Urban Sprawl

The terms urban sprawl and car dependent now accurately describe the lifestyle of most Americans and individuals around the globe. Urban sprawl is an urban layout where the location of homes, schools, shops, and places of work are widely separated. All of the vastly separated locations are connected by multilane highways. The highways alleviate the issue of distance and replace it with an issue of time (how quick a location can be reached). The city limits are also constantly extending into the countryside, which is due to a lack of space and/or cheaper land on the outskirts of metropolitan areas. Over time, the development outside of a metropolitan area becomes a suburb. Then, urban sprawl directly supports car dependency. As previously stated, urban sprawl includes locations connected by multilane highways. Thus, when suburbs are created and development continues to occur outside of old city limits, cars become an imperative part of
To begin, the government offers subsidies to individuals expanding sewers and wastewater treatment infrastructure. The subsidies help communities have access to sanitation, but they also promote growth outside of a city. Developers are able to move outside of the city in order to build suburbs and then be granted subsidies for putting in a sewer system. Then, the Federal Housing Associations (FHA) Loan Program made it cheaper to get a loan to purchase a family home than it was to purchase an apartment after World War II. Therefore, many new homes were bought on the outskirts of cities, which contributed to sprawl. Lastly, the Highway Trust Fund is a transportation fund that receives money from a federal fuel tax. The fund is used to alleviate traffic conditions. However, it also encourages the development of more highways and thus more distant