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Articles 1 - 21 of 21
Full-Text Articles in Law
Freeing The City To Compete, James J. Kelly Jr.
Freeing The City To Compete, James J. Kelly Jr.
Journal Articles
In this paper, I examine how the rights of owners, lenders and residents threaten the functioning of real markets in distressed urban neighborhoods, perpetuating the pall that vacant and abandoned houses cast over their future. Even a single abandoned house can present an example of how the rights of several stakeholders create a form of gridlock known as anticommons, which isolates that property from a potentially transformative transfer of title. In addition to this legal anticommons, some neighborhoods are so beset by vacant property problems that they require coordination of investment that is frustrated by both the multiplicity of private …
The Fair Market Value Of Public Resources, Bruce R. Huber
The Fair Market Value Of Public Resources, Bruce R. Huber
Journal Articles
This Article explores the problem of public resource sales with particular reference to natural resources managed by the federal government. Lands owned by the United States hold trillions of dollars' worth of natural resources. Federal agencies earn billions in annual revenue from resource sales, yet critics assert that billions more could be reaped if resources were sold for a fair price. Although federal law has increasingly required that agencies price resources at fair market value, this requirement is surprisingly difficult to interpret and even more dfficult to implement and enforce. This Article analyzes the various forces that bear on public …
The Durability Of Private Claims To Public Property, Bruce R. Huber
The Durability Of Private Claims To Public Property, Bruce R. Huber
Journal Articles
Property rights and resource use are closely related. Scholarly inquiry about their relation, however, tends to emphasize private property arrangements while ignoring public property — property formally owned by government. The well-known tragedies of the commons and anticommons, for example, are generally analyzed with reference to the optimal form and degree of private ownership. But what about property owned by the state? The federal government alone owns nearly one-third of the land area of the United States. One could well ask: is there a tragedy associated with public property, too? If there is, here is what it might look like: …
A Room Of One's Own? Accessory Dwelling Unit Reforms And Local Parochialism, Margaret F. Brinig, Nicole Stelle Garnett
A Room Of One's Own? Accessory Dwelling Unit Reforms And Local Parochialism, Margaret F. Brinig, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
Over the past decade, a number of state and local governments have amended land use regulations to permit the accessory dwelling units (“ADUs”) on single-family lots. Measured by raw numbers of reforms, the campaign to secure legal reforms permitting ADUs appears to be a tremendous success. The question remains, however, whether these reforms overcome the well-documented land-use parochialism that has, for decades, represented a primary obstacle to increasing the supply of affordable housing. In order to understand more about their actual effects, this Article examines ADU reforms in a context which ought to predict a minimal level of local parochialism. …
The People Paradox, Nicole Stelle Garnett
The People Paradox, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
U.S. land-use regulators are increasingly embracing mixed-land-use “urban” neighborhoods, rather than single-land-use “suburban” ones, as a planning ideal. This shift away from traditional regulatory practice reflects a growing endorsement of Jane Jacobs’s influential argument that mixed-land-use urban neighborhoods are safer and more socially cohesive than single-land-use suburban ones. Proponents of regulatory reforms encouraging greater mixing of residential and commercial land uses, however, completely disregard a sizable empirical literature suggesting that commercial land use generates, rather than suppress, crime and disorder, and that suburban communities have higher levels of social capital than urban communities. This Article constructs a case for mixed-land-use …
Restoring Lost Connections: Land Use, Policing, And Urban Vitality, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Restoring Lost Connections: Land Use, Policing, And Urban Vitality, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
Justice William Brennan rightfully reminded all of us that state constitutional law is too often neglected in our courtrooms and our classrooms. State constitutions, to borrow from the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, ought not to be "relegated to the status of a poor relation" in our constitutional legal structure. They differ in important ways from the federal law Constitution-and those differences provide the space within which our democratic experiment flourishes. And I am sure if Justice Brennan were here with us today, he would agree that we also should not neglect the study of the state and local policies …
Governing? Gentrifying? Seceding? Real-Time Answers To Questions About Business Improvement Districts, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Governing? Gentrifying? Seceding? Real-Time Answers To Questions About Business Improvement Districts, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
