Land-use policy

DEFINITION: The way in which a society organizes, plans, and manages social and physical activities on the landscape

Policymakers around the world have become increasingly aware of the potential environmental impacts of government and community decisions regarding land use. Since the late twentieth century, approaches to land-use planning have trended toward ecological conservation and preservation.

Human societies are organized to survive in particular environments. The adaptive nature of culture allows a society to respond to changes in the and to cause even more changes. Once human beings began to establish cities, where their lifestyles became relatively sedentary, formal land-use policies arose, and decisions about how to manage land became critical to survival. Even during the earliest periods of the Mayan, Egyptian, and other city-state civilizations, land-use control was implemented for religious, agricultural, hunting, and residential purposes. Religious proscriptions dictated the appropriate appearances of structures. Plagues, warfare, and resource distribution demonstrated the need to isolate structures as well as groups of people. Crowding and cultural conflicts made it necessary for groups to create processes to make government decisions about who would get to use particular resources. Land-use policies are even more necessary in the contemporary world of competing interests, growing populations, and diminishing natural resources. Increased scientific knowledge about environmental impacts has fueled the need to ensure that appropriate land-use decisions are made in the interests of survival through long-term resource management.

Roots of Land-Use Policy

The earliest land-use policies took the form of religious prohibitions and mandates as the priest class interpreted the needs of the gods for sacred spaces. Kings exercised a divine mandate in interpreting just what could be allowed in sacred areas, while market forces dictated the use of less important secular space. Later, after kings began losing their divine authority, they could still regulate the use of secular space in the name of promoting social order. Social class structure continued to support the allegiance to class-based authority.

After the Renaissance, European societies believed that while God no longer directly intervened in day-to-day activities, his presence was felt in the need to maintain social order through hierarchies. It was believed that this social order must also be reflected in physical space, or in the way in which a landscape was arranged. Accordingly, it was seen as only proper that buildings, towns, and landscapes reflect particular patterns in form and ownership. In the American colonies that became the United States, examples of kingly intervention in land-use decisions can be found in the marking of potential mast pine trees in New England with the king’s broad arrow, the designation of village squares, and the reservation of lots for the king’s agents. However, the rise of a democratic society provided a shift in decision-making authority to elected representatives.

By the mid-nineteenth century, early planning laws in the United States began to regulate urban tenement housing and prohibit “obnoxious uses.” In 1893 the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago promoted the exchange of planning and design concepts in exhibits by landscape architectFrederick Law Olmsted, artist Saint Gaudens, and others. By 1895 Los Angeles had an ordinance prohibiting the locating of steam shoddying plants (plants that reprocessed wool) within 30.5 meters (100 feet) of a church. In addition to ordinances and the designation of parks, planned communities were initiated. The publication of Ebenezer Howard’s Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) launched the garden city movement. In an 1899 decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld a building height limitation, and by 1909 zones of limits for buildings were upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court.

By the early twentieth century, organized planning efforts were under way in some large cities. Hartford, Connecticut, established a planning board in 1907. By 1909 Wisconsin had passed the first state enabling act for planning, and Los Angeles provided the first American use of zoning to direct future development in a series of multiple zoning ordinances. In 1913 Massachusetts became the first state to make planning mandatory for local governments. Newark hired the first full-time city planner in 1914, and the first comprehensive zoning code in the United States was enacted in New York City in 1916. By 1925 Cincinnati, Ohio, had become the first major US city to adopt a comprehensive plan, and Burlington, Vermont, had authorized a municipal planning commission.

Policies After

In the 1940s planning for war and postwar public housing brought the US government to review the land-use planning process. The mustering of resources for World War II demonstrated the value of planning, and many towns implemented town plans as postwar prosperity began. In 1962 the Chicago Area Transit Study showed the applicability of cost-benefit studies to planning for suitable development.

