Law Commons^™

Learning From Land Use Reforms: Housing Outcomes And Regulatory Change, Noah Kazis

Law & Economics Working Papers

This essay serves as the introduction for an edited, interdisciplinary symposium of articles studying recent land use reforms at the state and local level. These papers provide important descriptive analyses of a range of policy interventions, using quantitative and qualitative methods to provide new empirical insights into zoning reform strategies.

After situating and summarizing the collected articles, the Introduction draws out shared themes. For example, these essays demonstrate the efficacy of recent reforms, not only at facilitating housing production but at doing so in especially difficult contexts (like when producing affordable housing and redeveloping single-family neighborhoods). They point to the …

Measuring Local Policy To Advance Fair Housing And Climate Goals Through A Comprehensive Assessment Of Land Use Entitlements, Moira O'Neill, Eric Biber, Nicholas J. Marantz

Pepperdine Law Review

California’s legislature has passed several laws that intervene in local land-use regulation in order to increase desperately needed housing production—particularly affordable housing production. Some of these new laws expand local reporting requirements concerning zoning and planning laws, and the application of those laws apply to proposed housing development. This emphasis on measurement requires the state to develop a housing data strategy to support both enforcement of existing law and effective policymaking in the future. Our Comprehensive Assessment of Land Use Entitlements Study (CALES) predates, but aligns with and supports, this state-led effort to improve local reporting. For the cities that …

Comprehensive Rezonings, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Of all powers given to local governments, the power to zone is one of the most significant. Zoning dictates everything that gets built in a locality—and thus effectively dictates all of the key activities that take place within it. Nationwide, most zoning codes were adopted in the first half of the twentieth century. Many, including the zoning codes of New York City and Chicago, were significantly revised in the 1960s. While these codes have been revised piecemeal, just a few American cities have undergone a comprehensive revision: replacing the old code with a completely new one.

A comprehensive rezoning can …

Sharing Property, Kellen Zale

University of Colorado Law Review

The sharing economy-the rapidly evolving sector of peer-topeer transactions epitomized by Airbnb and Uber-is the subject of heated debate about whether it is so novel that no laws apply, or whether the sharing economy should be subject to the same regulations as its analog counterparts. The debate has proved frustrating and controversial in large part because we lack a doctrinally cohesive and normatively satisfying way of talking about the underlying activities taking place in the sharing economy. In part, this is because property-sharing activities-renting your car out to a tourist for a day, paying to spend the weekend in a …

Begone, Euclid!: Leasing Custom And Zoning Provision Engaging Retail Consumer Tastes And Technologies In Thriving Urban Centers, Michael N. Widener

Pace Law Review

Is urban center retailing in a death spiral? Competition for consumers with Internet vendors is afoot; winners and losers shall be anointed. The threats to physical retailing in an era of the “Internet of Goods” initially are described below. Adaptations by tenants, landlords, and stakeholders in urban centers will be required quickly, and new perspectives and partnerships, including those among local and regional governments, are instrumental if physical retail operations in municipal cores are to survive. The balance of this article describes these needs from the vantage point of each stakeholder; but this article argues that integrating information and communication …

Requiem For Regulation, Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

This comment reviews U.S. Supreme Court decisions over the past 100 years which have considered the constitutional limitations on governmental powers. It finds that at the three-quarter mark of the 20th century, a remarkable set of Court precedents had swollen the regulatory powers of governments while shrinking private rights to property and contract. But since the Reagan years, a more conservative Court has undertaken to curtail governmental activity in general, and to limit federal, state, and local planning in particular. A number of 5-4 decisions expanded private property rights and contracted the scope of the federal “commerce power.” The comment …

Requiem For Regulation, Garrett Power

Garrett Power

This comment reviews U.S. Supreme Court decisions over the past 100 years which have considered the constitutional limitations on governmental powers. It finds that at the three-quarter mark of the 20th century, a remarkable set of Court precedents had swollen the regulatory powers of governments while shrinking private rights to property and contract. But since the Reagan years, a more conservative Court has undertaken to curtail governmental activity in general, and to limit federal, state, and local planning in particular. A number of 5-4 decisions expanded private property rights and contracted the scope of the federal “commerce power.” The comment …

Moderating Citizen "Visioning" In Town Comprehensive Planning: Deliberative Dialog Processes, Michael N. Widener

Michael N. Widener

This paper describes one method of mediated collective bargaining addressing opposing stakeholder views in a Comprehensive Land Use Plan amendment processes where stakeholders provide inputs on behalf of a diverse stakeholders’ community. The moderation process described here involves the City of Scottsdale, Arizona, currently engaged in developing its 2014 Plan extending the city’s planning vision through 2045.

