Leapfrogging

Passage One

[The developer’s] success depends on buying land cheap, and selling it dear. Everything else that he buys is purchased in a national market and at price levels over which he has little influence. But he can leapfrog, buy and develop cheap land, mount an adequate advertising campaign and persuade prospective home-buyers to share with him in the anticipated capital gain. His marketing and management skills are focused on land value appreciation. He succeeds only if he can suburbanize the countryside. (Raup 1975)

Large parcels of land are more likely to exist in outlying areas. . . . Other complications of infill development are less likely to be present, such as contaminated sites, poor perceptions of inner-city neighborhoods, or the need to negotiate with neighborhood groups. . . . ‘Developers say it is far easier to work with a vast tract of empty land at the city’s periphery than to weave new homes into older neighborhoods’ (Pitzl 1996z).

^{Source: Heim, Carol E. “Leapfrogging, Urban Sprawl, and Growth Management: Phoenix, 1950-2000.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 60, No. 1. January, 2001.}

Cities with Fastest Population Growth from 1990 to 1995 are at the Urban Edge

Passage Two

Water development costs lend order to the development of a city in the desert – building can occur only where it can be connected to a source of supply. The result is that desert cities tend to exist in concentrated isolation, wholly unlike the pattern of widely spread towns, farms, and small settlements in the Midwest or the East. Leapfrog development in the desert cannot leap very far and there are few truly rural areas on the borders of a desert city. . . . Reliance on water delivered through major infrastructure has confined the area of settlement in which people can live to a defined geography.

^{Source: Gammage, Grady and Jonathan Fink. “The Phoenix Experiment.” March 1, 2004. http://west.stanford.edu/events/edge_conference/metrowestsouthwest.html}