"Zoning has for a century enabled cities to chart their own course. It is a useful and popular institution, enabling homeowners to protect their main investment and provide safe neighborhoods. As home values have soared in recent years, however, this protection has accelerated to the degree that new housing development has become unreasonably difficult and costly. The widespread Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome is driven by voters’ excessive concern about their home values and creates barriers to growth that reach beyond individual communities. The barriers contribute to suburban sprawl, entrench income and racial segregation, retard regional immigration to the most productive cities, add to national wealth inequality, and slow the growth of the American economy. Some state, federal, and judicial interventions to control local zoning have done more harm than good. More effective approaches would moderate voters’ demand for local-land use regulation—by, for example, curtailing federal tax subsidies to owner-occupied housing"--Publisher's description.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

Land Use Law in Florida presents an in-depth analysis of land use law common to many states across the United States, using Florida cases and statutes as examples. Florida case law is an important course of study for planners, as the state has its own legal framework that governs how people may use land, with regulation that has evolved to include state-directed urban and regional planning. The book addresses issues in a case format, including planning, land development regulation, property rights, real estate development and land use, transportation, and environmental regulation. Each chapter summarizes the rules that a reader should draw from the cases, making it useful as a reference for practicing professionals and as a teaching tool for planning students who do not have experience in reading law. This text is invaluable for attorneys; professional planners; environmental, property rights, and neighborhood activists; and local government employees who need to understand the rules that govern how property owners may use land in Florida and around the country.

Land Use and Society is a unique and compelling exploration of interactions among law, geography, history, and culture and their joint influence on the evolution of land use and urban form in the United States. Originally published in 1996, this completely revised, expanded, and updated edition retains the strengths of the earlier version while introducing a host of new topics and insights on the twenty-first century metropolis. This new edition of Land Use and Society devotes greater attention to urban land use and related social issues with two new chapters tracing American city and metropolitan change over the twentieth century. More emphasis is given to social justice and the environmental movement and their respective roles in shaping land use and policy in recent decades. This edition of Land Use and Society by Rutherford H. Platt is updated to reflect the 2000 Census, the most recent Supreme Court decisions, and various topics of current interest such as affordable housing, protecting urban water supplies, urban biodiversity, and "ecological cities." It also includes an updated conclusion that summarizes some positive and negative outcomes of urban land policies to date.

The conversation about zoning has meandered its way through issues ranging from housing affordability to economic growth to segregation, expanding in the process from a public policy backwater to one of the most discussed policy issues of the day. In his pioneering 1972 study, Land Use Without Zoning, Bernard Siegan first set out what has today emerged as a common-sense perspective: Zoning not only fails to achieve its stated ends of ordering urban growth and separating incompatible uses, but also drives housing costs up and competition down. In no uncertain terms, Siegan concludes, "Zoning has been a failure and should be eliminated!" Drawing on the unique example of Houston--America's fourth largest city, and its lone dissenter on zoning--Siegan demonstrates how land use will naturally regulate itself in a nonzoned environment. For the most part, Siegan says, markets in Houston manage growth and separate incompatible uses not from the top down, like most zoning regimes, but from the bottom up. This approach yields a result that sets Houston apart from zoned cities: its greater availability of multifamily housing. Indeed, it would seem that the main contribution of zoning is to limit housing production while adding an element of permit chaos to the process. Land Use Without Zoning reports in detail the effects of current exclusionary zoning practices and outlines the benefits that would accrue to cities that forgo municipally imposed zoning laws. Yet the book's program isn't merely destructive: beyond a critique of zoning, Siegan sets out a bold new vision for how land-use regulation might work in the United States. Released nearly a half century after the book's initial publication, this new edition recontextualizes Siegan's work for our current housing affordability challenges. It includes a new preface by law professor David Schleicher, which explains the book's role as a foundational text in the law and economics of urban land use and describes how it has informed more recent scholarship. Additionally, it includes a new afterword by urban planner Nolan Gray, which includes new data on Houston's evolution and land use relative to its peer cities.

Why are American cities, suburbs, and towns so distinct? Compared to European cities, those in the United States are characterized by lower densities and greater distances; neat, geometric layouts; an abundance of green space; a greater level of social segregation reflected in space; and—perhaps most noticeably—a greater share of individual, single-family detached housing. In Zoned in the USA, Sonia A. Hirt argues that zoning laws are among the important but understudied reasons for the cross-continental differences.Hirt shows that rather than being imported from Europe, U.S. municipal zoning law was in fact an institution that quickly developed its own, distinctly American profile. A distinct spatial culture of individualism—founded on an ideal of separate, single-family residences apart from the dirt and turmoil of industrial and agricultural production—has driven much of municipal regulation, defined land-use, and, ultimately, shaped American life. Hirt explores municipal zoning from a comparative and international perspective, drawing on archival resources and contemporary land-use laws from England, Germany, France, Australia, Russia, Canada, and Japan to challenge assumptions about American cities and the laws that guide them.

"Attention to value capture as a source of public revenue has been increasing in the United States and internationally as some governments experience declines in revenue from traditional sources and others face rapid urban population growth and require large investments in public infrastructure. Privately funded improvements by land-owners can increase the value of their land and property. Public actions, such as investments in infrastructure, the provision of public services, and planning and land use regulation, can also affect the value of land and property. Value capture is a means to realize as public revenue some portion of that increase in value through various revenue-raising instruments. This book, based on the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy's sixth annual land policy conference in May 2011, examines the concept of value capture, its forms, and applications. The first section, on the conceptual framework and history of value capture, reviews its relationship to compensation for partial takings; the long history of value capture policies in Britain and France; and the remarkable expansion of tax increment financing in California. The second section reviews the application of particular instruments of value capture, including the conversion of rural to urban land in China, town planning schemes in India, and community benefit agreements. The third section focuses on ends instead of means and examines the use of value capture by community land trusts to provide affordable housing, the use of land development to finance transit, and the use of various fees to fund airports. The final section explores potential extensions of value capture mechanisms to tax-exempt nonprofits and to the management of state trust lands in the United States."--Publisher's website.