Five years ago, New Orleans resident Mandy Pumilia was concerned about the number of apparently blighted structures in her neighborhood, known as Bywater, where she is currently vice president of the neighborhood association. Despite post-Katrina recovery efforts, it was hard to identify and track truly troubled properties, and she didn’t have access to city data that could have helped. Instead, she built her own Google spreadsheet and filled it in with the results of her own research and legwork. “It was an arduous process,” she recalls. And despite her tech savvy and determination, it was a solution with limits: it wasn’t easy to share the information beyond people she knew directly, and keeping up with property-specific city hearings was a chore.

Since then, a web app called BlightStatus (blightstatus.nola.gov) has become a valuable new tool for her neighborhood recovery efforts. Created in 2012 by Code for America, a nonprofit specializing in open-source projects that benefit local government, BlightStatus makes it simpler for citizens like Pumilia to access property details, more deeply engaging them in managing blight and other planning challenges. The effort caught the attention of other cities and led to a spinoff startup called Civic Insight, which is now deploying its technology in Dallas, Atlanta, Palo Alto, Sacramento, and other places.

In New Orleans, BlightStatus aggregates information on inspections, code complaints, hearings, judgments, foreclosures, and more. This data is generally siloed or hard to access, but the app gathers and updates most of it daily. Users can search by address or use an interactive map to search at the neighborhood or citywide level. Particularly useful: a “watch list” feature that lets someone like Pumilia keep tabs on specific properties, and sends timely alerts about hearings and other developments. “And it makes it easier for me to empower other residents,” she adds, “so I’m not the only keeper of information.”

When other cities noticed New Orleans’ embrace of the app and expressed interest in a similar tool, Code for America adapted the technology to work elsewhere. “We seemed to hit a nerve,” says Eddie Tejeda, one of the BlightStatus creators. Specifics varied from place to place, but grappling with official property data was clearly a widespread frustration. Lots of people want information about buildings and property, Tejeda continues, but what’s available is often “really hard to work with”; digging through it requires knowledge and experience.

With an investment from the Knight Foundation, the group formed Civic Insight in 2013, using their New Orleans work as a template that could be scaled for other cities large and small, with varied needs and data sets. (Setup and annual subscription-like fees vary by population: roughly $1,000 to $10,000 for the base rate plus 20 to 70 cents per capita.) Among its newer clients, Dallas is proving a particularly important case study. A sprawling metropolis with wildly diverse neighborhoods, from pricey and thriving to severely economically challenged, it’s helping demonstrate that this approach to open-data technology isn’t just for triage in a place like post-Katrina New Orleans.

The connection came via Habitat for Humanity. The nonprofit’s New Orleans chapter has been an enthusiastic user of BlightStatus. Members passed the word to colleagues in Dallas, where the city has been grappling with strategies for using data to define, track, and address blight and related issues, such as identifying problem landlords. Launched in late 2014 with data similar to the information collected in New Orleans, the Dallas version will incorporate additional crime and tax-related statistics that locals want to access more readily, says Theresa O’Donnell, the city’s chief planning officer, who spoke about the app at the Lincoln Institute’s Big City Planning Directors conference in Cambridge in October 2014. “As we get these programs up and started,” she says, “we can rely more on citizens to let us know if [our blight efforts] are working or not.”

Atlanta and Sacramento are rolling out their own programs to make use of the app this year, and other Civic Insight efforts are forthcoming in Fort Worth, Texas, and elsewhere. Client goals aren’t limited to blight issues, notes Tejeda, now Civic Insight’s CEO: in Palo Alto, where zoning, development, and construction are hot topics, architects and homeowners use the app to keep up with permitting processes. That flexibility is by intent. “It’s relatively quick for us to map [raw data] to our application,” he explains. “The role we play is being the translator between what the city has, and what the public needs.” (The app is also built to accommodate new data sets—and it’s no surprise that active citizens like Pumilia, in New Orleans, have lots of suggestions that Civic Insight is working to accommodate.)

Comprehensive data sets and other digital tools have helped to guide planners and other city officials for years, but what Civic Insight is up to is the next logical step. “There’s this great opportunity to harness this data—sort of hidden data, for many cities—and bring it to life” in ways that are useful to citizens and planners alike, points out Lincoln Institute fellow Peter Pollock, the former head of planning in Boulder, Colorado.

Such accessibility matters because policy makers must “coproduce the good city” with residents, Pollock continues. “Planners are in the business of harnessing community energy around a vision for the future,” he says. That means zoning and permitting—but also maintenance and compliance. “It’s not just building the city; it’s care and feeding of the city over time.”

Still, the Civic Insight proposition may seem confusing at first: How does a city benefit by hoping citizens will pore over information that it already owns? But that’s the point. Opening up data to people who really know the neighborhoods where they live and work amounts to a kind of crowd-sourcing strategy for planning-level city maintenance.

Just ask Pumilia. This is the essence of what she was trying to do in New Orleans with her DIY spreadsheet and a whole lot of grit a few years ago. Now she can monitor her neighborhood more easily and direct others to BlightStatus so they too can quickly round up the information they need and prod the city about troublesome properties.

Dipping into the data as we speak, she calls up the history of one local address: “So there are one, two, three, four, five cases against this property,” she says. In short, she has just whipped up a ready-made dossier of neglect—one that helped persuade officials to start a process that should lead to the auction of that property.

Sometimes, Pumilia says with a laugh, “It requires citizen action to inspire people to do their jobs.”

We are inaugurating our fourteenth volume year of Land Lines with a new look and feel—more color, more articles, more news about our faculty, and more announcements about our courses, publications and special projects.

In the past five years our educational programs have expanded to reach policy makers and practitioners in federal, state and local government throughout the United States and in many countries of Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Our faculty has developed a broad range of introductory and advanced professional development courses that explore both the theory and practice of land and tax policy.

The Institute’s Department of Valuation and Taxation, chaired by Joan Youngman, has three major goals: improving public and scholarly debate on the taxation of land value; addressing the economic impact, feasibility, political acceptability, and appropriate use of value-based taxes; and contributing to a better understanding of the valuation process for tax purposes. The local property tax, as the primary value-based tax in the United States, is a major focus of the Institute’s work, but we analyze a variety of revenue instruments, particularly with regard to their treatment of land value increments attributable to public investment.

The Department of Planning and Development, cochaired by Rosalind Greenstein and Armando Carbonell, links interests in the theory and practice of planning with an understanding of how land markets operate. Our concerns focus on urban and regional planning and design, land conservation, urban redevelopment, and the behavior of land markets. We are particularly interested in the integration of urban and environmental systems; the planning process and its outcomes; the interplay of public and private roles in decisions involving land policy and land use; the effect of land markets and the institutions that support them on the city and its residents; and the role of land and real estate in the larger economy and in poverty alleviation.

Building on our experiences in Latin America since 1993, Martim Smolka directs the Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean in developing activities oriented toward both scholars and practitioners, including legislative and executive policy officials and upper-level technical staff. Programs focus on five priority topics: value capture policies and implementation of instruments to mobilize land value increments; property taxation systems that can meet the needs of rapid urbanization; regulatory environments supporting large-scale urban intervention; security of tenure, regularization and urban upgrading programs; and urban land market forces, including spatial and social segregation, speculation, vacant land and related issues.

Each issue of Land Lines will continue to feature articles by faculty who share the ideas discussed and lessons learned in Institute-sponsored courses. In addition, we will announce upcoming courses, lectures and other programs that are open to a general audience, and we will keep you informed about new publications, web-based programs and other resources that address our work in land and tax policy.

While the issue of managing suburban growth has long been on the Lincoln Institute’s agenda, “sprawl” is now receiving a great deal of attention from citizens, policy analysts and policymakers, as well as the popular press. However, crafting policies to respond to suburban growth is extremely difficult for a variety of reasons.

First, we lack a public consensus about what sprawl is. Even paraphrasing former US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “. . . but I know it when I see it” does not work in this case. For example, one often hears from anti-sprawl activists that they do not want their community to be “another Los Angeles.” However, Los Angeles is more densely populated today than it was 30 years ago.

Dowell Myers and Alicia Kitsuse report that “the Los Angeles urbanized area (the region excluding mountains and deserts) has the highest gross population densities among the 20 largest metropolitan regions, higher even than New York.”1 Exploring deeper, one finds that “Los Angeles” is code for a variety of social problems that are concentrated in our nation’s cities, such as urban crime, teenage pregnancy, poverty, persistent unemployment, and a variety of other concerns, not the least of which is the organization of uses in metropolitan space.

A second challenge to crafting policies to respond to suburban growth is the threat to anticipated economic gain by some of those who own undeveloped land on the fringes of metropolitan areas. For example, one can imagine the great interest these landowners would have in negotiations to redraw urban growth boundaries. The line on the map can have significant monetary implications for a parcel depending on which side of the line it lands.

