Land in Conflict: Managing and Resolving Land Use Disputes

A “mutual gains” approach based on consensus-building promises to help resolve increasingly contentious land use disputes, according to new practical guide published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
     Political polarization, redevelopment proposals, and tensions over property rights in the wake of intense storms such as Hurricane Sandy have complicated the role of more than 25,000 local and regional governments, say Sean Nolon, Ona Ferguson, and Pat Field in Land in Conflict: Managing and Resolving Land Use Disputes.
     The techniques outlined in the book build on many of the principles of conflict resolution and negotiation in the landmark book Getting to Yes, tailored to assist planners and planning board members at the local level manage the increasingly contentious development process.
      “The planner’s job has never been easy,” said Armando Carbonell, senior fellow and chair of the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute. “Beginning with a focus on issues where there is not disagreement, this approach holds out hope for better managing the stresses and strains.”
     Bruce Babbitt, recalling one of his first experiences as Interior Secretary grappling with the land use implications of adding a California songbird to the Endangered Species Act, writes in the Foreword that “land use issues, large and small alike, almost always have implications for the broader community, which should lead to more frequent use of the techniques that are the subject of this book.”
     “For all the talk about broad-based, national planning and environmental goals, most decisions about land use are made at the local level, which means that local planning officials often have more impact on the physical form of this country than anyone else. Land in Conflict is an invaluable guide for planners, citizens, architects, and anyone involved in the process of land use. It offers the best hope for bringing reason to the painful battles that land use decisions have too often become,” said Paul Goldberger, architecture critic and contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
    Diverse stakeholders voice their interests and concerns in the combative context of land use decisions. Every day, public officials must make challenging decisions involving land that impact open space, economic development, transportation, and many other issues. At stake are the built environment, quality of life, and the economy for decades to come. How officials make these decisions influences the way community members interact with one another and whether they work as a cohesive or a divided group.
      Over the last one hundred years of land use management by local governments, a common four-stage approval process for decision making has developed: applicants are required to file proposals with a local board or department; these plans are reviewed and sometimes modified; the plans often come before a body such as the planning board or zoning board of appeals and the board asks questions, may request further modifications, and hears public comment; and then the public body either makes a decision or refers its recommendation to a final decision-making body such as a town or city council.
     This standard required process works well for the majority of noncontroversial land use decisions, which can be made quickly by most land use boards using this process. But in more complex decisions, communities often become embroiled in battles that tear at the civic fabric, pit neighbor against neighbor, demonize the applicant, and wear down local officials. Volunteer board members, neighbors, and applicants are often disheartened by what seems to be an insufficient process for solving these difficult, heated land use disputes.
       In over a decade of research supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and with years of professional experience, the authors, all associated with the Consensus Building Institute, have found that the “mutual gains” approach is a better way to manage the most challenging situations. This approach is guided by core principles, follows a set of clear action steps, and is useful at different stages of land use decision making. It is different from, though not incompatible with, the required land use procedures. The mutual gains approach:
·     is based on all stakeholder interests as well as the necessary technical information;
·    involves stakeholders along with appointed and elected decision makers;
·    generates information relevant and salient to stakeholders such as abutters, community leaders, and others;
·   requires strong community and public engagement skills along with strong technical planning skills; and
·   engages the public above and beyond sharing information and views.
     The mutual gains approach to preventing and resolving land use disputes is not a single process or technique. It draws from the fields of negotiation, consensus building, collaborative problem solving, alternative dispute resolution, public participation, and public administration. The result is a more public, collaborative process designed to tease out the range of interests and criteria, compare various alternatives, and determine which of those alternatives meet the most interests. Case studies from across the United States and Canada illustrate the principles and steps in the mutual gains approach.
     More praise for Land in Conflict:

•  --Mark R. Tercek, President and CEO, The Nature Conservancy: This book is a great primer for any stakeholder involved in a land use dispute. It demonstrates that even in the most complex cases it is possible to achieve outcomes that benefit all parties. Whether you are a private citizen concerned about development in your community or a representative of a state, the approach in this volume will satisfy your needs.
•  --Peter R. Stein, Managing Director, The Lyme Timber Company LP: The authors provide a wealth of detailed insights into the mechanisms that allow multiple parties to successfully engage in the land use decision-making process. Through case studies, the authors present resolutions to complex land use debates that utilize various negotiation, mediation, and stakeholder processes. By applying the techniques in this book, decision makers can enhance the conventional and linear process by including a range of participants with credible community concerns, which will yield timely and economical land use decisions. 
•  --Patricia E. Salkin, Dean and Professor of Law, Touro College: Land in Conflict provides a concise, practical, and convincing framework that will help communities and developers arrive at better land use results. This volume is a must-have for any land use or municipal attorney who is interested in helping clients achieve effective and efficient results in the land development process.

