All that empty acreage means that these big, rapidly developing cities don’t really have to sprawl.
In a recent survey, CommercialCafe attempted to quantify how much undeveloped land remains in the central business districts of a number of U.S. cities; the answer, in short, is a lot, but not where you might expect.
Dallas came in first, with Austin and San Antonio also in the top five (as well as Las Vegas and Phoenix), though it’s worth noting that Dallas developed more than 8.5 million square feet in the last five years, second only to New York.
From the report:
While it is not surprising that these cities have utilized the advantages of spacious geography to expand their boundaries outward, it invites the obvious question: why sprawl, if there is still plenty of potential to reinvest in the city core? The answer to that may be more complex than we can approach in this one article, but what we can do is look at the numbers.
CommercialCafe also asked residents of 25 cities what they’d like to see in their downtowns; the most common answer, of course, was housing.
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