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The Globe and Mail cites a new study released this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine which found that people who live in neighborhoods that had physical activity amenities and healthy food options were 38% less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes.  The same authors published a study last year looking at the same issue with regard to insulin resistance and had similar results.

Photo: Yo Ghurt

As the evidence piles up linking sprawling, automobile-centric, urban design with poor health outcomes,  you wonder when policymakers are going to start linking public health concerns with efforts underway to reduce carbon emissions and improve air quality.  All of these environmental factors result in negative outcomes in numerous policy areas.  Sensible land use reform and smart planning could possibly be a crucial step in solving a host of social problems with a single policy intervention.

Over the last several years there have been numerous studies that suggest a linkage between the types of neighborhoods where people live and rates of obesity.  A whole subfield of “Active Living Research” has emerged to understand the reasons why obesity has skyrocketed in recent years.  The idea that living in suburban areas might increase the likelihood to be obese is logical.  Generally North American suburbs are built and organized around facilitating automotive mobility at the expense of pedestrian mobility.  Since suburbanites are forced to drive everywhere they may not be getting as much exercise as people dwelling in a more density-rich environment.

Smart Growth America published a report in 2003 that suggested people living in counties with a higher sprawl index had higher problems with obesity.  They linked census data on sprawl with national health data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to substantiate their claims.

Their findings were not without controversy. The Ottawa Citizen is reporting on a new study questioning these claims.  A team led by University of Toronto economist Matthew Turner have written a paper [pdf] suggesting the absence of a link between sprawl and obesity.  Unlike the Smart Growth America study, Turner’s research stems from a longitudinal health data set following the same people from 1988-1994.  With this data, Turner and his colleagues had the luxury of seeing changes in body mass index in specific people as they moved to different environments.  Their analysis indicates that there is no relationship between changes in BMI and sprawl.

The study is still a “working paper,” meaning that it has not gone through the standard process of peer review.  But, nevertheless, the preliminary results are undoubtedly provocative and will probably be scruitinized by the many scholars who have been arguing the opposite for the last several years.

The Washington Post has an article today assessing the “growth tax” that has been in effect in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland for the past two and a half years.  In 2003 the County Council passed a tax on all new homes being built in the county to pay for the requisite road improvements and school expansions associated with suburban growth.

This is a strategy being employed or debated throughout the country as the real estate boom of the last several years resulted in signifianct stress placed on suburan municipalities.  More and more building resulted in more and more people and demand for services.  Because the rate of growth is dictated by the market, municipalities often don’t have the revenue to initiate infrastructure improvements before demand emerges.  Existing residents, meanwhile, are less than enthusiastic to have to pay up front for the service demand generated by new arrivals.  Thus, taxes such as this one are established to help get growth to “pay for itself.”

In the case of Montgomery County, however, developers were given a four month window before the tax went into effect.  The Post’s analysis suggests that developers took advantage of the grace period and applied for permits in advance in order to get their projects in the pipeline before they had to pay the tax.  The problem, of course, is that revenues were less than expected while the costs associated with growth increased.

The other problem pointed to in the article is the fact that revenues generated from this tax are subject to the fluctuations of the housing market, making it difficult to plan long-term financing for the large-scale infrastructure projects the tax is meant to serve.

These types of taxes will probably continue to be adopted throughout the country as municipalities search for ways to pay for growth; but the grace period embraced by Montgomery County may be something that other municipalities want to question.