Urban sprawl is more than an eyesore—it may hinder upward mobility for low-income residents and perpetuate racial inequality, according to recent studies led by a geographer from the University of Utah.
One study, co-authored with a former economics graduate student from the university’s College of Social & Behavioral Science, analyzed Census tract data and revealed that individuals who grew up in sprawling neighborhoods tend to have lower earning potential compared to those raised in more densely populated areas.
“For adults, jobs are harder to access in more sprawling neighborhoods,” said Kelsey Carlston, now an assistant professor of economics at Gonzaga University. “If we can understand how kids’ interactions with their neighborhoods are related to their economic opportunity, we can come up with some targeted policies for how to help poor kids get out of poverty and improve their situation.”
Published in Economic Development Quarterly, this study and two related ones were led by Yehua Dennis Wei, a professor in the School of Environment, Society & Sustainability. The other two were co-authored with graduate student Ning Xiong.
Wei’s three new studies build on prior work led by Utah city and metropolitan planning professor Reid Ewing, whose research scrutinizes the adverse impacts of sprawl and identifies features of urban resilience.
Ewing and colleagues, including Wei, demonstrated how sprawl at the city level could lock families into cycles of poverty across generations.
The new research takes a closer look at the neighborhood level, analyzing demographic data from the 71,443 tracts included in the U.S. Census. These tracts, each with 8,000 or fewer residents, provide social scientists with a detailed view of local variations in poverty rates, income levels, ethnic composition, education, and other factors within sub-county areas.
The University of Utah studies define sprawl as urban areas characterized by low accessibility, heavy reliance on car travel, and distinctly separated residential, commercial, and business zones. In simpler terms, these are places with limited pedestrian-friendly street access and long distances between homes, workplaces, schools, shopping, and recreational sites.
“One finding is that typical livable-city indicators, like walkability, mixed-use development and job-housing balance, improve intergenerational mobility,” Wei said.
However, this might not always be the case, depending on the socioeconomic factors at play, he cautioned.
“We find that those kinds of dense mixed-use walkable neighborhoods sometimes have lower intergenerational mobility because of high concentrations of low-income families and single-parent families, and sometimes also minority populations,” Wei said. “The general finding is true, but it also depends on who is living there and the social relations in those neighborhoods.”