A third challenge is the variety of existing policies and laws that have encouraged suburban growth over the past 50 years. In a recent Institute-supported study, Patricia Burgess and Thomas Bier make a strong case that governmental fragmentation on two fronts contributes to a policy environment that supports sprawl.2 Fragmentation between levels of government makes regional planning approaches difficult, while fragmentation across functional agencies impedes comprehensive solutions. In another study, Joseph Gyourko and Richard Voith have argued that the combination of the federal mortgage interest deductions and local-level exclusionary zoning have encouraged low-density residential development in jurisdictions surrounding central cities.3

Finally, there is little agreement about desired future development patterns. Thus, if the forces that create sprawl are based on a combination of federal, state and local policies, if our existing landscape reflects both public and private actions, and if the desired future is unclear, how does one even begin to address the issue? The Lincoln Institute’s mission is to contribute to and improve the quality of debate about land policies. Toward that end, our work on sprawl is multi-dimensional, focusing on educational programs for policy officials at the federal, state and local levels.

Programs for Federal and State Officials

Land use issues have increased in importance on the federal policy agenda, and the Institute has begun working with Region 1 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), based in Boston, to develop a training course for senior administrators. Many staff at EPA are not schooled in land use planning, but their work in traditional EPA areas such as water or air quality requires that they pay attention to land use issues.

Harvey Jacobs, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, developed and taught a course to two groups of EPA administrators in the fall of 1998. Response to the two-day program, which included the historical and institutional context of land use planning, was so positive that the EPA asked the Institute to offer this program annually as part of EPA’s required orientation for new administrators.

At the state level, the Institute has recently supported programs to facilitate information exchanges among legislators and planning directors. Patricia Salkin of the Government Law Center at the Albany Law School has researched lessons to be learned from states that attempted state-level legislation on growth management, but failed. Among her findings was the lack of in-depth knowledge among state legislators and executive-level policymakers about the causes and consequences of suburban sprawl. In order for any kind of growth management legislation to be passed successfully, sponsorship is needed by the appropriate legislator. Depending on the state, this might be the chair of the Local Affairs Committee or a different committee leader.

In an attempt to respond to this need for better understanding about sprawl on the part of legislators and their staffs, the Lincoln Institute and the Albany Law School cosponsored a briefing session in February 1999, in Albany. It coincided with the legislative session and, fortuitously, was held on the day of a press conference announcing that the bipartisan “Smart Growth Economic Competitiveness Act of 1999” had been filed in both houses of the New York legislature. The bill includes three key provisions:

(1) It charges the Governor to create an inter-agency council to review existing policies related to growth and development.

(2) It creates a task force to study the issue and come up with recommendations.

(3) It asks the Governor to provide grants for regional compact efforts.

National experts on sprawl, state legislators and commissioners, and Mayor William A. Johnson of Rochester and members of his staff exchanged up-to-date information on related state-level efforts, as well as possible resources for their continued work on this issue. The briefing session gave prominence to the issue of growth management at an important juncture in the state’s history. Perhaps most useful to the legislators and other senior-level policymakers was the neutral forum that the briefing provided for frank discussion of the complexities of “smart growth.” While the event was designed with legislators in mind, it is clear that participants from the executive branch who attended the briefing session also benefited.

In another attempt to target our educational programs to key decision makers, the Lincoln Institute, the Regional Plan Association (RPA) and the New Jersey State Planning Commission cosponsored a leadership retreat for state planning directors from ten of the eleven Northeast states. The directors, or in states without a state planning director a representative from the executive branch, met in Princeton in March for a day characterized by peer-to-peer training.

States with nascent state-level efforts were able to learn from those with more institutionalized programs. While Delaware is as different from New York as Connecticut is from Maine, their state officials were able to benefit enormously from stepping outside their individual political, geographic and economic contexts and considering alternative solutions to similar problems. While each state must construct strategies appropriate to its own needs, all states face many common concerns.

The gathering also provided an opportunity to contribute to a larger, region-wide planning effort. Among the initiatives presented by Robert Yaro, executive director of RPA, was Amtrak’s introduction of high-speed rail service between Boston and Washington, DC, which may leverage substantial economic growth for cities along the corridor. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington will clearly benefit from rapid, comfortable transportation between terminals. However, it may be in smaller cities such as Providence, Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, Newark, Trenton and Wilmington where high-speed rail could have a far greater impact. Frequent service to these cities, where airline connections are limited, could bring new investment as well as increased access to other employment centers for their residents.

RPA is drafting a proposal to provide the analysis and preliminary recommendations needed to evaluate the benefits of the Amtrak service. The state planning officers at the Princeton meeting felt that the initiative would be of great interest to their governors and agreed to take the RPA proposal back to their states in an effort to broaden the coalition in support of Amtrak’s high-speed rail service in the Northeast Corridor.

Programs for Local Officials and Community-Based Organizations

At the local level, strategies to address suburban sprawl also need to focus on development and redevelopment in the cities, and the Institute is expanding its course offerings to groups long interested in urban policy. Last November, the Institute cosponsored “Breaking Barriers, Building Partnerships: Urban Vacant Land Redevelopment” with the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations. Meeting in Boston, staff from community development corporations and private and non-profit lenders explored strategies for bringing underutilized land back into use. A similar group gathered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in May for a workshop cosponsored by the North Carolina Community Development Initiative and the Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise. The hands-on training was designed to give participants experience in generating alternative financing strategies for urban redevelopment

In another effort in the Southeast, the Lincoln Institute provided support to Spelman College as part of an effort to contribute to the redevelopment of its neighborhood in Atlanta. In June, Spelman and its partners from the Atlantic University Center held a community summit as part of a larger initiative to identify both neighborhood needs and university-community strategies to address those needs.

Our experiences in these programs confirm the complex factors influencing current development patterns: the variety of social, economic, technological and political forces; complex and sometimes conflicting policies at the local, state and federal levels; and the actions of those in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Through this work we have come to understand the need for basic information about the broader issue of land markets. In particular we are interested in how and why land markets operate as they do and the implications of land market activity on various public and private stakeholders. Future curriculum development efforts in this area will concentrate on materials to help policymakers and citizens gain a better appreciation of these markets. In doing so, we will have a fuller understanding of the sprawl issue: what causes sprawl, where interventions will be effective, and the characteristics of successful interventions.

Rosalind Greenstein is a senior fellow and director of the program in land markets at the Lincoln Institute.

Notes

1. Myers, Dowell, and Alicia Kitsuse, “The Debate over Future Density of Development: An Interpretive Review.” Lincoln Institute Working Paper, 1999: 22.

2. Burgess, Patricia, and Thomas Bier, “Public Policy and ‘Rural Sprawl’: Lessons from Northeast Ohio.” Lincoln Institute Working Paper, 1998.

3. Gyourko, Joseph, and Richard Voith, “The Tax Treatment of Housing and Its Effects on Bounded and Unbounded Communities.” Lincoln Institute Working Paper, 1999.

Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 6 del libro Perspectivas urbanas: Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.

La descentralización del estado, el crecimiento de las empresas y la participación comunitaria en los asuntos públicos, están presentando nuevos retos para el desarrollo de las instituciones enfocadas en las políticas de tierras y su implementación en a través de América Latina. Los alcaldes y consejos locales están asumiendo nuevas responsabilidades en las áreas de protección ambiental, transporte urbano, infraestructura básica, financiamiento local, servicios sociales y desarrollo económico. Al mismo tiempo, las empresas y organizaciones civiles encuentran nuevas vías para asegurar la atención pública de sus exigencias mediante el urbanismo participativo, la administración de presupuestos, la cofinanciación y el control a nivel local.

De este modo, la descentralización y participación democrática están construyendo un medio en el cual las alianzas publico-privadas pueden desarrollar proyectos conjuntos de interés común tanto para individuos como para el gobierno. Sin embargo, a muchas instituciones les falta mucho para adaptarse totalmente a sus nuevos papeles de planificación, regulación y evaluación.

Las culturas de apatía y desconfianza hacia el gobierno arraigadas desde hace mucho tiempo, deben transformarse en una confianza común capaz de movilizar las mejores tradiciones comunitarias de los latinoamericanos. El patronazgo político y económico y la corrupción del estado, deben reemplazarse por responsabilidad política y administrativa. Leyes municipales, de contratación y de administración obsoletas aún restringen la capacidad tanto de los gobiernos locales como de la sociedad civil de interactuar creativamente por medio de arreglos contractuales y de cofinanciación.

