Most the literature on urban sprawl and the urban conversion of farmland hypothesizes that direct and indirect government policies inadvertently provide incentives that foster discontiguous urban development [see Boling, Dunford, Clawson]. Although merely responding to these incentives and constraints, developers make key locational decisions that are responsible for discontiguous urban growth [see Kaiser and Weiss; Clawson]. It is often hypothesized that in an effort to maximize profit, developers select first those parcels that have the site and accessibility characteristics most desired by consumers. This argument suggests that discontiguous urban growth occurs because the parcel characteristics desired by housing consumers and sought by developers are widely and randomly scattered throughout the urbanizing area. For instance, Kaiser [pp. 351-352] "attempts to illustrate conceptually and verify empirically that the factors in— fluencing the developer's profit motivated locational decisions include, but are by no means limited to, characteristics of consumer demand." He goes on to conclude that [p. 361], "on a fairly general level, the empirical analysis supports the hypothesis that the locational decision should be substantially explainable by the list of site charactertistics involved in every such decision."