ABSTRACT
Urban sprawl has become a salient policy issue in the United States. The issue reflects many concerns: rising traffic congestion; farmland and natural resource depletion; disappearing parks and open spaces; decaying streets, sewers, and schools; and a general sense that urban growth and development is destroying communities and eroding quality of life. Though concern with sprawl has attracted the attention of policy makers at the state and federal levels of government, the problem is largely a problem of local governments. I n a recent survey conducted by the US GAO (2000) , for example, 53% of counties and 35% of cities indicated that sprawl was of high or very high concern. (Perhaps most interesting about these data i s the low percent of cities concerned with sprawl . Such concern is particularly low outside the major metropolitan areas in the Midwest . ) Local governments often attribute sprawl to pervasive state and national trends and conditions: cheap fuel , rising incomes, interest deductibility, and highway subsidies. But the policies of local governments have become leading suspects as well . That is, sprawl may be caused, at least in part, by the zoning ordinances, subdivision regulations, and infrastructure policies of local governments. In this paper we examine the system of infrastructure finance in Il l inois to determine whether this system contributes to urban sprawl . We do so by examining how infrastructure is financed in 1 11inois and how this system affects the urban development process.