Los retos institucionales y los dilemas de políticas que actualmente enfrenta el Área Metropolitana de San Salvador (AMSS) ilustran las transformaciones que ocurren a lo largo de la región. Después de años de guerra civil, los salvadoreños firmaron un acuerdo de paz en 1992 que proporcionó un marco de competencia real entre los partidos políticos y estimuló una participación más activa por parte de las empresas, las organizaciones no gubernamentales (ONGs) y las organizaciones comunitarias. La AMSS comprende varias municipalidades, algunas de ellas dirigidas por alcaldes de partidos de oposición al gobierno central. El cuerpo coordinador del AMSS es el Consejo de Alcaldes, que a su vez es dirigido por la Oficina Metropolitana de Planificación.

Con asistencia técnica de ONGs internacionales, la AMSS ha preparado un plan integral de desarrollo. Instrumentos contemporáneos de planificación urbana tales como la macrozonificación, los impuestos a la propiedad de tasa variable, la recuperación de plusvalías para la protección del medio ambiente, los consorcios público-privados y los coeficientes de uso de suelo están siendo considerados en la implementación de políticas de tierra, de desarrollo y de protección del medio ambiente. De hecho, los salvadoreños tienen el apoyo de varios centros de investigación que están familiarizados con el uso e impacto de estos y otros instrumentos en otras partes del mundo. Actualmente, su necesidad fundamental es movilizar a los protagonistas metropolitanos, tanto públicos como privados, en dirección a políticas comunes y desarrollar instrumentos compartidos para su aplicación.

Cerca del final, PRISMA, una prominente ONG salvadoreña y centro urbano de investigación, invitó al Instituto Lincoln a desarrollar un taller conjunto sobre herramientas de administración urbana, mecanismos de coordinación intergubernamental para áreas metropolitanas e iniciativas público-privadas para ciudades sustentables. El taller, llevado a cabo en El Salvador en octubre, contó con la participación de representantes de alta jerarquía en el gobierno central, así como alcaldes, funcionarios de planificación y otras autoridades del AMSS; así como representantes de asociaciones de construcción y desarrollo y algunas instituciones y organizaciones comunitarias.

Los oradores del Instituto Lincoln presentaron experiencias de Taiwan, Filipinas, México y otros países de América Latina que destacaron las políticas e instrumentos capaces de armonizar los intereses de diversos inversionistas urbanos y coordinar varios niveles de gobierno para el uso de la tierra y objetivos de desarrollo urbano. Los salvadoreños explicaron sus preocupaciones inmediatas, como la falta de coordinación intergubernamental para proteger el ambiente urbano, las discontinuidades en las medidas políticas, arbitrariedades a todos los niveles del gobierno e incertidumbres legales y administrativas.

Los participantes del taller concluyeron que para fomentar el nuevo marco legal e institucional que busca el AMSS, los salvadoreños necesitan ampliar las discusiones a otros protagonistas urbanos. También necesitan continuar trabajando con instituciones como el Instituto Lincoln, que tienen la confianza y credibilidad para presentar políticas de administración de tierra reconocidas internacionalmente y pueden ayudar a construir consenso entre intereses públicos y privados.

Mario Lungo es investigador en PRISMA, el Programa Salvadoreño de Investigación y Medio Ambiente; Alejandra Mortarini es la directora de los programas para Latinoamérica y el Caribe del Instituto Lincoln; y el abogado colombiano Fernando Rojas, es miembro visitante del instituto este año.

Local governments exercise greater land use authority in the United States than in any other advanced democracy. Yet local governments have themselves evolved piecemeal in the typical U.S. metropolitan area, producing a pattern of fragmented authority. Most notably, as metropolitan areas have exploded outward, the local government system has adapted mainly by creating new suburbs and single-function districts rather than by expanding the boundaries of existing central cities.

Illustratively, when Robert Wood studied the New York metropolitan region in the late 1950s, he counted roughly 1,400 local governments. When Jameson Doig and Michael Danielson examined the same region in the early 1980s, the number had grown to 2,200, of which more than 800 exercised land use regulatory authority.

Critics levy numerous charges against this system. Above all, they contend it invites parochialism and, in dealing with issues of regional scale, gridlock. These failings are particularly apparent when the potential ends of land use policy are controversial. But they are visible in many other circumstances as well—wherever, for example, there is substantial risk that the instruments of policy (from regional overrides of local zoning to the siting of new incinerators) will be highly controversial and no consensus has yet emerged about the severity of a crisis that might justify accepting such risk.

In other respects, however, the system is both adaptive and finely tuned to citizen desires. Numerous functions have been shifted from localities to regional authorities and higher levels of government in recent decades, yet the changes have been highly selective and incremental.

When broad agreement has emerged that a particular function—such as mass transit or environmental protection—requires decisionmaking and management at supra-local scale, the political leaders in many metropolitan areas have frequently crafted new institutional arrangements. They have typically defined the new institutions quite precisely, however, so as to avoid sapping local authority any more than necessary to deal with the specific problems that gave rise to the consensus for change. Where large numbers of voters still favor local control, moreover—as, preeminently, in the field of land use regulation—metropolitan-area political leaders have taken great care to avoid disturbing it.

To be sure, certain objectives are all but impossible to realize through this piecemeal, consensus-dependent mode of institutional adaptation (most notably, greater class and racial integration at regional scale, and prevention of urban sprawl). But others (e.g., the preservation of neighborhood character and vigorous grassroots democracy) are accomplished much more reliably than would be likely in a more “rationalized” system.

Balancing Communal and Individualistic Values

Controversies about this system invariably reflect a mix of conflicting interests and values. Since a considerable body of scholarship exists on the interests most commonly in dispute, let us concentrate here on the values.

Americans consider land use issues within the framework of two disparate ideologies: one communal and egalitarian, the other individualistic and disposed to leave distributional outcomes to the marketplace. In any given controversy, self-interested groups organize their briefs around aspects of one or the other of these ideologies. So it is easy to miss the crucial fact that both enjoy near-consensual support. Americans favor both private capitalism and government action to further collective values–each in its place. The disputes typically arise in situations where parties disagree about which ideology ought to take precedence or about how the differing ideological claims should be balanced.

The land use arena is chock full of such points. Ownership is private. Most development initiative is private. And tradition favors viewing land as a market commodity. But most human activities take place on land; the byproducts of land use profoundly affect every aspect of the human environment; and no one is an owner every place he or she goes. So everyone has a powerful stake in the preservation of some common spaces, in society’s rules for behavior in such spaces, and in some regulation of land use “overspill” effects.

Owners themselves, moreover, are eager for collective services. The value of urban real estate hinges critically on the availability and quality of such services, from highway access to public safety to education. In addition, neighborhood characteristics and the level of investor confidence in the neighborhood’s future profoundly affect real estate values. As a result, whether their aim is development or simply enjoyment of what they already have, property owners are drawn inevitably to the public realm.

Within the public realm, however, communal values–including the presumption of equal access to collective services regardless of income or wealth–predominate. This poses a severe problem for relatively affluent property owners who are reluctant to trigger wide egalitarian claims.

The fragmentation of metropolitan areas into independent suburbs, a problem for some, is for these voters a solution. It provides a means of confining the application of communal norms within relatively small population groups. And it makes available to such groups an instrument of extraordinary power for the pursuit and preservation of homogeneity: land use regulation.

Public Regulation vs Market Forces

Pressures have built in recent decades, nonetheless, for public land use action on a wider scale. Some of these pressures (e.g., for major infrastructure investments and for environmental protection) come largely from property owners themselves and do not pose much redistributive threat even when higher-level governments assume responsibility for action. Nearly all of the centralization that has occurred has been in response to pressures of this sort.

A second set of pressures for supra-local action has come primarily from less favored groups and their political representatives, seeking fiscal equalization and residential integration. There have been considerable shifts of money in response to these pressures. But resistance has been fierce to reforms that might force racial or class integration at the neighborhood level. With rare exceptions it has been successful.

The reform idea with the greatest apparent potential to override local land use parochialism would be a shift of some land use regulatory authority to the state level. Movement in this direction occurred in about one-quarter of the states during the 1970s and 1980s. Except in the notable cases of Oregon and Florida, however, the changes were slight, and the historic pattern of local land use autonomy remained firmly entrenched. Concerns about growth, moreover, rather than concerns about equality or integration drove these state land use reforms. Consequently, with weak real estate markets in the early 1990s interest in them has waned.

The question remains whether shifting land use authority from the local to the state level, if it does occur, will be likely to produce more egalitarian and integrationist outcomes than would the existing pattern of fragmented land use governance. One can plausibly argue that it will, stressing that egalitarian norms tend to prevail within (even if not between) U.S. public jurisdictions. Thinking of the immediate future, however, the likelihood is that such shifts will be rare and that, even when they occur, their egalitarian impacts will be meager.

For better or worse, the overwhelming trend of the 1990s, at all levels of government, is toward greater market deference rather than more vigorous public action to achieve redistributive objectives.

