Land Use Law Commons^™

Downtown Condos For The Rich: Not All Bad, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Some new condominiums in urban neighborhoods are too expensive for anyone but the very wealthy. Buyers of these high-cost units include not only wealthy city residents, but also nonresidents who wish to use housing as an investment rather than a residence. Some commentators use this apparent fact as an argument against new market-rate housing generally; they claim that new housing will be purchased by out-of-town investors rather than used by local residents and that those investors will leave housing units empty, rather than renting them out. A related argument is that, even if market-rate condos are purchased by local residents, …

Will Zoning Fix Itself?, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Typically, zoning artificially limits housing supply, thus increasing housing costs. One possible defense of this system is that zoning can fix itself- that is, that when rents and housing costs become unusually high, politicians will deregulate and thus reduce housing costs. This article suggests that such a happy result is unlikely; instead, where housing costs spiral out of control, voters and politicians are likely to make regulation even more strict out of a fear of gentrification.

The Zoning Straitjacket: The Freezing Of American Neighborhoods Of Single-Family Houses, Robert Ellickson

Indiana Law Journal

Municipal zoning practices profoundly shape urban life in the United States. In regions such as Silicon Valley, regulatory barriers to residential construction have helped raise house prices to roughly ten times the national median. These astronomic prices have prompted some households to move to places, such as Texas, where housing is far cheaper. I have been engaged in an empirical study of zoning practices in Silicon Valley, Greater New Haven, and Greater Austin. This Article presents one of my central findings, induced from those metropolitan areas and elsewhere: local zoning politics typically freezes land uses in an established neighborhood of …

Nine Ways Of Looking At Oklahoma City: An Essay On Sam Anderson’S Boom Town, Rodger D. Citron

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Bringing Judaism Downtown: A Smart Growth Policy For Orthodox Jews, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Until the late 20th century, the most rigorously traditional Jews, haredi Jews (often referred to as “ultra-Orthodox”) tended to congregate in New York City. But as New York became more expensive and haredi population grew due to high birth rates, some haredi Jews (known collectively as “haredim”) moved to small towns and outer suburbs in search of cheaper land, sometimes creating towns dominated by haredim such as Kiryas Joel, New York and Lakewood, New Jersey. As haredi populations have continued to grow, their households now seek undeveloped land outside these enclaves. But as haredim move deeper into the countryside, zoning …

The Limits Of Equity, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

"Equity" is a common buzzword in urban planning circles. However, nearly any land use decision can be justified as more equitable than the alternatives.

Zoning Reformed, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

It has been roughly a century since early advocates of zoning took notice of how crowded and congested housing conditions contributed to the spread of disease (including the then-recent H1N1 pandemic). The U.S. Supreme Court had just rejected on property rights grounds a city ordinance that expressly segregated neighborhoods by race. One hundred years later, the exposure of the weaknesses embedded in our system of public land use regulation during the crises of 2020 presents a unique and timely opportunity for serious consideration of major and minor adjustments to state statutes, local ordinances, and judicial decisions. This Article calls for …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents and Special Thanks.

Extracting Indigenous Jurisdiction On Private Land: The Duty To Consult And Indigenous Relations With Place In Canadian Law, Estair Van Wagner

Articles & Book Chapters

Indigenous relations with land are grounded in place-based legal orders which have been regulating the territories now making up Canada for millennia (Borrows 2010, 2018; McGregor 2010). Judicial consideration of Indigenous relations with place has focused on the duty to consult and accommodate with respect to ‘Crown land’ – lands for which federal and provincial governments are the deemed owners. This emphasis on Crown lands is logical – 89 per cent of land in Canada is held by either the federal or provincial Crown (Neimanis 2013). Indigenous claims often expressly exclude private land, wary of courts’ willingness to unsettle third-party …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

The Battle Of Brandy Creek: How One Black Community Fought Annexation, Tax Revaluation, And Displacement, Mark Dorosin

Journal Publications

The Brandy Creek community is a working class, Black neighborhood located just east of I-95, south of Weldon, North Carolina.' In 2005, this rural neighborhood and its surrounding land were legislatively annexed into the city of Roanoke Rapids as part of a planned economic development project. The decision to pursue legislative annexation allowed city officials to bypass the statutory notice and municipal service requirements of a city-initiated, involuntary annexation. Residents were never informed of Roanoke Rapids' intent to annex the community and had no opportunity to voice their opinions on the issue to town officials. In fact, the community first …

