Have We Reached Peak Sprawl?

Several real estate researchers met in Atlanta on Wednesday to announce a milestone nearly as significant, they believe, as when historian Fredrick Jackson Turner declared the closing of America's frontier after the 1890 census. Metropolitan Atlanta, long a symbol of car-dependent American sprawl, has recently passed a threshold where a majority of its new construction spending is now focused in high-density, "walkable" parts of town.

Since 2009, 60 percent of new office, retail and rental properties in Atlanta have been built in what Christopher Leinberger calls "walkable urban places" – those neighborhoods already blessed by high Walk Scores or on their way there. That new construction has taken place on less than 1 percent of the metropolitan Atlanta region's land mass, suggesting a shift in real estate patterns from expansion at the city's edges to denser development within its existing borders.