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Alan Altshuler is professor in urban policy and planning and director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is also a faculty associate of the Lincoln Institute, which distributes several of his publications. This article is reprinted with permission from the 1995-96 Annual Report of the Taubman Center.

For the past several years, the Lincoln Institute has been collaborating with the Loeb Fellowship Program based at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. The program was established in 1970 through the generosity of Harvard alumnus John L. Loeb to allow mid-career professionals to study independently and gain additional tools to help revitalize the built and natural environment. The 2001-2002 Loeb Fellows took their end-of-the-year class trip to Cuba in mid-June, including two days in Santiago de Cuba and four in Havana, with a side trip from Havana to Trinidad and destinations in between.

With its neoclassical facades, white cobbles, Caribbean clouds and pastel paint, Trinidad is frozen in time like a watercolor postcard. Because Cuba’s architectural heritage is the focus of growing international attention and it’s not threatened by waves of new construction, the future of the past seems assured. The future itself is much more difficult to find. As our Loeb Fellowship group searched for clues in three cities and parts of the countryside, we found that despite economic stagnation and international political tension Cubans are hard at work on a future that is uniquely theirs.

An influx of tourist dollars and an aggressive, uniquely Cuban preservation campaign have begun to seize the riches of Old Havana from the jaws of benign neglect. After at least one bad experience with new construction, the Office of the City Historian, which coordinates the impressive large-scale restoration and revitalization of Old Havana, is still grappling with the problem of integrating the new with the historic. One way of addressing the problem is to closely oversee the design of block-sized developments. We walked by one large, modern parking structure inside Old Havana that will be rebuilt as a multi-use building, with parking beside it, according to a design intended to replicate the scale and some of the monumental features of a colonial convent that once stood on the site. Although some residents are being relocated here and elsewhere, many are returning to their homes after their neighborhoods are rehabilitated.

Now considered a model for financing rehabilitation efforts in other districts of the city, the renewal of Old Havana is based on a system of taxes and joint ventures that includes revenues from the private enterprises profiting from restoration-related tourism. The Office’s US$50 million-per-year budget is divided between construction and social supports for Cubans living within the boundaries of the rehabilitation zone. This can be thought of as a system of “value capture,” long a topic of interest at the Lincoln Institute.

Julio César Pérez, a Cuban architect, urban designer and advocate for community-based planning, was a member of our Loeb Fellowship class. With his special perspective as a local practitioner, he showed our group some favorite examples among the rich legacy of pre-revolutionary Deco and Modern architecture in Havana. Five-story gems are set among the very mixed cityscape of central Havana, which also includes the 28-story Edificio Focsa, with its 375 apartment units, built in the twilight of the Batista years.

On the heels of the international style housing blocks and casinos of the 1950s, the revolution brought its own form of land use revision. Julio told a story of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro playing a game of congratulatory post-revolution golf on the vast green of the former Havana Country Club. “How can we make good use of this land?” they mused, according to the legend. The results of their conversation are the grandly metaphoric and mostly unfinished National Schools of Art designed by Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garratti and Roberto Gottardi. Their stance is deliberately indifferent to the clubhouse or the plan of the golf course, treating the open area as if it were a large meadow in the wilderness. The buildings are slated for restoration, a project made more complicated by poor siting and hydrological problems.

Julio also singled out more recent examples of large-scale construction in Havana, such as the Melia Cohiba Hotel with its bulky, corporate arch and the Miramar Trade Center, a commercial (dollar) mall across the street. These expensive projects are not only design failures, but also miss the relationship of the site with the sea and the possibility for creating a new quality of place in a developing district.

With the stalled economy and international stalemate of the 1990s, Cuban architect and planner Miguel Coyula and his colleagues have made use of the time and materials at hand to take a more thoughtful approach to land use and development. While vertical cities of steel and glass are popping up on a fast track and enormous scale in cities around the world, one of the world’s largest scale city models is being built out of discarded cigar boxes in Havana. This breathtaking miniature landscape was conceived as an aid to planning and an anchor for the efforts of the Group for the Integrated Development of the Capital (GDIC), which has been advising the city government on planning matters since 1988.

The 1:1000 model of greater Havana has been evolving piece by fitted piece for most of the last decade, and now covers 112 square meters or about a quarter of a basketball court. The model is housed in a specially designed, daylight-filled pavilion in the Mirarmar area near the center of the city, where drop-in visitors can circulate around and above the model on the broad floor and ramping mezzanine levels. Scale models of virtually every structure in the city are mounted on the wood topographical base. The buildings are color-coded to show development at different stages in history: colonial, pre-revolutionary modern (1900-1958) and post-revolutionary.

Miguel describes one construction project, a high-rise for the Committee for Economic Collaboration (CECE), which was cancelled because the model showed it was clearly out of scale for its location in central Havana. The decision seems to be a milestone because it was a very real project and also symbolic of a determination to build with environmental sensitivity—despite pressures to accommodate foreign investors in cash-strapped Cuba.

The primary mission of the GDIC is intimately familiar to Americans involved in planning inside major cities: start with neighborhoods. The group has run a series of “neighborhood transformation workshops” for local residents guided by professional designers and planners, selected from the same area when possible. These projects capture the spirit of the international community design movement, a 45-year-old, U.S.-linked tradition in which designers work directly in the interest of area residents. Since both the hard times of the post-Soviet 1990s and the U.S. embargo began taking their huge economic toll on Cuba, these workshops have gained in significance. They have brought planning and economic development together in a new local context, with neighborhoods tackling projects like urban farming and manufacturing building materials from recycled rubble.

The neighborhood transformation workshops and similar initiatives over the last 20 years have helped to bridge the Cuban revolutionary imperative of equal treatment for all and the very human imperative of making decisions about family, community and daily life. Another example is Architects for the Community, a national civic sector community design practice involved in town construction and environmental planning as well as low-fee design services for individual families. Built on the theories of Argentinean architect Rodolfo Livingston, the practice promotes a direct relationship between the user and the architect while building sustainability and contextual sensitivity into each construction project. Julio worked with the practice for five years before coming to Harvard and he presented a paper with Kathleen Dorgan, another member of the Loeb class, at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture conference in Cuba last spring. As an advocate for more humane and thoughtful land use and building design in his country, Julio is among a number of Cuban architects concerned with traditional values of craft and environmentally appropriate design.

Considering efforts like these, there is hope for a future of construction based on a fine calibration of scale, carefully considered relationships between built fabric and natural features of the surroundings, as well as the comfort and pleasure of the users. The challenge is to find the economic and regulatory means to support appropriate construction. So far, the state has maintained control of land use through direct and almost exclusive ownership, negotiating leases for some private and foreign investment through a delicate and extremely tenuous web of economic and legal formulas for valuing the parcels involved. As the economy becomes tied to the influx of outside currencies, these leases are likely to evolve into more predictable and transparent transactions. Perhaps land sales and heftier taxation are not far behind.

With the coming of foreign investment and the pressures to open up to even more, there will be ample opportunity in the future to be hijacked by land use decisions that are driven by the profit margins of distant organizations, and that would be an unfortunate addition to Cuba’s historic burden. Because, despite the beauty of its landscapes and cityscapes, Cuba is a map of victimization—by colonial conquest, crass economic exploitation, revolutionary confrontation, and brutal Soviet-style development.

The Loeb Fellows got an overview of intense nationalism built upon a deep and diverse culture, cosmopolitan history and the very real achievements of the last 40 years. Cuba is a place of great hardship and also enormous potential, for Cubans and for the rest of the world. We hope that the future does not hold only exploitation and cultural degradation when the barriers to trade and international travel finally fall. We also hope to show that Cuba is a place to learn from the mistakes of the past—theirs and ours—and to find out what is possible when a people are free to protect, respect and enhance their environment.

For more information about the Loeb Fellowship Program, see the website at www.gsd.harvard.edu/loebfell.

Loeb Fellows, 2001-2002

Kathleen Dorgan
Architect and community designer, Storrs, Connecticut

Clair Enlow
Journalist, Seattle

Kathleen Fox
Director, Ohio Arts and Sports Facilities Commission, Columbus.

James Grauley
President, Bank of America’s Community Development Corporation, Atlanta

Seitu Jones
Public artist, Minneapolis

Rick Lowe
Public artist and founder, Project Rowe Houses, Houston

Rubén Martínez
Writer, Los Angeles, and professor of non-fiction writing, University of Houston

Julio César Pérez
Architect, urban planner and professor, Faculty of Architecture, Havana

Virginia Prescott
Radio journalist and interactive media specialist, National Public Radio, New York and Boston

Richard St. John
Director, Conversations for the Common Wealth, Pittsburgh

Marina Stankovic
Architect, Berlin

Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 3 del libro Perspectivas urbanas: Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.

