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Anthony Downs

Anthony Downs is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., where he has been since 1977. Before that, he was for 18 years a member and then Chairman of Real Estate Research Corporation, a nationwide consulting firm advising private and public decision-makers on real estate investment, housing policies, and urban affairs. Dr. Downs received a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, and is the author or co-author of 20 books and over 480 articles. His most famous books are An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), translated into several foreign languages, and Inside Bureaucracy (1967). His latest books are Stuck in Traffic (1992) and New Visions for Metropolitan America (1994), from Brookings and the Lincoln Institute, A Re-Evaluation of Residential Rent Control (1996), from the Urban Land Institute, and Urban Affairs and Urban Policy and Political Theory and Public Choice (1998), two volumes of his collected essays published by Edward Elgar Publishing.

Sprawl Costs

Sprawl Costs

Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development

The environmental impacts of sprawling development have been well documented, but few comprehensive studies have examined its economic costs. In 1996, a team of experts undertook a multi-year study designed to provide quantitative measures of the costs and benefits of different forms of growth.