In the 1970s Americans became increasingly concerned with the need to control development. Performance standards were upheld in the courts as one mechanism to manage growth through land-use policy. In 1971 the concept of transferable development rights (TDRs) was introduced to help preserve urban landmarks. Creative land-use tools such as conservation easements, controlled access rights, planned unit development (PUD) credits, and overlay districts were increasingly used in the 1970s as communities expanded their regulatory schemes. In their zeal to manage growth, some communities enacted land-use policies that were discriminatory. In an early decision on discriminatory land-use regulation, in 1975 the New Jersey Supreme Court struck down a restrictive Mount Laurel zoning ordinance on the basis that it did not allow a regional “fair share” of low- and middle-income housing.

By the late 1980s a sufficient number of court cases existed to reduce the likelihood that communities would enact discriminatory ordinances, but a slump in the US economy fueled the challenge of some land-use ordinances and policies as unauthorized “takings”—the or loss of landowner rights through excessive regulation without due compensation. Yet the vast majority of land-use regulations are not generally found to be true takings because at least some economic use of land is allowed. Still, the issue of a taking is frequently raised when regulations deprive an owner of one or more desired uses. The economic climate has a strong influence on the reaction of a to particular issues such as takings and to land-use regulation in general.

Land-use regulation is generally viewed as the control of two categories: subdivision (physical size or boundary change) and development (physical use or alteration within the boundary). Changing landownership or subdivision is a land use because it affects the management of resources on the land and can fragment habitat. Most land that has been subdivided stays that way; it is unusual for such land to revert to an original, larger tract. Land that is used or developed through construction, clearing, or other alteration, including various forms of land management such as agriculture, also undergoes a change to the natural path of succession. In fact, sufficient past alteration through the introduction of new species or direct physical action has so altered some landscapes that it is almost impossible to determine their true “natural” condition. It is this perspective that, along with concern regarding environmental impacts from yet-to-occur changes, is most commonly used to justify land-use policies.

Conventional and Planning

Conventional land-use planning assumes the desirability of economic growth through new development and therefore tends to favor revenue generators. Tools such as zoning are the main techniques for conventional planning. A government land-use plan is implemented through a series of development regulations that differ according to zones. A series of base maps are prepared after the completion of natural, social, and infrastructural resource inventories. The maps can be viewed as both opportunities for and constraints on growth. Individual base maps, when combined with the community’s or region’s goals and objectives for growth, result in a land-use map containing zones. Each zone reflects a particular category: commercial, industrial, residential, recreational, historical, governmental, agricultural, special, and others that are suggested by the inventory and goal processes. Each category can contain a variety of subcategories based on lot size and range of allowable uses.

The size, configuration, and pattern of the arrangement of lots can all affect growth. For example, large lots reduce the number of houses, while small lots increase the number of houses, reduce the amount of open space, and increase the fragmentation of landownership. The uses the planning process to agree upon the development capacity of given areas. By using various tools and approaches, a community can seek a balance between achieving appropriate densities and maintaining natural and aesthetic resources; the objective is to achieve sustainability.

Conservation planning is one approach to improving land use within conventional planning. In conservation planning, structures and uses such as septic systems are located away from valued or critical natural resources on a tract. Conventional planning, even if conservation-oriented, can still lead to checkerboard or highway strip patterns of development that are harmful to open space. Clustering is a technique that goes one step further by attempting to preserve or conserve open space by treating it as a natural resource. Other cited benefits of clustering are the fostering of a sense of community, reduction of urban sprawl, and the presentation of traditional village appearances.

In clustering, dwelling units (or commercial structures) are grouped together to allow a larger uninterrupted area of open space (generally 25 to 30 percent), which is often maintained in a residential or commercial subdivision as common land under shared ownership. Some communities encourage clustering through policies that allow a greater density of units or square feet of construction. Thus, a 20-hectare (50-acre) tract that might be approved for construction of five houses in a traditional checkerboard subdivision of ten lots might be allowed to contain up to fifteen units of housing if the houses (or condominiums) are clustered and if a specified percentage of the parcel is preserved as open space. The open space might be a separate 8-hectare (20-acre) lot that is deeded to the prospective unit owners as shared or common land to be managed in a certain way.