La ejecución de cualquier programa nacional de planeación a escala regional o local puede ser un reto, incluso en las circunstancias más propicias. Colombia enfrenta muchos problemas sociales, políticos y económicos que bien podrían haber desvirtuado la expansión de su iniciativa principal de planeación: el programa nacional de catastro. Algunos de estos problemas tienen su origen en el gobierno descentralizado, los cambios de mando en la gestión pública local, la inestabilidad de la economía y las dificultades generalizadas vinculadas a la pobreza, el narcotráfico y la intervención internacional. No obstante esta situación, el Departamento Administrativo de Catastro Distrital de Bogota (DACD) está recibiendo un reconocimiento cada vez mayor como un precedente exitoso para los países en desarrollo de América Latina y más allá.

Aunque las transferencias legales, la política de suelos y la planeación han sido aspectos significativos en toda la historia de los catastros, la gestión fiscal ha sido el principal centro de atención en Bogotá para sus ciudadanos y el sector empresarial por igual. El proceso administrativo de los avalúos abarca el mantenimiento de una base de datos que se alimenta de la información aportada por las divisiones encargadas del modelo econométrico, los sistemas de información geográfica (SIG), la creación de códigos y normatividad, la cartografía, el análisis socioeconómico de sectores homogéneos, la matrícula inmobiliaria y la zonificación. Como se señaló en el artículo anterior, los números de inmuebles incorporados (formación catastral) y actualizados (actualización catastral) han aumentado considerablemente (véase la Figura 1).

El gran volumen de predios y mejoras ha podido manejarse en un lapso tan corto gracias a un plan administrativo minucioso e integral. El proceso reglamentario de participación pública no puso en riesgo la eficiencia con la cual se llevaron a cabo las actualizaciones y la certificación de inmuebles. Durante el año fiscal pasado, el modelo econométrico tomó en cuenta las variables típicas del avalúo y también consideró un elemento clave en el catastro de Bogotá, el “autoavalúo”. De conformidad con la Ley 44 de 1990, se utiliza un proceso de declaración y revisión públicas para actualizar y mantener la cédula catastral de cada inmueble. El propietario u ocupante presenta un estimado del valor del inmueble y su depreciación o apreciación, según lo estipulado en la Ley de Reforma del Impuesto Predial Unificado. Esta legislación busca simplificar la administración tributaria territorial y evitar la posibilidad de gravar los mismos factores dos veces. Si bien es importante recurrir a los ciudadanos para que suministren la información más actualizada con respecto a las condiciones del inmueble, también es imprescindible la verificación. De esta manera, un grupo de peritos profesionales debidamente capacitados han realizado inspecciones de todos los inmuebles registrados en el sistema catastral. Los ciudadanos han tenido muy buena disposición para suministrar información sobre las mejoras en terrenos desocupados, puesto que la tasa del impuesto sobre suelo no urbanizado es mayor que la tasa sobre suelo con mejoras. Este enfoque de planeación integral ha limitado la especulación y por ende ha estimulado la inversión de la comunidad.

El uso de SIG ha sido un factor determinante para la integración y evaluación en todo el departamento de las revisiones de inmuebles, actualizaciones del sistema y la administración general del programa. El IGAC está en el proceso de desarrollo de un programa basado en el software ArcCadastre en coordinación con la Universidad de Bogotá. El objetivo es vincular todos los catastros regionales con la base de datos nacional. En el área de Bogotá un SIG central proporciona a los funcionarios catastrales una base de datos valiosa que incluye un inventario interactivo y multifuncional que se utiliza durante el proceso de disminución del impuesto predial. El SIG se ha ampliado recientemente para ofrecer al público general una herramienta de consulta de datos de los registros históricos de los inmuebles, además de listados de los bienes raíces de todos los vecindarios. Con el uso propuesto para el SIG y el aumento del número de terminales públicos, se tendrá un acceso mayor al sistema catastral. Mientras tanto, la página Web del DACD es una creativa herramienta educativa que mantiene a los usuarios informados a la vez que controla este complejo proceso.

El catastro de Bogotá ha logrado avances novedosos y tangibles en la creación, desarrollo y mantenimiento de un sistema catastral considerado por muchos una imposibilidad teórica. La visión y la tenacidad de los administradores públicos, la empresa privada y los ciudadanos contribuyeron a crear un catastro que debiera cumplir e incluso superar las metas previstas en el Catastro 2014 de la FIG (Van der Molen 2003). Este plan requiere que un catastro tenga “derechos inclusivos y restricciones sobre el suelo en los registros cartográficos, modelos integrales de mapas catastrales, colaboración continua entre los sectores público y privado y un catastro que permita la recuperación de costos”. En vista de sus retos políticos, administrativos, financieros, técnicos y prácticos, el catastro de Bogotá ha logrado convertir un sueño en una realidad innovadora.

Michelle Thompson es consultora de bienes raíces e investigación y dicta clases de sistemas de información geográfica en el Departamento de Planeación de Ciudades y Regiones de la Universidad de Cornell. Además pertenece al cuerpo docente asociado del Instituto Lincoln; participó en la conferencia sobre catastros realizada en Bogotá en noviembre de 2003.

This article is adapted from a policy roundtable report on national spatial development strategies prepared under the auspices of the Lincoln Institute, Regional Plan Association and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. The roundtable was held in September 2004 at the Pocantico Conference Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The impetus for this project developed in the spring of 2004 in a graduate city planning studio directed by Robert Yaro and Jonathan Barnett, both Practice Professors in City and Regional Planning at Penn, and Visiting Professor Armando Carbonell. With funding support from the Ford Foundation’s Institute of International Education, additional input was provided by a distinguished team of European and American planning experts hosted by Professor Sir Peter Hall at the Institute of Community Studies in London, England.

European efforts to develop policies and investments for the entire continent and for regions that cross national boundaries have been organized under the umbrella of the European Spatial Development Perspective, a set of policy directives and strategies adopted by the European Union in 1999 (Faludi 2002). Over the past generation the EU has initiated a large-scale approach to planning for metropolitan growth, mobility, environmental protection and economic development. Europeans use the umbrella term “spatial planning” to describe this process, involving plans that span regional and national borders and encompass new “network cities” spread out over hundreds of kilometers (see Figure 1). The EU is also mobilizing public and private resources at the continental scale, with bold plans and investments designed to integrate the economies of and reduce the economic disparities between member states and regions, and to increase the competitiveness of the continent in global markets.

By contrast, the United States has no strategy to anticipate and manage comparable concerns, even though the U.S. population is expected to grow another 40 percent by 2050. How can this growth be accommodated in metropolitan regions that are already choking on congestion and approaching build-out under current trends and policies? How can we improve the competitiveness and livability of our own emerging constellation of network cities? How can the U.S. reduce the growing disparities in wealth and population among fast-growing coastal regions, vast interior rural areas and declining industrial cities? How can the U.S. promote regional strategies designed to address these concerns?

Two important precedents have shaped this analysis of America’s spatial development. The national development and conservation strategies prepared by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807 and President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 stimulated the major infrastructure, conservation and regional economic development strategies that powered America’s economic growth in its first two centuries. Other major strategies and investments promoted in the administrations of Presidents Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Eisenhower also had a profound impact on the nation’s growth. Some examples are the Morrill Act land grant university system, the Homestead Act, and creation of the national rail and interstate highway systems.

Economic, Demographic and Spatial Trends

Rapid population growth

The U.S. Census Bureau forecasts that the nation’s population will grow by 40 percent to 430 million by 2050, whereas most European countries are expected to lose significant numbers of residents, due to declining birth rates and limited immigration. This means we must build half again as much housing and as much commercial and retail space and the infrastructure needed to support these activities in the next half century as we have in the past two centuries.

The study of historical settlement patterns sheds light on current and future patterns. While early settlers clung primarily to the coasts and in compact urban regions, the inventions of rail transportation and later the automobile forever changed settlement patterns and allowed people to set up homes in the interior of the country and in highly decentralized metropolitan areas. Fast-growing Sunbelt states, such as Texas, California and Florida, are expected to see sustained rapid population growth, spurred by the trend of immigrant populations settling in those and surrounding states.

While most central cities will continue to grow at a moderate pace, many metropolitan regions around these urban cores are expected to experience remarkable development. As the city of Philadelphia continues to lose population, for example, its adjacent suburbs and areas further outside the city continue to grow. In general, however, the number of people living in urbanized areas as opposed to rural areas is projected to continue rising, signaling an increase in the amount of urbanized land in the coming decades.

