Econ Paper

Urban Sprawl
The idea of urban sprawls is one that interests economists. An urban sprawl is the spreading of urban developments on undeveloped land near a city. In the article, “Urban Sprawl” by Thomas J. Nechyba and Randall P. Walsh, the authors talk about the advantages and disadvantages of urban sprawls. They also explain the consequences of inner-city and suburbs after the urban sprawls have occurred.
The problems of urban sprawls are the un-productive congestion of roads, high levels of metropolitan car pollution, lots of open space amenities, and un-equal provision of public goods and services. Along with the disadvantages, there are also a few advantages. The advantages of urban sprawls are the lower transportation costs and self-sorting of the population. The article also talks about the people living in the inner-city, suburbs, and urban sprawls. They say that there are lots of problems with crime and other activities in the inner-city which results in high income inner-city people to move to the suburbs. Since this started, half of the increase in suburbanization was caused by increasing incomes. For economists, three model and hypothesis appear in urban sprawls. The first one is the monocentric city model. This explains urban spatial structure as arising from the trade-off between commuting costs and land rents. This deals with marginal costs of living in urban sprawls. The next economic model is the Tiebout sorting model. The Tiebout sorting model explains how relatively mobile families form new cities in the suburbs in part to create communities comprised of households with similar willingness to pay for the provision of public goods. Finally, our last one is the spatial mismatch hypothesis. The spatial mismatch hypothesis suggests that job suburbanization has led to a disconnect in locations between jobs and low-income residential developments that are inhabited by less mobile households. Those three models and hypothesis are the major components in figuring out urban sprawls with economics. Whether to live in an urban sprawl, inner-city, suburb, or rural depends on your marginal cost and marginal benefit. Bigger cities make driving hectic for lots of people. With more people come more cars. With more cars come more congested roads. With congested roads comes a longer commute time. Is your marginal benefit outweighing your marginal cost if it takes you an hour to drive to work and an hour worth of gas. Sometimes it’s easier to live in smaller areas that don’t require such a congested commute time to work. By doing so, you increase your marginal benefit by saving on time and gas. If you feel your marginal benefits still outweigh your marginal costs by living in urban sprawls, then you can become economically savvy and save money by walking to work in the big cities. When choosing where to live, people use the principles of individual choice such as, people usually exploit opportunities to make themselves better off. Also, they use resources are scarce. That means that your resources such as jobs, attractions, etc. in a bigger city compared to a rural area are different since there are not as many resources in rural areas. If you are moving from a rural area to an urban sprawl you may also the principle, the real cost of something is what you must give up to get it. So there are lots of economics put into something as simple as an urban sprawl. This article can tell you a lot about the real world, since an enormous amount of people live in inner-cities, suburbs, and urban sprawls. At first only 5% of the U.S. population live in urban areas in 1790. By 1850 that number had tripled and has increased ever since. This should be a wake-up call on what’s going on with our large population areas. As discussed earlier there are quite a few disadvantages of living in metropolitan areas. If anyone is thinking of moving from a rural to urban setting, some of these disadvantages can help someone out a lot on if and where they want to live in the metropolitan areas. Whether you want to live in the inner-city crime, suburbs, or urban sprawls. Urban sprawls can pop-up quickly and consumers and producers need to either hop on the bandwagon or get far away from an urban sprawl. With urban sprawls we can find out in real world experiences how useful urban sprawls can be for lowering transportation costs and self-sorting the population. We can find out a lot of about the real world and urban settings from this article. Urban sprawls are more an economist’s job then it is a scientist’s job. The best occupation to study urban sprawls is a demographist. Economists can study money movement with businesses and personal incomes of populations, but a demographist can study the populations and vital statistics that then can be used by an economist. Scientists just don’t really play a big part in the urban sprawl issue. There are too many other problems with science to worry about then urban sprawls. This article and assignment has helped me realize actually how crucial economists was to a subject I felt isn’t really based around economists. It has helped me realize that economics is all around us. The urban sprawls didn’t really change my opinion since I already had some of the same opinions already. If anything they made my opinions stronger. This assignment in general has helped me think outside the box with economics and not just about basic supply and demand curves. There is much more about economics then just that. To conclude, the article “Urban Sprawls” by Thomas J. Nechyba and Randall P. Walsh talks valuable information on urban sprawls and there advantages and disadvantages. It also talks about important hypothesis and models of economics relating to urban sprawls. This article can really tell you a lot about real world problems. Also, I feel like this is somewhat of a job for economist and not a scientist. Lastly, this article has made my opinion stronger relating to article subject. I will never see urban sprawls the same again thanks to this article and assignment.