Density, sprawl and wellbeing
Sprawling and leapfrogging suburbs, as opposed to compact central cities, appear peaceful, clean and safe. They appear happy and healthy. On the other hand, suburbs look and feel fake, dull and alienating. Which one is happier and healthier, sprawling or compact areas? I discuss pros and cons of sprawling and compact counties drawing on social and natural sciencies. I also perform a simple quantitative exercise--I regress several health measures on sprawl and density at county level (in the USA). Sprawl is measured with Ewing's index. Sprawling and low-density counties are healthier in terms of mentally and physically healthy days than non-sprawling counties, controlling for many predictors of health. I interpret it as the advantage of low density living close to nature. Given rather unaesthetic nature of American suburbia, I argue that, if we made suburbs more natural, people living there would be even happier.
Sprawl is treated as a problem by policy makers. A popular and reasonable strategy to deal with it is so called smart growth (http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org). It promotes high-density living and redevelopment of cities. It is a reasonable strategy, but it misses the point that I am trying to make here that people who live in low-density areas are likely to be happier, despite commute and fake feel of contemporary American suburbia. If we could redevelop low-density areas by retaining more nature there, people would be even happier there. My point is that you can stay eco-friendly while living in suburbs, but you cannot have lots of nature in cities.
Again, the rule is to leave the nature untouched as much as possible, to keep the nature natural, instead of building fake ponds with fake fountains and plant fake trees around it. Given that people are still happier in these fake, ugly and unnatural suburbs than in big cities, we will have even more happiness if we have natural suburbs.
I31 - General Welfare
I18 - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health