Regional Determinants of Exurban Land Use in the US Midwest

As urban areas continue to disperse and decentralize, new urban growth is increasingly occurring in peri-rural or exurban areas. The US Midwest (the East North-Central Regional Census Division) typifies the transformation of the countryside as agricultural employment declines, and both jobs and people move out into formerly rural areas proximate to larger urban centers. Many of the factors underlying this urbanization process are linked to higher-ordered processes at regional and even global scales. For example, rising household incomes, changing preferences for low-density development, adoption of new information and production technologies, and improved regional infrastructure are all associated with regional economic growth and are among the primary influences hypothesized to influence urbanization patterns. This analysis explores the association between regional factors and resulting exurban residential land use in areas within all Metropolitan Statistical Areas but outside core urbanized areas in the region, representing the potential commutershed and access to centers of commerce. First, a crosstabulation of exurbanization and economic growth was conducted to develop a broad typology of the regional growth-exurbanization link for the period 1980 – 2000. Then, a panel regression model is estimated which specifies the density of residential and commercial/industrial land use in these exurban areas as a function of regional economic structure at the level of the MSA as a whole, controlling for relevant geographical and infrastructural factors. Lastly, a cross-sectional analysis using spatially explicit data is conducted for the year 2000 to test whether the spatial pattern (i.e., fragmented or compact) of exurban land use directly relates to these regional factors.