Pore Space Property, Joseph A. Schremmer

Faculty Scholarship

Through modern technology we can use the void pore space of underground rock formations for a growing number of socially beneficial purposes. These run the gamut from unconventional oil and gas production to climate change mitigation. The common law of property and tort, however, has struggled to keep up with advancing technology in this area. Significant questions remain about the nature of property rights in pore space. Of particular interest are the limits, if any, on an owner’s right to use pore space for beneficial purposes when it extends beneath the land of another. For example, may A hydraulically fracture …

Knick V. Township Of Scott: Knick Knack Paddy Whack, Give The Takings Clause A Bone, Gatlin Squires

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

For Richer Or Poorer: Incentivizing Meaningful Investments In Qualified Opportunity Zones, Monica L. Keo

Seattle University Law Review

The wealth disparity in the United States is nothing new. Many have proposed wealth taxes and higher tax rates for large corporations to address income inequality; however, these proposals have been criticized as tax programs that are difficult to administer. Congress passed the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) in 2017 and created a new investment vehicle known as the Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ). The QOZ program incentivizes private investors to invest their capital gains in exchange for a reduction in capital gains tax. The underlying idea of the QOZ program is to utilize a new tool designed to spur …

Yimby And Covid-19, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Discusses whether the COVID-19 pandemic strengthens the case for the pro-housing YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement.

Race And Property Law, K-Sue Park

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter offers an outline for understanding the key role of race in producing property values in the history of the American property law system. It identifies major developments in the mutually formative relationship between race and property in America that made and remade property interests in America through the processes of 1) dispossessing nonwhites, 2) degrading their homelands, communities, and selves, and 3) limiting their efforts to enter public space and occupy or acquire property within the regime thereby established. First, it describes the use of law to create the two most important forms of property in the colonies …

Anem: A Simple Web-Based Platform To Build Stakeholder Understanding Of Groundwater Behavior, Bruce Huber

Journal Articles

Groundwater supports essential societal and ecological functions by acting as a reservoir that buffers against natural variability. Increasing water scarcity and climate variability have resulted in more intensive management of groundwater resources, but groundwater often remains difficult to understand and manage. With this in mind, we develop a simple platform that provides a straightforward, web-based user interface applicable to a wide variety of end-user scenarios. Groundwater behavior is modeled using the method of images in a new R package, anem, which serves as the engine for the web platform, anem-app, produced using R Shiny. Both tools allow users to define …

Climate-Induced Human Displacement And Conservation Lands, Jessica Owley

Articles

As climate change leads to both internal displacement and mass migrations, we need not only new places for people to live but also new locations for infrastructure projects and other public needs. Some of the most attractive areas for these new land uses are currently unoccupied land, including land set aside for conservation. Numerous laws restrict the availability and possible uses of public conservation land. Individual agreements and property restrictions encumber private conservation land, varying in the ease with which the restrictions can be modified. For example, privately protected areas in the United States are often encumbered with perpetual conservation …

Does A Rising Tide Lift All Boats? Sea Level Rise, Land Use, And Property Rights, Laura M. Padilla

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers the competing interests of landowners, governments, and academics; Part I describes the problem-sea level rise and its projected acceleration. Part II details sea level rise physical and economic impacts. Part III discusses a range of adaptation responses to the problem, and Part IV explores the sea level rise-adaptation strategies' potential legal challenges. This Article focuses on California, but the problems, solutions, and challenges pervade coastal communities everywhere.

Wolastoqiyik And Mi’Kmaq Grandmothers - Land/Water Defenders Sharing And Learning Circle: Generating Knowledge For Action, Sherry Pictou, Janet Conway, Angela Day

Reports & Public Policy Documents

This report is a summary of the Grandmothers/Defenders’ stories and are interwoven with corresponding news articles, press releases, and other public documents. This is followed by an overview of some of the critical common issues and importantly, strategies for moving forward proposed by the Grandmothers/Defenders.

