"Since 1950, four million acres of Pennsylvania farmland alone have been turned into sprawl, an area larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. In the same period, metropolitan Phoenix grew to encompass nearly 600 square miles, an area larger than Delaware. By most estimates, in the next half century sprawl is expected to consume more than 3.5 million acres of California's Great Central Valley, the nation's most valuable farmland..."

"By 1970 more Americans lived in suburbs than in either central cities or rural areas. By 2000, more Americans lived in suburbs that in central cities and rural areas combined."

"We now realize that how we design the built environment may hold tremendous potential for addressing many of the nation’s greatest current public health concerns, including obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, asthma, injury, depression, violence, and social inequities."

"The personal happiness of many Americans has been undermined by poorly designed housing and public space, yet few of us employ the language of real estate development, architecture, or urban planning to trace the contours of loneliness, boredom, weariness, discrimination, or financial worry in our lives".

 "Hundreds of millions of Americans, over 70% of the population, reside in sprawl, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of its presence in their lives. Most of us do not associate our feelings of loneliness, depression, and fear with our physical landscape. Being so ubiquitous, sprawl avoids detection by the general public as the root cause of so many of our personal and societal woes."

Source: Douglas Morris, It’s A Sprawl World After All

“(Suburbs) do nothing to satisfy our social human needs; they do nothing to encourage us to be anything but strangers who happen to park their cars on the same street every night."

"From 1982 to 2000, the annual hours of highway traffic delay per person in urban areas increased from 16 hours to 62 hours per year".

"While automobiles are stealing our time they are also monopolizing our space. In many of our cities, infrastructure to accommodate cars consumes 60 - 70 percent of the landscape in the form of streets, parking space, and highways. Maryland has 10 parking spaces for every car."

"82 per cent of new housing built over the last five years in Britain fails to measure up on design quality. 29 per cent are so poor they should not have even got planning permission."

"So many houses, so big with so little soul. Our suburbs are filled with houses that are bigger than ever. But are bigger houses really better? Are the dreams that build them bigger, or is it simply that there seems to be no alternative? Americans are searching for home in unprecedented numbers. Yet, when we look, the only tools we seem to have are those we find in the real estate listings. But a house is more than square footage and the number of beds and baths. In of the wealthiest societies ever, many people are deeply dissatisfied with their most expensive purchase."

 "It is much more common to complain about time or money than to fume about urban design. In part this is because we think our miseries as being caused by personal problems rather than social problems Americans often say, 'There aren't enough hours in the day', rather than, 'I'm frantic because the distance between my home and my workplace is too great'."

Source: Dolores Hayden, Redesigning The American Dream, The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life.

"Since 1945, our physical landscape has been molded by business interests, working hand in hand with government, to promote a sprawled way of life dominated by automobile usage. Tax laws were changed, zoning laws implemented, and our elected representatives blatantly supported one form of transportation over another. All so that sprawl and automobile dependence would occur. The American people did not choose to live this way. On the contrary, since the end of World War II, sprawl is the only option we have been given."

"But at least two thirds of a million homes will be built across England over the next five years. If change does not speed up, large numbers of people will be living in low-grade neighborhoods, and the public purse will bear the brunt of the social, environmental and economic costs of badly-designed homes."

"From 1969 to 1995, the number of private vehicles per household rose more than 50% to roughly one vehicle per licensed driver."

"At this point, the United States has paved a land area equivalent in size to the state of Georgia."