Conservation planning can be employed on a city- or statewide level through the administration of tiered levels of permits and other development review processes coupled with a system of land-use planning in which designated areas are conserved. An example is Oregon’s establishment of greenline boundaries, which limit growth at the edges of cities. Trails and greenbelt corridors also reflect conservation planning, but these require considerable coordination and cooperation when more than one community or state is involved.

Ecological Planning

Ecological land-use planning expands on conventional land-use planning by taking a more integrative perspective of dynamics and applying it over a greater period of time than the normal five-year period. To take this comprehensive approach, planners require significant amounts of data about a wide variety of resources and a fairly stable set of goals and objectives in a relatively constant sociopolitical setting. Ecological planning provides the benefit of long-range dynamic planning while attempting to prevent, rather than remedy, problems. However, it is more costly than conventional planning in initial expenditures. The Netherlands and some other northern European countries have a long history of ecological land-use planning, particularly in response to increased population pressures in areas of finite land resources.

The decrease in numbers of rural inhabitants and the growing numbers of suburbanites in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century caused an increase in the consideration of various planning techniques and tools. Vermont adopted a statewide land-use policy law in which individual development decisions are made by a regional volunteer citizen panel at quasi-judicial hearings in which dispute resolution techniques and consensus building are encouraged. Vermont has found this case-by-case process to work quite well despite the lack of a comprehensive statewide plan and despite an expanding population. Oregon uses a similar process. Florida’s Environmental Land and Water Management Act of 1972 allows the state to designate areas of critical interest that local governments must consider when enacting local policies. It also requires state review of development projects that are large or have regional impacts.

The cumulative adverse environmental effects of many small subdivision and construction projects can significantly outweigh the effects of larger projects that are more intensely regulated. By the end of the twentieth century, most US states had begun to recognize this and had increased local control of land use. Most had also implemented statewide natural resource programs that reflected ecological understanding of the interactions between changing land use and the need to manage wildlife and other natural resources.

Forms of Land-Use Regulation

Land use can be controlled through incentives or restrictive processes. Incentive-based land-use control approaches include direct funding, grants, tax abatements, trade-offs such as credits for clustering, and other forms of positive feedback. Restrictive land-use control is the form more commonly recognized and employed, notably through the use of permits, licenses, environmental assessments, taxes, and direct prohibitions. Restrictions may be imposed by government or by landowners via covenants or easements. Government restrictive regulations have two forms: prescriptive, in which the objectives and specifications are precisely articulated; and subscriptive, in which the outcomes are specified but the individual means of achieving them are left to the discretion of the owner or community. Critical land uses and issues, such as matters of public health, are more likely to be prescriptively regulated. Less critical matters might be handled by subscriptive means, also called performance-based planning. Even tax structuring can be performance-based when land is taxed based on actual use rather than potential use. This can reduce the pressure for commercial development of high-value or expensive properties.

Most communities and governments use a combination of the two forms of land-use control and the two forms of regulations. Much of land-use policy concerns the manner in which the combination is achieved. Issues of land-use control can become highly politicized, as in the wise-use movement or the controversy involving the northern spotted owl and logging policy in the northwestern United States. In such cases, reaching sufficient community consensus to support consistent regulation can be difficult to achieve because of the differing cultural and social values held by the parties involved.

Although the United States and Canada have contributed greatly to the literature on land-use planning and the development of innovative techniques, North America has relatively weak land-use controls, as does Australia. Northern Europe and countries such as Japan are known for their comprehensive land-use controls. In the United States, as in many countries, the redistribution of population and wealth, together with the restructuring of public lands, necessitates constant reexamination of land-use policies and regulations. For developing nations, land-use policies become particularly critical in the evaluation of trade-offs between natural and land-based resources on one hand and economic well-being on the other. Pressures exist for these countries to exploit their natural resources while striving to achieve the prosperity they see in more developed countries such as those in North America and Northern Europe. As global markets have expanded, the need for international dialogue on land-use issues has also grown.

Bibliography

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Johnston, Robert J., and Stephen K. Swallow, eds. Economics and Contemporary Land Use Policy: Development and Conservation at the Rural-Urban Fringe. Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 2006.

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