the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration cultivated the development of single-family, detached homes in these new suburbs. But even the conclusion of the war couldn’t do as much to bolster the progression of sprawl as much as President Dwight Eisenhower’s signing of National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, which launched a 41,000-mile interstate highway system across the country. This improved road infrastructure made it truly possible for the masses to live a suburban lifestyle. Between 1950 and 1990, the urban-suburban population in the United States increased by more than 200% (Hoyt). …show more content…
This frequently called-out feature of sprawl can be defined as a bounty of large-lot, single-family residential housing sub-divisions that consume extensive parcels of what was unoccupied or productive land. Aside from this key characteristic, segregated land uses and a nodal street network with low connectivity are also some of the physical defining features attributed to sprawl. This last feature is a crucial element in the negative effects of sprawl and in the solutions presented to help combat those negative