This paper examines a policy question of acute interest in the fields of urban and regional economics and urban planning: if a state government wanted to alter the spatial pattern of growth, could it? The analysis uses a bidirectional growth model to examine equilibrium densities of people and jobs throughout the Atlantic Southeast, which includes Florida — a state having one of the nation’s best-known pieces of growth management legislation. The results suggest that Florida’s policy has had two sets of countervailing effects: (i) a lower population density at equilibrium and a slower process of adjustment toward that equilibrium; and, more tentatively, (ii) a lower employment density at equilibrium and a faster process of adjustment toward that equilibrium. Focusing on the population density results, which are more robust than the employment density results, the paper concludes that Florida’s growth management program may have produced more residential sprawl, even as it slowed the transition toward that outcome.