Next week brings the end of the century, and also the completion of four years of Capital Ideas. This humble communique will continue into the next century, but we can’t pass up a last shot at this one.
The summary of the new 1997 National Resources Inventory (NRI) is just out from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It concludes that the rate of land being urbanized in the U.S. has increased rapidly in the 1990s, to more than three million acres a year, and is providing fresh fuel for those who see urban sprawl as a crisis requiring significant new land regulation.