Business improvement districts (BIDs) have become a ubiquitous feature of the urban development toolkit. An important - perhaps the most important - instantiation of the trend in urban governance toward the devolution of local authority to new sublocal, quasi-governmental institutions, BIDs play an important role in urban re-development efforts, especially efforts to revitalize downtowns and satellite center-city business districts. Drawing upon case studies of Philadelphia’s BIDS, this symposium essay seeks to answer three questions about how BIDs actually work on the ground: First, whether BIDs are actually functioning as local governments rather than quasi-private providers of supplemental services; second, whether …
The Order-Maintenance Agenda As Land Use Policy, Nicole Stelle Garnett
The Order-Maintenance Agenda As Land Use Policy, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
Debates about the broken windows hypothesis focus almost exclusively on whether the order-maintenance agenda represents wise criminal law policy — specifically on whether, when, and at what cost, order-maintenance policing techniques reduce serious crime. These questions are important, but incomplete. This Essay, which was solicited for a symposium on urban-development policy, considers potential benefits of order-maintenance policies other than crime-reduction, especially reducing the fear of crime. The Broken Windows essay itself urged that attention to disorder was important not just because disorder was a precursor to more serious crime, but also because disorder undermined residents’ sense of security. The later …
Land Trusts That Conserve Communities, James J. Kelly
Land Trusts That Conserve Communities, James J. Kelly
Journal Articles
Much has been written about land trusts that conserve wilderness, agriculture or other environmentally beneficial uses that would be threatened by unfettered development. In the context of inner-cities, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) conserve neighborhoods. Like their environmental and agricultural counterparts, CLTs employ use restrictions to prioritize communally beneficial development. Conserving communities, however, requires other legal tools as well. CLTs create and sustain permanently affordable homes to break the market’s bias toward socioeconomic homogeneity. CLTs also make room, literally, for green space, sites of shared culture and other productive activities that the market tends to commercialize or marginalize. By sustaining a …
Homes Affordable For Good: Covenants And Ground Leases As Long-Term Resale-Restriction Devices, James J. Kelly
Homes Affordable For Good: Covenants And Ground Leases As Long-Term Resale-Restriction Devices, James J. Kelly
Journal Articles
Covenants and ground leases have been, and continue to be, used to create shared spaces that are fundamentally, and often invidiously, exclusive. Famously made a dead letter in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer, covenants banning resale to nonwhite households put the force of law behind the segregated birth of America’s suburbs. Today, gated residential communities and shopping malls assure a degree of class exclusivity through covenants and commercial ground leases, respectively. These same legal mechanisms, however, are now deployed to assure long-term inclusion as well.
Developers of affordable housing are creating homes that are not only beneficial to the …
Planning As Public Use?, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Planning As Public Use?, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
This short Essay explores the Supreme Court's suggestion in Kelo v. New London that public, participatory planning may be a constitutional safe harbor that separates impermissible private takings from presumptively valid public ones. After briefly reviewing the Court's discussion of the planning that preceded the Kelo litigation, the Essay examines how Kelo's emphasis on planning departs from standard rational basis review of economic policies and asks what such a departure means for future public-use litigants. The Essay then explores three possible practical benefits of a constitutional rule that encourages the government to engage in detailed planning before exercising the power …
Suburbs As Exit, Suburbs As Entrance, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Suburbs As Exit, Suburbs As Entrance, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
Most academics assume that suburbanites are exiters who have abandoned central cities. The exit story is a foundational one in the fields of land-use and local-government law: Exiters' historical, social, and economic connections with their center cities are frequently used to justify both growth controls and regional government. The exit story, however, no longer captures the American suburban experience. For a majority of Americans, suburbs have become points of entrance to, not of exit from, urban life. Most suburbanites are enterers - people who were born in, or migrated directly to, suburbs and who have not spent time living in …
Relocating Disorder, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Relocating Disorder, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
Judicial challenges to order-maintenance policing apparently are leading some city officials to adapt the tools of property regulation to a task traditionally reserved for the police - the control of disorderly people. Examples of efforts to regulate disorder, ex ante, through land-management strategies include homeless campuses that centralize housing and social services, neighborhood exclusion zone policies that empower local officials to exclude disorderly individuals from struggling communities, and the selective targeting of inner-city neighborhoods for aggressive property inspections. These tactics employ different management techniques - some concentrate disorder and others disperse it - but they have same goal: to relocate …
Ordering (And Order In) The City, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Ordering (And Order In) The City, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