The building out of suburban America

Since 1970 the vast majority of the nation’s economic and population growth has occurred in 30 large metropolitan regions, mostly in their sprawling outer rings. While some cities and inner-ring suburbs are now experiencing infill development and renewed population growth, many others are approaching “build-out,” which increases traffic congestion and commuting times, contributes to loss of farmland, and creates conflicts between new development and green infrastructure, such as public water supplies and wildlife habitat.

In less than three centuries, 46 million acres of America’s virgin landscape have been converted to urban uses. In the next 25 years that number will more than double to 112 million acres. If current growth and land consumption rates continue, another 100 million acres will be urbanized by 2050, at a rate seven times faster than the population will grow.

Uneven and inequitable growth patterns

While most population and economic growth has been in large metropolitan regions, other areas of the country have experienced losses. Large rural regions where resource-based economies or groundwater reserves are in permanent decline are left without the means to support even basic services. A number of large urban centers and second-tier cities also have experienced decades of decline. For example, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis and New Orleans have lost a third or more of their populations since 1960. Even in cities where the outer-ring suburbs have grown, many inner cities and inner-ring suburbs have lost residents, tax base and economic activity, and poverty has become highly concentrated. Many of these places have high concentrations of African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and poor whites who will be increasingly disadvantaged as economic opportunities in these regions decline.

In contrast with the U.S., the European Union for decades has invested vast sums to promote development and redevelopment of comparable bypassed areas. These investments have produced dramatic results in revitalizing the economies of Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece, and formerly depressed cities and regions in Europe’s periphery. Similar strategic investments in America’s disadvantaged cities and regions could produce comparable results.

Limited infrastructure capacity

Metropolitan infrastructure of all kinds, most of it built in the last half of the twentieth century, will reach its capacity limits in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Unless new capacity is created in roads, rails, airports, seaports and other systems, the nation’s economic potential will be artificially limited. Federal transportation investments over the past decade have been largely focused on maintaining the existing infrastructure, not on expanding the capacity of these systems.

Over the last 50 years, Americans have become increasingly mobile. The increase in miles traveled per person has been most pronounced in car and aircraft travel, creating new challenges to keep various types of transportation corridors congestion-free. At the same time, congestion poses a serious threat to manufacturing and freight sectors of the economy. Experts believe that by 2020 there will be nearly a doubling of trucks on the roadways over current numbers. Significant policy measures are needed to channel more resources into high-capacity transportation systems for both individual and commercial activity.

Emergence of megalopolis

In 1961 French geographer Jean Gottman described the Boston–Washington Megalopolis. Between now and 2050, more than half of the nation’s population growth, and perhaps as much as two-thirds of its economic growth, will occur in this and seven other emerging megalopolitan regions whose extended networks of metropolitan centers are linked by interstate highway and rail corridors. Similar networks of cities in Europe and Asia are now seen as the new competitive units in the global economy. Major public and private investments are being made in high-speed rail, broadband communications and other infrastructure to strengthen transportation and economic synergies among their component centers.

The New Megalopolis

The new megalopolis is a model for cooperation among the cities and regions in the U.S. that are growing together and creating diseconomies in congested transportation networks, which in turn affect the economic vitality and quality of life of these regions. This model is based on the idea that if the cities in these colliding regions work together they can create a new urban form that will increase economic opportunity and global competitiveness for each individual city and for the nation as a whole.

These component metropolitan areas will have to cooperate in the formation of a structure that takes advantage of the complementary roles of each area while addressing common concerns in the areas of transportation, economic development, environmental protection, and equity. The new megalopolis model will contribute to improving social and economic cohesion along with a better territorial balance, and will support more sustainable development by emphasizing collaboration on important policy issues, infrastructure investments and instruments for facilitating economic growth and job creation.

To facilitate the development of megalopolitan areas, the U.S. could focus on creating a truly intermodal network linking rail, highway and air transportation. Such connections would relieve congested airports and provide greater options for freight movement. The resulting transportation flexibility would be less vulnerable to terrorist attacks and disaster. Furthermore, regional infrastructure and development focused around rail stations would shape and redirect urban growth in more efficient, less sprawling patterns.

Our current direction is building a country whose competitiveness is threatened by inefficient urban forms and declining rural communities. The new megalopolis concept points us in a different direction, one in which urban areas and their surrounding regions work together on a larger scale to address common concerns and share their complementary strengths. This new model would produce an America that is environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, and competitive in an increasingly global economy.

Six distinctive regions can be identified based on common history, geographic location and topography: the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midwest, Southwest and West. Most of the nation’s rapid population growth, and an even larger share of its economic expansion, is expected to occur in eight emerging metropolitan areas spread over thousands of square miles and located in every one of these regions (see Figure 2). These megalopolitan areas are becoming America’s economic engines: centers of technological and cultural innovation where the vast majority of immigrants who are driving population and economic growth will assimilate into the economic and social mainstream.

In Europe and Asia similar network cities are already being seen as the new competitive units in the global economy. The European Union and national governments in Europe, China and Japan are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new intermodal transportation and communication links and other infrastructure to underpin the capacity, efficiency and livability of these regions. In all of these places, new high-speed rail networks are integrating the economies of formerly isolated regions.

Toward an American Spatial Development Perspective

An American Spatial Development Perspective (ASDP) could encompass long-range strategies to achieve five broad national goals.

1. Facilitate the emergence of eight new megalopolitan areas that can compete with similar emerging networks of cities in Europe and Asia.
2. Create capacity for growth and improved global competitiveness in the nation’s transportation and other infrastructure systems.
3. Provide resiliency, redundancy and capacity in the nation’s infrastructure to respond to national security needs.
4. Revitalize bypassed urban and rural regions.
5. Protect and reclaim important nationally significant natural resource systems and promote less land-consuming patterns of growth.

The federal government could play a crucial role in this process, through collaborations with existing and emerging “bottom-up” networks of interconnected regional strategies, encompassing each of the emerging megalopoli. Ideally, the federal government would help coordinate and “incentivize” these planning efforts, but rely on local and regional initiatives to drive each region’s own strategies.

The federal government could also lead in coordinating infrastructure planning and investments for national and regional intermodal, high-speed transportation networks, as it did in promoting creation of the national rail and interstate highway systems. These investments would be made through partnerships between federal, state and regional government, and private investors. User fees, tolls and fares would cover a substantial portion of the cost of developing and managing these systems.

Regional strategies could also promote investments in major higher education and research institutions needed to maintain the nation’s competitive advantage in technology and create a lifelong learning system to help skilled workers adapt to economic change. This broad approach could also identify the important natural resource systems that sustain public water supplies, biological resources, sense of place and recreational opportunities. Future growth could be designed to reuse formerly used sites and to reclaim and restore impaired landscapes and natural resource systems.

Plans for these infrastructure systems should be closely coordinated with strategies for smaller-scale urban and regional development, to ensure that future development patterns support, and are supported by, these infrastructure investments. Federal and state governments could invest in demonstration projects to test innovative transportation, land use, environmental and other strategies.

Building and Financing the ASDP

The proposed new infrastructure systems and urban development outlined in this article could cost trillions of dollars, much of which could be financed through user fees and public-private partnerships. It should also be possible to employ modest payroll or other taxes to finance some of these investments, which would generate trillions of dollars of new economic capacity for the whole nation. The expected doubling of the national economy by 2050 would expand the gross domestic product by more than $14 trillion (in constant dollars). Redirecting even a small share of the growth of tax revenues in these strategic investments could secure the nation’s economic future.

For over a hundred years, the U.S. has financed major infrastructure projects through a “top-down” system, with major funding from the federal government complemented by state resources. Based on general public agreement of national priorities, this model financed several generations of growth and paid for one of the world’s great infrastructure systems. However, this approach is now being challenged as the needs of maintaining our aging infrastructure systems outpace federal and state funding, to say nothing of new capacity expansion. Today we witness a debate between “donor” and “donee” states over the fairness of federal transportation funds, even as the total amount of federal dollars falls far short of estimated needs. As a result, we find ourselves increasingly starved for capital for infrastructure systems.

To provide more funding for system maintenance and expansion, metropolitan regions are looking to new and innovative financing systems. Public authorities use their tax-free status to attract private dollars through bond issuances, sales and lease-back arrangements. New user fees, such as congestion pricing or high-occupancy-vehicle lanes on toll roads, link charges to those who benefit the most from new investments, creating new revenue streams. And value capture models, such as tax increment financing, allow increases in land values to finance infrastructure investments.

The federal government is advancing instruments such as TIFIA, the Transportation Infrastructure Innovation Act, to stimulate the development of these projects. However, megalopolitan areas have a critical role to play in this emerging system. They provide a vital link between state and federal government and local jurisdictions, which in many cases have the last word over land use decisions. These regional areas transcend political boundaries and capture the true economic and social geography of their communities. And they have the size, capacity and expertise to undertake complex planning strategies.

