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Atlanta has these. They're roughly where the development stops. Winder (where I live), Gainesville, etc. It's probably an environment thing. Past the edge, it's

Atlanta has these. They're roughly where the development stops. Winder (where I live), Gainesville, etc. It's probably an environment thing. Past the edge, it's all trees, hills, farms, and mansions. That makes it hard to get the big, cheap, contiguous spaces developers like. Caterpillar did open a plant outside the edge, but it's also close to Athens with its airport and relative proximity to both a port and a major city.

amyjess 9y ago
Looking up Winder on a map makes the problem a little more clear: the layout of roads there is awful. There's no nearby freeways, and the major roads look like spaghetti. The Dallas area did a very good job of organizing outward sprawl into rings like a sequoia. There are edge cities, sometimes more than one, within each ring (Far North Dallas & Richardson, Plano, Frisco & McKinney, Prosper...). Freeways delineate the rings (380 isn't a freeway yet, but plans are in the works), six-lane arterial roads are laid out in a nice, neat grid even extending into the exurbs' exurbs, and subdivisions are packed closely together to get more use out of the same space (I honestly can't stand how suburbs in eastern states look rural to my eyes... I grew up in a suburb filled with single-family homes with yards, and we still don't waste space like eastern states do). For example, compare the northern sprawl of Dallas https://goo.gl/maps/qhK6geVaYKz https://goo.gl/maps/qhK6geVaYKz with the northeastern sprawl in Atlanta: https://goo.gl/maps/PZsPw6YUyD92 https://goo.gl/maps/PZsPw6YUyD92