Economics in time, space, and footprints 63municipality. And they invest in residential development, which is considered
toprovide a modest income, though service costs may exceed income.
Acquiring land for resource protection is just as sensitive to land value as
are housing sales and ownership. Such land acquisition, as in the water supply
case above, is difficult and expensive in an area near a city or a community
expected to expand outward. Accomplishing land protection early, well before
growthis expected, is much less expensive. It requires thinking and investing
in the future, just as the Jamaican family and Norwegian nation do.
Economic disparities: poor and rich
Land value highlights another large, difficult economic issue. The ben-
efits of growth fall unequally, creating or exacerbating the economic disparities
between the rich and poor (Main and Williams1994,Fainstein and Campbell
1996,LeGatesand Stout2003,WorldBank2006). Poverty is present in all cities
and, relative to the land as a whole, often concentrated there. Wealth is anal-
ogously present and concentrated. Neither wealth nor poverty is good for the
environment.
But the people and residences of the two groups are little mixed, indeed
commonly quite segregated, and often separated by middle-income communi-
ties. Land values are stretched from high to low in nearby rich and poor neigh-
borhoods, almost anywhere in and near cities. Market-driven investments in the
neighborhoods tend to parallel the land values, helping to maintain both poor
and rich areas. Consequently a patchwork of neighborhood land values is super-
imposed on the distance-from-city land value gradient.
One additional force makes this economic disparity a mammoth urban prob-
lem: immigration. Some of the highest population growth rates anywhere result
from immigrants from rural to urban that ‘‘overnight” createsquatter settlements
(shantytowns, informal housing, favelas) (Perlman 1976 , Main and Williams1994,
State oftheWorld’sCities2006). The people mainly arrive with no capital and do
not pay for the land or its ongoing occupation, creating an externality cost for
government and the city. Characteristically the arrivals are poor, unemployed,
ill-prepared for urban life, and have little for shelter. Informal economic and
social systems, mostly beyond the reach of economic institutions and govern-
ment, control life in such communities. Government and NGOs sometimes help
a bit with infrastructure or economic conditions. Since squatters illegally occupy
asite, periodically the owner, whether government or private, expels them as
land value changes. Thus many squatters move from location to location for
various reasons, often in an outward direction from the city center.
Such squatter settlements mainly appear in specific types of locations: steep
slopes, flood-prone areas, forgotten spaces around transportation corridors, and