Armando Carbonell is senior fellow and co-chair of the Lincoln Institute’s Department of Planning and Development. Robert D. Yaro is president of the Regional Plan Association in New York City.

References

Faludi, Andreas, ed. 2002. European spatial planning. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Regional Plan Association. 2004. Toward an American spatial development perspective. Policy Roundtable Report. September.

University of Pennsylvania School of Design. 2004. Planning for America in a global economy: 2004–2005. City Planning Studio Report. Spring.

In the nearly 35 years since Bosselman and Callies (1972) published The Quiet Revolution in Land Use Control, land use policies in states across the nation have continued to change and evolve. The state of Maryland offers a good example. The history of land use policy in Maryland records a variety of conservation, development, and growth management acts, but in 1997 the state burst into the national spotlight with its innovative Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation package of land use reforms.

Today, some 10 years later, a new initiative is aiming to take the reform process in Maryland even further. Named Reality Check Plus: Imagine Maryland, this effort is supported in part by the Lincoln Institute, along with other nonprofit organizations, foundations, corporations, and individuals. It remains to be seen how far this effort will go and in what ways it may produce significant policy change, but regardless of the outcome it represents an interesting test of whether a privately led reform initiative can foster land use change at state and local levels.

A Rich Planning History

Maryland has a longstanding reputation as a national leader in land use policy and planning. The historical roots of Maryland’s smart growth program date to 1933, when Maryland established the nation’s first state planning commission. Recent planning history begins with the formation of the Chesapeake Bay Commission in 1980. Although the commission has no explicit land use authority in the signatory states (Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia), its recommendations have been instrumental in shaping land use policy in Maryland. The state’s Critical Area Act of 1984, for example, required local governments to adopt special development regulations within a 1,000-foot buffer of the Bay shoreline, and the Economic Growth, Resource Protection, and Planning Act of 1992 required local governments to address six visions originally outlined in a report prepared for the Chesapeake Executive Council (DeGrove 2005, 254–256).

Although the 1992 Planning Act provided a framework for local comprehensive plans, it failed to stem the tide of urban sprawl, according to the Growth Commission, established by the act as a new state advisory body. Following an extensive listening campaign, many meetings, and frequent forums, Governor Parris Glendening (1995–2003) proposed and the 1997 legislature passed the initiatives that have led to Maryland’s recognition as a leader in the promotion of smart growth. The original 1997 package of smart growth legislation included five separate measures; the first two captured the primary focus of the program (see Figure 1), and three others supported the overall concept.

• The Priority Funding Areas (PFAs) Act: This act launched a program in which state subsidies for new roads, water, and other infrastructure are available only for projects that are either within municipalities, inside the beltways around Baltimore and Washington, or in other areas designated by counties that meet certain criteria set by the state. This landmark legislation marked the first time the state restricted its expenditures on infrastructure or other growth-related expenses to specific geographic areas of the state.
• The Rural Legacy Act: Under this program the state provides funds for local governments and/or land trusts to purchase development rights on properties (and, in rare instances, purchase the property itself) in rural areas threatened by development, in order to preserve agriculture, forest, and natural resource lands in contiguous blocks, corridors, or greenways. This program recognized that efforts to concentrate new development within existing communities would not be completely successful and that the best remaining farms and natural areas of the state should be identified and protected.
• Brownfield Voluntary Cleanup and Redevelopment Act: This act launched a program that provides financial incentives, technical assistance, and liability protection to eligible participants in the cleanup and redevelopment of underutilized or abandoned industrial properties that are, or are perceived to be, contaminated.
• Live Near Your Work: This program promoted linkages between employers and nearby communities by offering incentives to enable employees to buy homes in proximity to their workplace. This small but popular program subsequently lost state funding due to budget constraints faced by the administration that followed Glendening.
• Job Creation Tax Credit Act: This act launched a program designed to boost employment within the newly established PFAs by providing state income tax credits to employers who created 25 or more new, full-time jobs in those areas.

Incentive-based Programs

Maryland’s smart growth programs are interesting in a number of ways, but the most distinctive feature is their reliance on spatially specific incentives instead of land use regulations (Cohen 2002). For example:

• Local governments can grow wherever they want, but state funds for accommodating development are available only within PFAs.
• Property owners need not clean up and redevelop their properties, but grants are available for doing so.
• Residents can live anywhere, but grants may be available if they purchase homes near their work.
• Farm and forest lands can be developed, but development rights can also be sold and extinguished or, in some counties, transferred to more desirable locations.
• Business can expand anywhere, but tax credits are available for expansion only in certain locations.

This reliance on incentives is what enabled these programs to pass the Maryland legislature, and what makes them so attractive to other states. After nearly 10 years, Maryland remains a national model for state efforts to promote smart growth, although many within the state believe the program has not gone far enough. According to John W. Frece, a former aide to Glendening, the smart growth program was “unquestionably a move in the right direction,” but it also represented only as much change as was politically possible at the time (Frece 2005). He concludes that the Maryland program might have been more effective if it had set specific goals and benchmarks when it was created, and that it failed to conduct any statewide visioning or other exercises to determine what the public thought their region or state should look like in the future. He also notes that the basic planning blocks of smart growth, the priority funding areas, proved to be too weak and porous to slow sprawl, much less stop it.

Because Maryland’s smart growth policies relied extensively on state incentives, their efficacy waned when those incentives were not maintained after Glendening left office. In some cases the policies were simply insufficient to counteract the economic factors that drive sprawl development. Moreover, if a development project was approved by the local government but did not need or rely on financial incentives from the state, the smart growth initiative had no effect on it. Finally, the smart growth program skirted the politically sensitive issue of whether the state should have more authority over local land use decisions. If local decisions were contrary to the state’s smart growth policies, the state had little recourse (Frece 2005).

Several recent studies support these assertions.

• A pair of studies by 1000 Friends of Maryland that focused on the Baltimore area (1999) and the Eastern Shore (2001) found great variation in county land use policies. Whereas some counties had strong policies designed to protect natural resources, encourage infill, and promote mixed land uses, others did little to support any of these goals.
• An examination of land conversion to urban uses from 1992 to 2002 found that urban development after 1997 was more likely inside PFAs than outside them, but only in those counties that had strong urban containment programs before 1997 (Shen and Zhang forthcoming).
• In an examination of investments in wastewater infrastructure, Howland and Sohn (forthcoming) found that a large share of wastewater investments—even investments funded by the state—continued to occur outside of PFAs after 1997.
• Research on brownfield redevelopment in Maryland by Howland (2000; 2003) found that those sites take no longer to sell than greenfield properties, as long as their asking prices are appropriately discounted. Further she found that the most significant impediments to brownfield redevelopment are inadequate infrastructure, incompatible surrounding land uses, and poor truck accessibility.
• In an analysis of Maryland’s Job Creation Tax Credit Program, Sohn and Knaap (2005) found that the effects of the tax credits on the location of job growth are small and sector specific, and perhaps cause more job redistribution than actual job growth.
• In a series of studies on local land use policies in Maryland, the National Center (2003; 2006) found that zoning policies and adequate public facilities ordinances can serve as impediments to development in PFAs and can deflect growth to rural areas and neighboring states.
• A comprehensive analysis of the Rural Legacy Program by the Maryland Department of Planning (Tassone et al. 2004) found that the efficacy of the program depends critically on support from local zoning ordinances. In counties where local zoning is not supportive, land fragmentation in rural legacy areas is high, residential development remains common, and conservation easements become prohibitively expensive.

These reports suggest that although Maryland has adopted some of the most innovative land use policies in the country, there is limited evidence that these policies have significantly altered urban development trends. The reasons are complex, but the available research suggests that state incentives are either too small or are poorly suited to the situation to have major impacts on land development trends, especially without supportive regulatory policies at the local level.

Reality Check Plus: Imagine Maryland

To rekindle interest in urban development trends and land use policy in Maryland, and to advance progress in land use reform, a new initiative was launched in 2005. Reality Check Plus: Imagine Maryland is a broad-based, long-term effort led by the Baltimore District Council of the Urban Land Institute (ULI), the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, and 1000 Friends of Maryland. It is also supported by more than 130 organizations throughout the state.

The first component of the effort involved four public participatory visioning exercises based on similar exercises in Washington, DC, and Fredericksburg, Virginia, led by ULI and the National Center for Smart Growth. In these exercises citizens representing civic, government, and business interests, including elected officials, were literally brought to the table to confront the issues of urban growth and express a desired vision for their region’s future. The Maryland exercises were held in May and June in four regions: the Eastern Shore, Southern Maryland, Western Maryland, and the Baltimore-Washington Corridor. Participants expressed their vision for where future growth should go by placing plastic Lego® blocks representing projected job and housing growth through 2030 on large, table-top regional maps.

