Anti-“Sprawl” Bay Area Leads Expanding Metropolitan Regions | Newgeography.com
"The San Francisco Bay area (San Jose-San Francisco) continued to expand its commuting shed, the regional planning disdain for "sprawl", adding territory for the second time in the decade. Ironically, this has been driven by the extraordinary house price increases and land use regulation that bans new suburban subdivisions in undeveloped areas closest to the largest jobs centers. The previous expansion had been to Stockton (San Joaquin County). Now Modesto (Stanislaus County) and Merced (Merced County) have been added to the Bay Area. The draw of the added areas is the lower cost of living, driven by lower housing costs. Even so, in Merced County, the most distant from San Francisco in the metropolitan region, housing is severely unaffordable, at a Median Multiple of 6.0 (median house price divided by median household income). This is worse than New York (5.5) and Seattle (5.6)." California's model is to tie up most of the land in the Bay Area in protected wildlands, then force sprawl throughout the remaining areas, and finally expand the sprawl along transportation corridors. They could have allowed these people to live and work nearby but the mindless urban growth boundaries make this impossible. "The San Francisco expansions mirror developments in other markets, such as Portland and Seattle, where severely unaffordable housing polices --- which are designed to slow “sprawl” --- has driven expansion of the metropolitan regions. For example, the Portland and Seattle metropolitan regions combined form an unbroken line along Interstate 5 from Anacortes, Washington to Corvallis, Oregon, a distance of more than 300 miles (500 kilometers)." These sprawl corridors are terrible, they make traveling slow and difficult and they do not allow people to live near where they work unless they are quite wealthy. This is the fight against sprawl creating the worst possible type of sprawl. There is no way to get away from this interminable corridor sprawl.
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