Studying the effects of the intensity of US state growth management approaches on land development outcomes

Driven by negative externalities from suburban sprawl, many states in the US have adopted comprehensive growth management legislation in an effort to regulate land development more directly. Most extant scholarship evaluating the effects of growth management programmes employs a design that averages growth management's effect across all of the growth management states. Yet, this approach largely ignores descriptive analyses of individual state growth management approaches which show large variation in both the methods and intensity of means by which states manage growth. This paper seeks to ascertain if differences in growth management intensity yield different evaluative outcomes. Analysis of panel data for nine growth management states using fixed effects regressions, across eight different model specifications, shows that only states with the strongest growth management intensity experience consistent success at reducing the expansion of urban land and increasing population densities.