Word: growths
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...America's detonating metro regions were the result of population growth alone, sprawl would be a problem without a solution. But they are equally the result of political decisions and economic incentives that lure people ever farther from center cities. For decades, federal highway subsidies have paid for the roads to those far-flung malls and tract houses. Then there are local zoning rules that require large building lots, ensuring more sprawl. Many localities fiercely resist denser housing because it brings in more people but less property-tax revenue. Zoning rules commonly forbid any mix of homes and shops, which...
These incentives to expand help create cities that widen much faster than their populations grow. Between 1990 and 1996, metro Kansas City spread 70%, while its population, now 1.9 million, increased just 5%. In that period greater Portland, Ore., spread just 13%, the same growth rate as its population, now 1.7 million. For a long time Portland has been the laboratory city for smart growth. In 1979, as part of its compliance with a groundbreaking statewide land-use law, Portland imposed a "growth boundary," a ring enclosing the city proper and 23 surrounding towns...
...Orderly growth comes at a price. Smaller towns within the ring are submerged by crowding they might otherwise zone out. And within the dwindling buildable space of the ring, average lot size has shrunk almost in half over the past 20 years, from 13,000 sq. ft. to 6,700. Yet the median price of a single-family home has more than doubled in just 10 years, from $64,000 to $159,900. Once ranked by the National Association of Home Builders as among the most affordable U.S. cities for housing, Portland is now the third most expensive, just...
...sitting out these moves in the Pepsis and Mercks. And who is to blame them? Lately I have come to wonder whether the risk-reward parameters I cut my teeth on are as out of date as those of my parents' generation, which saw utilities as safe, conservative growth vehicles that would leave hefty rewards for their children. They didn't. At what point, after how many new fortunes, can we proclaim the old paradigm of stock risk and bond reward as dead as the utilities-as-ultimate-wealth-generator theory? Judging by the feisty performance of the creaky...
...American motorists are filling their tanks for under $1 per gal., less than the price of bottled water. America's annual oil bill dropped roughly $40 billion last year, and that money has shifted to other parts of the booming economy. The result is lower inflation and higher growth, with savings that show up on everything from home- heating bills to airline fuel and utility charges. Says Cynthia Latta, principal U.S. economist at Standard & Poors/DRI: "Higher oil prices will be widely felt across the economy, but they are not likely to pose an immediate threat to continued low inflation...