Over the past two decades, the broken windows hypothesis by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson has revolutionized thinking about urban policy. This now-familiar theory is that uncorrected manifestations of disorder, even minor ones like broken windows, signal a breakdown in the social order that accelerates neighborhood decline. The response to this theory has been a proliferation of policies focusing on public order. Largely missing from the academic debate about these developments is a discussion of the complex and important role of property regulation in order-maintenance efforts. This Article attempts to fill that property law gap in the public-order puzzle …
The Public-Use Question As A Takings Problem, Nicole Stelle Garnett
The Public-Use Question As A Takings Problem, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
Government officials regularly use the power of eminent domain to benefit private entities, and just as regularly justify their actions with post hoc assertions about the need to promote economic development. In Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Fifth Amendment demands broad deference to a government's decision to exercise the power of eminent domain. Midkiff makes clear that public use challenges are subject to rational basis review; so long as a taking can be justified by some conceivable public purpose, it will be upheld. Yet in recent years, a number of courts have put the …
On Castles And Commerce: Zoning Law And The Home Business Dilemma, Nicole Stelle Garnett
On Castles And Commerce: Zoning Law And The Home Business Dilemma, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
Most zoning laws severely restrict residents' ability to work from home. Some prohibit it outright. These regulations serve the ostensible purpose of protecting neighbors from externalities that might be generated by home businesses. But, home occupation restrictions also reflect in a particularly sharp way the central motivating ideology underlying all zoning laws - namely, that the good life requires the careful segregation of work and home. Today, home business regulations are being challenged by both planning theory and economic reality. At the same time that many in the academy and planning professions are calling into question zoning's pervasive segregation of …
Trouble Preserving Paradise?, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Trouble Preserving Paradise?, Nicole Stelle Garnett
Journal Articles
Election day 2000 was not a good day for proponents of suburban growth controls. The overwhelming initial support for initiatives that proposed state-wide growth management plans in Colorado and Arizona withered in the face of vigorous opposition campaigns. And, pro-planning forces in Oregon woke up on Wednesday morning to learn that voters had approved a little-noticed initiative amending the state constitution to require compensation for partial takings - that is, for any reduction in the fair market value of property resulting from government regulation - thus throwing into question the future of the State's widely touted model controlled-growth scheme.
These …
Article 27 And Mexican Land Reform: The Legacy Of Zapata's Dream, James J. Kelly
Article 27 And Mexican Land Reform: The Legacy Of Zapata's Dream, James J. Kelly
Journal Articles
This student note takes an historical look at indigenous land tenure in Mexico and the role that limited alienability has played in sustaining indigenous agriculture from the time of the Aztecs up until the reforms enacted by the Salinas administration in Mexico in the early 1990's. As the piece was in edits, the Zapatista rebellion broke out and the text was amended to note the role that land tenure played in the uprising.
Determinable Fees, Effect Of Failure In Deed To Provide For Forfeiture Or Reversion, Joseph O'Meara
Determinable Fees, Effect Of Failure In Deed To Provide For Forfeiture Or Reversion, Joseph O'Meara
Journal Articles
The case of In re Matter of Copps Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church appears to establish that there is no longer any such thing as a determinable interest in land in Ohio. There would seem to be no escape from this unless the court should be prepared to overrule itself.
Legal Status Of The Spite Fence In Ohio, Joseph O'Meara, Herman W. Santen
Legal Status Of The Spite Fence In Ohio, Joseph O'Meara, Herman W. Santen
Journal Articles
It is generally assumed, on the authority of Letts v. Kessler, that spite fences in Ohio are within the law. In two cases language has been used indicating an adherence to the obsolescent view that spite fences may be erected with impunity, but in neither case was the question before the court for decision, so that what was said must be classed as dicta. This, then is the situation: there is not a single decision in the last twenty-one years supporting the rule of Letts v. Kessler. A careful reading of the opinion in Letts v. Kessler will show that …
Revocation Of Building Permits, Joseph O'Meara
Revocation Of Building Permits, Joseph O'Meara
Journal Articles
There is considerable confusion in text books and decisions in the use of the expression "vested interest", the same being sometimes used as though the owner of a vested interest becomes completely immune from legislation. Theoretically, as a building permit does not create a vested interest nor property right, no amount of expenditure in reliance on a building permit can create such a vested interest or property right as to effect a limitation upon the exercise of the police power. The problem is to devise a formula which, while meeting the objections to the scintilla rule, will put the judge …