Is suburban “sprawl” the vast aesthetic plague environmentalists and (Humbert Humbert) claim it to be?

Is America’s diminishing wilderness being overrun by tacky stripmalls and single story ranch homes with American flags displayed on their porch fronts and plastic flamingos dotting their little manicured lawns?

Well, not according to the latest federal data on land development — or at least, not as it’s being analyzed and reported on by Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D., the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation:

Among the many factors driving environmentalists to discourage suburban development is the belief that such growth is consuming America’s undeveloped land at a pace that jeopardizes the availability of open space, wilderness, and farmland. Although federal data on land use reveal such concerns to be misplaced — only 5.2 percent of the continental United States is defined as “developed”* — so-called smart growth and new urbanist advocates remain undeterred in their effort to impose costly and constraining limits on how individuals may develop and use their private property.

Of course, Dr. Utt works as a research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation is a “right-wing” organization, specializing in “right-wing” economic policy — presumably calculated using “right-wing” mathematics.

So, you know — just ignore it.

The Sierra Club has cooler bumper stickers, anyway.

*source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Resources Conservation Service, Summary Report 1997 National Resources Inventory, revised December 2000.

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