     About the Authors: Sean Nolon is associate professor of law and the director of the Dispute Resolution Program at Vermont Law School. He has extensive experience in consensus building, mediation, and litigation in commercial, land use, and environmental law. Ona Ferguson is senior associate at Consensus Building Institute (CBI), where she designs and facilitates meetings on environmental and public policy, and on organizational and strategic planning. Patrick Field is managing director at CBI, associate director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, and senior fellow at theUniversity of Montana Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy.

Raphael Bostic, Anthony Coyne join Lincoln Institute board

     Raphael Bostic, until recently an assistant secretary at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration, and Anthony Coyne, a land use attorney with extensive experience in planning in the City of Cleveland, were named as members of the Board of Directors for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
    “These extraordinarily accomplished men bring experience and wisdom in planning, housing, and land use, adding to the diversity of perspectives on the Lincoln Institute board,” said Kathryn J. Lincoln, chair and chief investment officer for the Lincoln Institute.
     Raphael Bostic is the Judith and John Bedrosian Chair in Governance and the Public Enterprise, and director of the Bedrosian Center on Governance and the Public Enterprise. For three years, he was the Obama Administration’s Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. In that Senate-confirmed principal position, he advised HUD’s secretary on policy and research, to promote informed decisions on HUD policies, programs, and budget and legislative proposals. He earned his PHD in economics from Stanford University and his BA from Harvard University.
     Anthony Coyne is president of Mansour, Gavin, Gerlack & Manos Co. LPA specializing in municipal planning and zoning law; corporate, business, real estate, and commercial litigation; and land use law including eminent domain. An expert on urban affairs, he has been on the Cleveland Planning Commission for more than twenty years and has served as its chairman for the last 13 years. He is also chairman of theGroup Plan Commission, serves on the board of directors for the Ohio Canal Corridor, and as law director to the City of University Heights. A member of the Urban Land Institute, he has authored several papers, served on the transition team of Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White, and worked with Judge Alice M. Batchelder of the United States District Court, Northern District of Ohio. He earned a B.A. from John Carroll University, an M.S. from Cleveland State University, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs and a J.D. from Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University.
     The other members of the Lincoln Institute board include former Interior secretary and Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt; Roy Bahl, Regents Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Georgia State University; Carolina Barco, former ambassador of Colombia to the United States; Thomas M. Becker, president of The Chautauqua Institution; Henry A. Coleman, professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University; Alberto Harth, president of Civitas in San Salvador, El Salvador; Gregory K. Ingram, president, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; Bruce Lincoln of Phoenix, Arizona; David C. Lincoln, president of VIKA Corp. and chairman of the Lincoln Laser Company; John G. Lincoln III, senior engineer at CH2M-Hill in Boise, Idaho; Johannes F. Linn, a resident senior scholar at the Emerging Markets Forum in Washington, D.C.; Thomas Nechyba, professor of economics and public policy studies, Duke University; Kenneth T.W. Pang, adjunct professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Jill Schurtz, former chief executive officer of Robeco-Sage; Andrea Taylor, director of community affairs, North America, Microsoft Corporation; Douglas P. Wheeler, partner at Hogan Lovells US LLP in Washington, D.C.; and Carol Whiteside, president emeritus of the Great Valley Center in Modesto, California.

