Here’s what jumped out at me in this N&R article on the anti-sprawl conference at the eco-friendly Proximity Hotel, headlined by sprawl critic William Fulton:
There are a variety of ways to contain urban sprawl, Fulton said, but the bottom line is that growth simply costs too much if it is allowed to drift ever farther from a region’s core…..
Eventually, the whole house of cards collapses because the cost of building and maintaining roads, utilities, schools and other public services can’t be supported by a landscape so thinly populated, Fulton said.
What does that mean, ‘the whole house of cards collapses?’ I’ll go ahead and assume the reporter was just looking for a figure of speech to keep the story going, instead of Fulton suggesting that society will implode under the strain of urban sprawl, although that seems to be what many anti-sprawl advocates really believe.