Back To The Future: Is Form-Based Code An Efficacious Tool For Shaping Modern Civic Life?, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This Essay serves as a critique of the New Urbanism in general and of form-based code in particular as a tool of the New Urbanism. It may be true that form-based code offers more flexibility than traditional zoning schemes and thus may offer some respite from acknowledged ills such as social and racial divisions created by exclusionary zoning and other tools, and from the relative inutility of single or limited use districts. However, I will argue that these benefits are eclipsed by some of the problems of form-based code. Form-based code is frequently hailed as a back to the future …

Fear And Loathing: Combating Speculation In Local Communities, Ngai Pindell

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Local governments commonly respond to economic and social pressures on property by using their legal power to regulate land uses. These local entities enact regulations that limit property development and use to maintain attractive communities and orderly growth. This Article argues that government entities should employ their expansive land use powers to limit investor speculation in local markets by restricting the resale of residential housing for three years. Investor speculation, and the upward pressure it places on housing prices, threatens the availability of affordable housing as well as the development of stable neighborhoods. Government regulation of investor speculation mirrors existing, …

Finding A Right To The City: Exploring Property And Community In Brazil And In The United States, Ngai Pindell

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Increasing poor people's access to property and shelter in urban settings raises difficult questions over how to define property and, likewise, how to communicate who is entitled to legal property protections. An international movement--the right to the city--suggests one approach to resolving these questions. This Article primarily explores two principles of the right to the city--the social function of property and the social function of the city--to consider how to better achieve social and economic justice for poor people in urban areas. Using Brazil as one example of a country incorporating these principles within constitutional and statutory provisions and employing …

Locational Justice: Race, Class, And The Grassroots Protest Of Property Takings, Judith E. Koons

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Where Left Meets Right: A Case Study Of Class-Based Economic Discrimination Through Zoning In Salisbury, Maryland, Robin R. Cockey

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Planner's Panacea Or Pandora's Box: A Realistic Assessment Of The Role Of Urban Growth Areas In Achieving Growth Management Goals, Keith W. Dearborn, Ann M. Gygi

Seattle University Law Review

Over the past twenty years, Urban Growth Areas (UGAs) have become a tool of choice to manage growth. Numerous states and local jurisdictions have mandated UGAs in hope of confining urbanization, reducing sprawl, protecting open space and resource lands, and minimizing infrastructure investment. Washington State joined the trend in 1990 when it adopted the Growth Management Act (GMA), which requires certain counties to establish UGAs as a central component of its "bottom up" growth management strategy. Nonetheless, thoughtful criticisms have been offered regarding the utility of UGAs to accomplish intended growth management goals, and concerns have emerged regarding unintended consequences …

Icons And Aliens: Law, Aesthetics, And Environmental Change, Scott Schrader

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Icons and Aliens: Law, Aesthetics, and Environmental Change by John J. Costonis

Book Review. The Zoning Dilemma By D. R. Mandelker, A. Dan Tarlock

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Not In Accordance With A Comprehensive Plan: A Case Study Of Regional Shopping Center Location Conflicts In Lexington, Kentucky, A. Dan Tarlock

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Evolving Judicial Attitudes Toward Local Government Land Use Control, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

The year 1967 begins the second half-century of zoning in the United States. The first comprehensive zoning ordinance was adopted by New York City in 1916. In the fifty years that have elapsed, zoning has become, notwithstanding a growing disenchantment with it on the part of planners, the most widely employed technique of land use control in the United States. At the present time only Houston, of all the major cities in the United States, lacks a zoning ordinance. And, though I have not obtained precise figures, we are all familiar with the increasingly large per centage of small municipalities, …