Exploring the Empirical Relationship between Inner-City Blight and Urban Sprawl in the United States

Urban blight has been found to cause a variety of problems, including negatively impacting the value of surrounding properties and increasing neighborhood crime rates. If the same externalities that give rise to urban sprawl also contribute to urban blight as is suggested by Brueckner and Helsley (2011), we would observe that city center vacancy rates, an indication of blight, would increase with the extent of urban sprawl. In this study, we add to the sparse literature on the empirical relationship between urban sprawl and blight by finding that the vacancy rate of city-center census tracts are indeed higher in more sprawling cities. Our results therefore provide support for the argument that policies designed to contain urban sprawl could have the advantage of also mitigating urban blight