Land values, real estate, and education

     The relationship between land values, real estate, and the provision of education will be explored at Education, Land and Location, the Lincoln Institute’s 8^th annual Land Policy Conference June 2‐4, 2013 at The Charles Hotel in Cambridge.  The three-day gathering of scholars, researchers and practitioners will consider the use of property taxes as a funding mechanism for local public schools, the role that school quality plays in household location decisions, how the perceived quality of schools affects real estate values, and the growth of new alternatives such as charter schools and homeschooling.
      “The nexus of real estate, land policy, and education deserves greater attention,” said Gregory K. Ingram, president of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, who will welcome the gathering.
      Laura Perille, Executive Director of EdVestors, a nonprofit group that provides strategic private investments in urban schools, will lead off the forum on Sunday evening, followed by a keynote talk Monday morning, “Is Location Fate? Distributional Aspects of Schooling,” by Eric A. Hanushek, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a specialist in school funding
    In the first session, considering the nexus of location, education, Joan Youngman, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, will be joined by William A. Fischel from Dartmouth College who will present “Not by the Hand of Horace Mann: How the Quest for Land Value Created the American School System.” Thomas A. Downes of Tufts University will provide commentary. Ellen B. Goldring and Walker Swain, from Vanderbilt University, will follow with the presentation, “The School Attendance and Residential Location Balancing Act: Community, Choice, Diversity, and Achievement,” with comments by Ansley T. Erickson from Columbia University.
      A discussion of financing local education will then be led by Amy Ellen Schwartz of New York University, with Lincoln Institute visiting fellow Andrew Reschovsky from the University of Wisconsin‐Madison, and discussant Ashlyn A. Nelson, Indiana University ‐ Bloomington, addressing the role of the property tax in the funding of K-12 education in the U.S.; and a look at non-traditional school funding sources, with Henry A. Coleman of Rutgers – The State University of New Jersey, with comments from Leslie Papke of Michigan State University.
     Robert McMillan of the University of Toronto, Robert Bifulco of Syracuse University, and Maria M. Ferreyra from Carnegie Mellon University will lead a session on emerging choices and alternatives in education, beginning with a consideration of charter schools, and concluding with the locational implications of homeschooling with Luke C. Miller of the University Virginia.
      Emmanuel Y. Jimenez from the World Bank will begin the second day focusing on the international dimension, with presentations by Carolina Flores of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, with comments from Keren Horn from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Stephen J. Machin of the University College London and Anne West from the London School of Economics will examine the school assignment plans in England and their relation to performance, class composition, and housing values with comments by Parag Pathak of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
      Thomas Nechyba, an economist at Duke University, will chair the session on residential location, mobility, and schooling, beginning with “School Quality, School Choice and Residential Mobility,” by Eric Brunner from Georgia State University, and discussant Charles T. Clotfelter of Duke University, followed by a look at transport costs of school choice, with Elizabeth J. Wilson from the University of Minnesota, Kevin J. Krizek from the University of Colorado, Julian Marshall from the University of Minnesota, and Marc Schlossberg of the University of Oregon.
     The discussion of school quality, diversity, and location will be led by Roslyn A. Mickelson from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, beginning with “The Impact of Charter Schools on Segregation and Educational Disparities across Racial and Ethnic Groups: 2000‐2010,” with John Logan of Brown University and Douglas N. Harris of Tulane University; and “Affordable Housing and Educational Opportunity,” by Elizabeth J. Mueller of the University of Texas at Austin, Shannon S. Van Zandt of Texas A&M University, and Deborah McKoy from the University of California, Berkeley.
      This is the 8^th year of the Land Policy Conference. The papers and discussant commentaries are compiled in a conference volume published each spring, most recently Infrastructure and Land Policies, based on the Land Policy Conference last year. Previous topics have been: Value Capture and Land Policies (2012) Climate Change and Land Policies (2011) Municipal Revenues and Land Policies (2010) Property Rights and Land Policies (2009) Fiscal Decentralization and Land Policies (2008) and Land Policies and Their Outcomes (2007).

Lincoln Institute in China

BEIJING -- A visit to the Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy in Beijing next week will begin Monday with a daylong symposium based on the book Financing Metropolitan Governments in Developing Countries, which has been translated into Chinese. 
      The event, organized with the Research Institute for Fiscal Sciences at the Ministry of Finance, will bring together researchers and practitioners to examine the importance of sound public finance in the administration of rapidly growing cities.  Joyce Man, director of the Lincoln Institute’s China program and director of the Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy will open the program along with Gregory K. Ingram, president of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
     Deborah Wetzel, country director for Brazil at the World Bank and Roy Bahl, founding dean of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, co-editors of Financing Metropolitan Governments in Developing Countries (along with Johannes Linn of the Brookings Institution), will survey the international experiences in municipal public finance. Christine Wong, professor and director of Contemporary Chinese Studies, Oxford University, Liu Zhi, Lead Infrastructure Specialist, the World Bank, and Tao Ran, professor at the School of Economics, Remnin University, will lead a discussion about paying for urbanization in China.
     Roundtable discussions will consider what international experiences in local public finance may be applicable to China, the role of land-related taxes in financing urban development in China, and the decentralization of governance in metropolitan areas. Jia Kang, director of China’s Ministry of Finance, will conclude the event.
     The Center for Urban Development and Land Policy is celebrating its fifth year. The center seeks to develop institutional capacity in China to address the many challenges of rapid growth, with the goal of strengthening expertise in land policy and planning for urban development, through research, fellowships, and training.

Catalysts for conservation

The business of land conservation is increasingly complex, whether with massive changes in plant and animal species growth and habitation patterns due to climate change, or more recent threats such as palm oil plantations (who knew that palm oil was in so much of everything at the grocery store). To help meet the challenges, Lincoln Institute fellow Jim Levitt has been hard at work expanding the network of thought leaders and practitioners concerned about land conservation, and discovered one sector that was particularly well-positioned to help: higher education institutions.
     Faculty and students from a dozen colleges and universities joined conservation leaders in the field last week at the Lincoln Institute for Universities, Colleges, and Research Institutions as Conservation Catalysts May 13-14. The group examined case studies in the restoration of the clogged Colorado River delta, private land conservation in Chile, conservation easements in Trinidad and Tobego, the Canadian BEACONs Project and boreal forest conservation, working landscapes and the Western Hemisphere Jaguar Network, landscape-scale conservation on the Serengeti, Australian coastal zone management, and current trends in conservation law and finance.
     An additional feature of the gathering was hearing about Charles Eliot and the Champlain Society in the gardens of the Longfellow House next door to the Lincoln Institute, and poetry from Caroline Harvey from the Berklee College of Music at the evening dinner at Henrietta's Table.
     The engagement of colleges and universities complements the Practitioners Network for Large Landscape Conservation established at a similar convening at the Lincoln Institute three years ago.

