Sprawl Doesn't Decrease Social Interaction

A new study by Jan Brueckner of the UC Irvine Economics Department and Ann Largey of the Dublin City University Business School in Ireland, finds that "suburbanites are more likely to talk to their neighbors, to have more friends, to be involved in social clubs."

From the paper's abstract:

"Various authors, most notably Putnam (2000), have argued that low-density living reduces social capital and thus social interaction, and this argument has been used to buttress criticisms of urban sprawl. If low densities in fact reduce social interaction, then an externality arises, validating Putnam's critique. In choosing their own lot sizes, consumers would fail to consider the loss of interaction benefits for their neighbors when lot size is increased. Lot sizes would then be inefficiently large, and cities excessively spread out. The paper tests the premise of this argument (the existence of a positive link between interaction and density) using data from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey. In the empirical work, social interaction measures for individual survey respondents are regressed on census-tract density and a host of household characteristics, using an instrumental-variable approach to control for the potential endogeneity of density."

From the conclusion:

"The starting point of the analysis is the above allegation that sprawling, low-density development weakens social capital and thus the level of social interaction...

The key element in this argument is a positive link between social interaction and neighborhood density, and the paper tests empirically for such a link. The results are unfavorable: whether the focus is friendship-oriented social interaction or measures of group involvement, the empirical results show a negative, rather than positive, effect of density on interaction.

The paper's findings therefore imply that social-interaction effects cannot be credibly included in the panoply of criticisms directed toward urban sprawl. In fact, the results suggest an opposite line of argument. ... Thus, the empirical results suggest that social-interaction effects may counteract, rather than exacerbate, the well-recognized forces (such as unpriced traffic congestion) that cause cities to overexpand."