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Growing Closer residents now live 30 miles or more from downtown. One- fifth live at least 40 miles away (Joint Center for Housing Stud- ies 2005). An increasing number settle not in the city, or even in inner-ring suburbs, but on large parcels in emerging sub- urbs farther afield. This echoes the national trend—40 percent of new homes built between 1985 and 2001 were on lots of more than an acre (Nelson 2004). The Coming Boom To shelter a fast-growing population, the next few decades will bring a significant need for new housing. There were almost 116 million units of housing in the United States in 2000. By the time we reach 350 million people in 2030, we’ll need a total of 155 million homes. Considering that about 18 percent of existing units will be lost to fire, natural disasters, or demo- lition in the next 25 years, we’ll need to build about 60 million new units to house the population—that’s more than half of the housing stock on the ground now. And that doesn’t include the 104 billion square feet of new space that will be needed for commercial, industrial, and institutional uses. The next genera- tion of Americans will face an unprecedented building boom (Nelson 2004). Given this need for housing, our tendency to sprawl will place a great strain on our environment and our future econ- omy. How long we can sustain ourselves on our finite land mass will depend on how carefully we use land in this new century. As we face the coming boom, we can choose between two basic approaches to land development—spreading out or grow- ing in and up. Spreading ouT or growing in For the past 50 years we’ve been growing out—extending beyond the limits of existing settlements and converting farm- land, deserts, and forests into building sites. Expansion outward is nothing new. The edges of our cities and towns have tradi- ■ ■ tionally shifted to accommodate the need for built space. It’s the density of that new growth that has changed. The rapid pace of conversion from resource land to suburb is due not to the amount of development, but to its low density. We are spread- ing fewer people across each square mile and using up more land in the process. The alternative to spreading out is to concentrate—to grow in and up. This is the way we grew before the automobile age transformed our sense of scale and distance. Before World War II, cities expanded outward in small increments in a dense fabric. Developers filled in vacant parcels and rebuilt existing structures, making room for newcomers within an area limited by pedestrian access and public transportation. As they added Buckeye, Arizona 041215-0432