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Full-Text Articles in Law
Exclusionary Megacities, Wendell Pritchett, Shitong Qiao
Exclusionary Megacities, Wendell Pritchett, Shitong Qiao
Faculty Scholarship
Human beings should live in places where they are most productive, and megacities, where information, innovation, and opportunities congregate, would be the optimal choice. Yet megacities in both China and the United States are excluding people by limiting the housing supply. Why, despite their many differences, is the same type of exclusion happening in both Chinese and U.S. megacities? Urban law and policy scholars argue that Not-In-My-Back-Yard (“NIMBY”) homeowners are taking over megacities in the U.S. and hindering housing development. They pin their hopes on an efficient growth machine that makes sure “above all, nothing gets in the way of …
Rights-Weakening Federalism, Shitong Qiao
Rights-Weakening Federalism, Shitong Qiao
Faculty Scholarship
This article examines whether federalism protects land rights in China from two dimensions. I first compare national law with local institutions of eminent domain, revealing that local governments take much more land than the national government approves, frequently violating, tweaking, and challenging national law. I next examine the impact of interjurisdictional competition on the development of local land institutions, demonstrating that local governments are weakening individual land rights for the benefits of mobile capital. Overall, Chinese federalism weakens rather than strengthens individual land rights and should be called rights-weakening federalism.
This China case also has general theoretical implications. Leading property …
Dealing With Illegal Housing: What Can New York City Learn From Shenzhen?, Shitong Qiao
Dealing With Illegal Housing: What Can New York City Learn From Shenzhen?, Shitong Qiao
Faculty Scholarship
In New York City, owners violated zoning regulations and opened up their basements, garages, and other floors to rent to people (particularly low-income immigrants) priced out of the formal market. The more than 100,000 illegal dwelling units in New York City (NYC) were referred to as “granny units,” “illegal twos or threes,” or “accessory units.” Due to the safety and habitability considerations of “alter[ing] or modif[ying] of an existing building to create an additional housing unit without first obtaining approval from the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB),” the City government devoted a lot of resources to detecting and …
The Evolution Of Relational Property Rights: A Case Of Chinese Rural Land Reform, Shitong Qiao, Frank Upham
The Evolution Of Relational Property Rights: A Case Of Chinese Rural Land Reform, Shitong Qiao, Frank Upham
Faculty Scholarship
The most notable, or at least the most noted, form of property evolution has been the transfer of exclusive rights from collectives to individuals and vice versa, such as the farm collectivization in Soviet Union and the establishment of the People’s Communes in Mao’s China and their reversals. Such radical moments, however, constitute only a small part of history. For the most part, property rights evolve quietly and incrementally, which is hard to explain if we take exclusive rights as the core of property, or, to put it more generally, if we are focusing solely on the question of who …
Private Business As Public Good: Hotel Development And Kelo, Joseph Blocher
Private Business As Public Good: Hotel Development And Kelo, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
In the summer of 2004, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. announced plans to demolish the all-but-derelict New Haven Coliseum and replace it with a publicly financed redevelopment that would include a 300-room hotel. Critics of the plan immediately objected that the hotel-even if it were completed-was a poor public investment, that there was no demand for such a hotel, and that the money could be better spent elsewhere. Some critics pointed to New Haven's own checkered history of major development projects, especially the failed downtown mall and the famously catastrophic Oak Street redevelopment. As of February 2006, the city …
Book Review: Dekker, The Invisible Line, Joseph Blocher
Book Review: Dekker, The Invisible Line, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
Reviewing Henri A.L. Dekker, The Invisible Line: Land Reform, Land Tenure Security and Land Registration (2003)