The final results of the four Maryland exercises will not be fully integrated and analyzed until September, but preliminary results presented at each event reveal similar but distinct results (see Figure 2). The consensus visioning principles expressed public desires to (1) protect open spaces and natural resources; (2) utilize existing infrastructure; (3) concentrate growth near transit stations in existing urban areas; and (4) balance the location of jobs and households. And at all four events, the placement of Legos was consistent with these principles. Specifically, when compared with current development patterns, participants placed larger proportions of growth inside PFAs and near transit stations and highway corridors, and placed more jobs in job-poor areas.

Notable support was given in all regions for new and expanded transit service and for more regional cooperation or even regional authorities to plan for future growth. There were also some important regional differences: participants from the Eastern Shore focused on protecting the region’s small town and agrarian way of life; in Western Maryland there was concern about uneven economic growth; the primary concern in Central Maryland was traffic congestion; and in Southern Maryland there was apprehension about the impacts of growth in military jobs.

Although these exercises represent one of the largest forums on growth ever conducted in a single state, it is important not to overstate what these events can produce. A pile of Legos placed on a table for a few hours cannot be confused with a thorough analysis of alternative development patterns, a careful consideration of consequences, and a true statewide consensus about the results. These events, however, do represent an important beginning to what must be a continuing dialogue on growth in the state.

In September, during the state’s quadrennial election cycle, a synthesis of the four regional events will be presented at a statewide forum. Candidates for state and local office, including candidates for governor, will be invited to attend and pledge their support for implementing the results. In the meantime, each of the three lead organizations is developing work plans for the implementation phase. The Baltimore District Council of ULI will offer a series of education and outreach programs designed to disseminate the results of the four events throughout each region, especially to elected officials. 1000 Friends of Maryland will sponsor a series of candidate forums and regional caucuses to encourage the implementation of the results, especially through state and local policy reform. The National Center, with support from the Lincoln Institute, will conduct more extensive analyses of alternative statewide development scenarios and existing land use policies in Maryland and other states.

For Maryland, these four regional exercises, and whatever changes in land use policies may follow, represent just the latest chapter in the state’s closely watched history of land use planning and policy. For other states, these exercises represent a rare natural experiment. Can a privately led visioning exercise precipitate significant change in the substance of state and/or local land use policy, local development decisions, and development trends? Stay tuned.

The Visioning Experience

At each Reality Check Plus event, up to 10 participants at each table were asked to think about how their region should accommodate the growth projected over the next 25 years. A six-foot by eight-foot map of the region was shaded in various colors to represent the existing population and employment density. The maps also depicted major highways; subway and commuter rail lines and stations; parkland or other protected conservation areas; airports, military bases, and other government installations; and rivers, floodplains, and other bodies of water.

To encourage participants to think regionally rather than locally, all jurisdictional boundaries were intentionally omitted, although place names of cities and towns helped with orientation. Each table was staffed by a scribe/computer operator and a trained facilitator to lead the three-hour exercise. Before considering where to accommodate growth, participants were asked to reach consensus on a set of principles to guide their decisions about where to place the new development, such as protecting open space, making use of existing infrastructure, and maintaining jobs-housing balance.

The exercise used Lego® blocks of four different colors: white blocks represented the top 80 percent of new housing units in the region based on price, or essentially market-rate housing; yellow blocks represented the bottom 20 percent of housing based on price, essentially a stand-in for nonsubsidized affordable housing; black blocks represented lower density housing development that could be exchanged for higher density white blocks at a ratio of 4:1; and blue blocks represented jobs.

The maps were overlaid with a checkered grid and scaled so a single block fit on each grid. Participants who wanted to add more than one housing or employment block to a single grid simply stacked the blocks. Those who proposed a mixed-use development pattern could stack various types of blocks together. Once all the Legos were placed on the map, the result yields a three-dimensional representation of where future growth in the region is or is not desired.

After all the Legos were placed, the participants were asked to assess their work. Have they allocated jobs and households across the region in a manner consistent with their vision for what the future should hold? Does the quantity of growth seem appropriate for a 25–30 year timeframe, or would they prefer more or less growth? Finally, if they are comfortable with the consensus vision, what policies or land development tools do they favor for assuring that the preferred vision is the one that is actually realized? What new infrastructure will be necessary to accommodate the projected level of growth? What might be the environmental impacts and tax implications? The participants’ considered responses to these questions are perhaps the most important products of the exercise.

During the lunch break a team of students from the University of Maryland counted the numbers of Legos at each table, entered the information into a computer, and then converted the results into two– and three-dimensional maps for each table. The data were also analyzed and inserted into a formatted PowerPoint presentation. The slides identified results for each table in a quantitative analysis of urban development indicators, such as percentages of jobs and households within one-quarter mile of a transit station; inside metropolitan beltways; inside existing urban areas; and in existing greenfields and farmland. Other indicators measured location of affordable housing and the degree to which it is integrated with market-rate housing; and the extent of jobs-housing balance.

After lunch the participants gathered in a large auditorium to hear a presentation of the results, which included a summary of the consensus principles, selected results from various tables, and a synthesis of the results from all the tables. Subsequent events included a town hall-type panel discussion focused on how to implement the pattern of development envisioned by the participants at each regional event.

Gerrit-Jan Knaap, an economist and professor of urban studies and planning, is executive director of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland. He is one of three co-chairs of the Reality Check Plus visioning exercise.

Dru Schmidt-Perkins is executive director of 1000 Friends of Maryland, a statewide citizens’ coalition that supports protection of natural resources, revitalization of existing communities, preservation of historic resources, efficient and effective transportation choices, and development that takes into account the public’s interest. She is also one of three co-chairs of the Reality Check Plus project.

References

Bosselman, Fred, and David Callies. 1972. The quiet revolution in land use control. Washington, DC: Council on Environmental Quality.

Cohen, J. R. 2002. Maryland’s “smart growth”: Using incentives to combat sprawl. In Urban sprawl: Causes, consequences and policy response, G. Squires, ed. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press.

DeGrove, John M. 2005. Planning policy and politics: Smart growth and the states. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Frece, John W. 2005. Twenty lessons from Maryland’s smart growth initiative. Vermont Journal of Environmental Law 6: 106–132.

Howland, Marie. 2000. The impact of contamination on the Canton/Southeast Baltimore land market. Journal of the American Planning Association 66 (4): 411–420.

———. 2003. Private initiatives and public responsibility for the redevelopment of industrial brownfields: Three Baltimore case studies. Economic Development Quarterly 17 (4): 367–381.

Howland, Marie, and Jungyul Sohn. Forthcoming. Has Maryland’s priority funding areas initiative constrained the expansion of water and sewer investments? Land Use Policy.

National Center for Smart Growth. 2003. Smart growth, housing markets, and development trends in the Baltimore-Washington Corridor. http://www.smartgrowth.umd.edu/research/pdf/KnaapSohnFreceEtAl_SGHousingMarketsBalWash_DateNA.pdf.

———. 2006. Adequate public facilities ordinances in Maryland: Inappropriate use, inconsistent standards, unintended consequences. http://www.smartgrowth.umd.edu/research/pdf/NCSG_APFOMaryland_041906.pdf.

1000 Friends of Maryland. 1999. Smart growth: How is your county doing—Baltimore Region. http://www.friendsofmd.org.

———. 2001. Smart growth: How is your county doing—Eastern Shore. http://www.friendsofmd.org.

Shen, Qing and Feng Zhang. Forthcoming, Land-use changes in a pro–smart growth state: Maryland, USA. Environment and Planning A.

Sohn, Jungyul, and Gerrit-Jan Knaap. 2005. Does the job creation tax credit program in Maryland help concentrate employment growth? Economic Development Quarterly 19: 313–326.

Tassone, Joseph, Erik Balsley, Lynda Eisenberg, Stephanie Martins, and Rich Hall. 2004. Maximizing return on public investment in Maryland’s rural land preservation programs. Annapolis, MD: Maryland Department of Planning.

Many historic centers in Latin America have been the focus of government and private initiatives seeking to rehabilitate the building stock and position the areas to serve the tourism industry. In most cases these efforts have led to the displacement of lowincome residents or of residential activities altogether, due to gentrification and commercialization of the district (Scarpaci 2005). More recently, the rehabilitation of these historic cores has been framed as part of broader debates and efforts that pursue the recovery of the city centers (historical or otherwise) because of their key role as collective symbols or spaces of social interaction, or because of their potential efficiency as dense, well-serviced urban districts (Pérez, Pujol, and Polèse 2003; Rojas 2004).

This article seeks to advance this discussion based on the experience in Panama City’s historic center, “Casco Antiguo.” It describes some recent, innovative policies that have explored the intersections of tourism, affordable housing, employment, and culture in a historical context, and draws some general insights and lessons.