Residential Land Use in the U.S.
In May 2006, two of the services operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released land use studies. The Economic Research Service (ERS) released Major Uses of Land in the United States, 2002, a study that is published every five years. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) released National Resources Inventory: 2003 Annual NRI, which used to be published on a five-year cycle but shifted to an annual schedule in 1997 with a reduction in the number of sample sites surveyed.
Although both studies contain useful information on the nation’s 2.26 billion acres of land (1.89 billion acres in the contiguous 48 states), some of the information can be difficult to interpret; at the same time, the data sources used to generate the studies vary in quality. The ERS study combines information from a variety of sources, including several surveys, not all of which are compatible with one another. The NRCS study is based on a survey of conditions in several nonfederal sample sites, which, by definition, are subject to sampling error.
The ERS and NRCS studies employ terms such as urban, developed, built-up, and residential to describe land cover. Whichever term is used, it pertains to a relatively small percentage of the nation’s total land area. Indeed, lack of precision in the estimates can make it difficult to identify nationwide trends based on changes affecting small acreages over a short period of time. Over a longer period, however, it is clear that the amount of land in urban or residential use has increased substantially, but whether that growth has coincided with a reduction in other important land uses, such as natural resource conservation or agriculture, is less clear. Answers often depend on the time frame of interest and the definitions used.
In addition, given that USDA studies understandably focus on agriculture, they do not explore all possible topics related to residential land cover. For example, a large amount of residential land is associated with single-family housing units sited on 10-acre-plus non-farm lots, suggesting that the country has substantial capacity to absorb further residential development without exp
anding beyond the boundaries of already established urban areas.
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