The Grandmother’s Report is a collection of stories told by Wolastoqiyik Grandmother/Defenders against the Sisson Mine in New Brunswick and Mi’kmaq Grandmothers against the Alton Gas project in Nova Scotia at the event, Indigenous Grandmothers Sharing and Learning Circle: Generating Knowledge for Action, held at the Tatamagouche Centre in Nova Scotia, January 26 to 27, …

Embedded Property, Douglas C. Harris

All Faculty Publications

The institution of property arises in the tension between autonomy and community. It serves not simply to demarcate spaces of individual control and authority, but also to balance individual with collective interests. Private property and common property emphasize individual and collective interests, respectively, but the bifurcation may not be as stark as it appears. Condominium constructs separate titles to individual units, and these private interests are carefully mapped in a constituting plan that marks their boundaries. Democratic rights, usually conveyed in the form of shares in a condominium corporation, are the third element of ownership within condominium. The analysis reveals …

Homeowners’ Lived Experience In Developing And Using Accessory Dwelling Units In Ireland, Geraldine Mary Hurley

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Researchers have explored the role of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) as a form of housing since at least the 1970s. Such exploration has taken place across a number of different disciplines, including gerontology, housing affordability, and urban planning. The literature tends to focus on specific policies, however, rather than on the lived experience of the homeowners impacted by those policies. Ireland’s national and local governments have yet to acknowledge the potential use of ADUs as a contributing solution to ongoing problems with housing supply, housing affordability, and homelessness, despite a government-declared national housing crisis. Formal research on ADUs in the …

Bridges To A New Era: A Report On The Past, Present, And Potential Future Of Tribal Co-Management On Federal Public Lands, Monte Mills, Martin Nie

Articles

Deep ancestral and traditional connections tie many Native Nations to the federal government’s public lands. The removal of these lands from indigenous control, their acquisition by the federal government, and the federal government’s approach to their management are largely premised upon the erasure or marginalization of those connections. Both physically and legally, Indian tribes have been removed from the landscapes they occupied since time immemorial. Rather than centering, honoring, and using those connections, the current discussion of tribal co-management of federal public lands is mostly bereft of this full legal and historical context.

Compounding these limitations is the considerable discretion …

Disadvantaged Unincorporated Communities And The Struggle For Water Justice In California, Jonathan K. London, Amanda L. Fencl, Sara Watterson, Yasmina Choueiri, Phoebe Seaton, Jennifer Jarin, Mia Dawson, Alfonso Aranda, Aaron King, Peter Nguyen, Camille Pannu, Laurel Firestone, Colin Bailey

Faculty Scholarship

This article maps a meshwork of formal and informal elements of places called Disadvantaged Unincorporated Communities (DUCs) to understand the role of informality in producing unjust access to safe drinking water in California’s San Joaquin Valley. It examines the spatial, racial, and class-based dimensions of informality. The paper aims to both enrich the literature on informality studies and use the concept of informality to expand research on DUCs and water access. We use socio-spatial analyses of the relationships between informality and water justice to reach the following conclusions: DUCs face severe problems in access to safe drinking water; disparities in …

The Compensation Constraint And The Scope Of The Takings Clause, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The idea I wish to explore in this Essay is whether the established methods for determining just compensation can shed light on the meaning of other issues that arise in litigation under the Takings Clause. Specifically, is it possible to “reverse engineer” the Takings Clause by reasoning from settled understandings about how to determine just compensation in order to reach certain conclusions about when the Clause applies, what interests in private property are covered by the Clause, and what does it mean to take such property?

The proposed exercise is positive or descriptive in nature rather than normative. The hypothesis …

Towards A Law Of Inclusive Planning: A Response To “Fair Housing For A Non-Sexist City”, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Noah Kazis’s important article, Fair Housing for a Non-sexist City, shows how law shapes the contours of neighborhoods and embeds forms of inequality, and how fair housing law can provide a remedy. Kazis surfaces two dimensions of housing that generate inequality and that are sometimes invisible. Kazis highlights the role of planning and design rules – the seemingly identity-neutral zoning, code enforcement, and land-use decisions that act as a form of law. Kazis also reveals how gendered norms underlie those rules and policies. These aspects of Kazis’s project link to commentary on the often invisible, gendered norms that shape …

Regaining Control Over The Climate Change Narrative: How To Stop Right-Wing Populism From Eroding Rule Of Law In The Climate Struggle In India, Binit Agrawal

Fordham Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

Innovative Regulatory And Financial Parameters For Advancing Carbon Capture And Storage Technologies, Zen Makuch, Slavina Georgieva & Behdeen Oraee-Mirzamani

Fordham Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

Textiles As A Source Of Microfiber Pollution And Potential Solutions, Lea M. Elston

Fordham Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lessons From Renewable Energy Diffusion For Carbon Dioxide Removal Development, Anthony E. Chavez

Fordham Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.