causes
Urban sprawl has many factors leading to its cause. This page will explain the main causes of the problem.
The first cause I would like to explain has to do with anybody who ownes a house. In recent studies it has been revealed that people now have a much larger house size prefrence that before. People like big houses, big yards, lots of land, now more than ever. This is not helping our little problem. That is the incentive, people like big houses. Apparently, having a big house with a huge, unnecessary yard is more important to them than the well being of our wildlife. Because people like everything to be so big, 3 houses now take up alot more room than 3 houses in the fifties or sixties. So now with every house built, there is so much space taken up that suburban areas are increasing in size while still housing the same amount of people. This is one of many causes of urban sprawl.
The second cause I would like to talk about is simply a lack of understanding for the sevarity of the matter. If you dont know that the problem exists, you can't fix it. most people don't realize that when they make the plans for their insanely large houses they are killing our wildlife and shaving down more of our forrests, which are a necessity to all life, may I add. But there are two sides to this. There are the people that don't know the consequences of their actions, and there are the kind of people who know that what they are doing is hurting all of us, but ignore it. These people that completely ignore the fact that they are helping to progress a soon unsolvable problem are terrible. I would imagine the incentive behind their actions is money, but whatever their reason may be, it is a horrible thing to be doing to our world.
A third cause of urban sprawl is one that most people in america are guilty of, and that is being overly dependent on automobiles as transportation. The more dependent on automobiles, the more roads are being created. Although this is a major cause of urban sprawl, I can not think of anything we can do to fix it. This is a hole that is to deep to climb out of. In America, we are so dependant on automobiles that we are at a point where we can't turn back. The only thing to do is to stop making roads. We dont need any more major highways, i would much rather have to drive five extra minutes to my destination than hurt our world by creating unneeded roads. The incentive here is to be able to get to destinations faster when driving, but these people need to understand that this is a major problem. They think, "one more road wont make a differance," but they all add up. Currently in america there is a total of 4.05 million miles of road. Think about how much forrest area that is taking up.
Although there are many more small causes of urban sprawl, these were the three that I found to be the most important. They all play huge roles in the acceleration of the problem in America, and if they were all either solved or improved, it would make a tremendous differance in the amount of area that is being consumed by urban sprawl.