Taxes and land in Eastern Europe

     Largely under the radar, great strides are underway in land valuation and property tax systems in Eastern Europe -- as well as in Western Europe hotspots such as Ireland. In March, senior fellow Joan Youngman traveled to Ljubljana, Slovenia, with a delegation from the Lincoln Institute for a workshop on market value-based taxation of real property at the Center of Excellence in Finance, a leading
training institution for public officials. The work was with participants from six Eastern Europe
nations to compare international experiences and draw lessons for the successful implementation of value-based property taxes. The group analyzed property tax bases and valuation systems from the perspective of revenue capacity, fiscal policy, property rights, administrative efficiency, and land
use incentives.
     Major property tax changes in Serbia, Latvia, Slovenia, and Croatia were discussed in the context of similar efforts in Estonia, South Africa, Northern  Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. For example, the Republic  of Ireland has instituted a new property tax this year, after more than three decades without a residential property tax. At the same time, Croatia is scheduled to introduce a new residential property tax this year to replace existing community charges, income tax surcharges, and taxes limited to second homes. Kosovo increased property tax collections by one-third between 2012 and 2013, while in Serbia a change from central to local tax administration led to more than an 80 percent increase in Belgrade property tax revenue between 2006 and 2011. Slovenia and Northern Ireland both undertook a consolidation of property records and tax billing, while in Estonia these separate departments were functionally coordinated through use of compatible software.
     Throughout all regions the economic downturn has had a serious impact on property markets. Residential values doubled in Northern Ireland and in Latvia between 2005 and 2007, then fell sharply and only now are approaching their pre-recession levels. Estonian land prices and rents fell by half in 2009, while Slovenia experienced a 50 percent drop in the number of property sales. These market
fluctuations posed serious political and assessment challenges to value-based taxes. The failure of a hastily designed 2011 property tax introduced in Greece in response to its fiscal crisis offered many potential lessons for legislative drafting, tax administration, taxpayer communications, and public relations.
     The week’s discussion stressed the importance of separating the valuation and rate-setting processes, avoiding the political temptation to overtax business property, and setting specific cycles for revaluation. The danger of excessive transaction taxes, which can easily undermine valuation data by encouraging misrepresentation of sales prices, was demonstrated by the revenue improvements that followed reform of high tax rates, which reach 18 percent in Russia but have been reduced to less than 1 percent in Estonia. All countries had confronted the challenge of minimizing exemptions and deductions, but none more so than the United Kingdom, where the London Eye Ferris wheel, the Houses of Parliament, and even Buckingham Palace and Stonehenge are subject to tax and all exempt property is valued in order to calculate the revenue forgone by the exemption.
     That approach is the subject of an article in the April issue of Land Lines, by William McCluskey and David Tretton: Valuing and Taxing Iconic Properties: A Perspective from the United Kingdom.

The perils of urbanization

    To accomodate the many millions of mostly poor rural migrants streaming into megacities in the developing world, planners must prevail in establishing a grid -- the framework for future urban expansion. That was the message from Joan Clos, executive director of UN-HABITAT, the United Nations organization concerned with helping developing world cities establish basic services, housing, and infrastructure, at a symposium last week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The event, co-sponsored by the Lincoln Institute, honored the SPURS fellowship at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, a program for international mid-career professionals.
    “The street pattern is the foundation of urban planning," said Clos, citing the work of Solly Angel, who in Planet of Cities calls for minimal preparations for massive urban expansion.
     As it stands, most cities poised for explosive growth seem woefully unprepared. Those moving to cities in search of a better life are going straight to the slums. In sub-Saharan Africa, Close says, 65 percent of the urban population is in informal settlements. Slums in general, he says, range from 200,000 to 750,000 in size; for comparison, the entire city of Boston is a bit over 600,000. Families live in 10 by 10-foot spaces with a crude cooking stove and no toilet, and wait in – or more often bail out of -- long lines for public restrooms.
     By starting with the basics, Clos said, these growing cities would do well to look at the grid created by the planning commissioners in New York City. The zoning, regulations, real estate development composition, and modes of transport changed many times in the two centuries that followed, but the basic framework of the grid has endured.  More on Clos's remarks can be viewed at The Atlantic Cities. 
     Senior fellow Armando Carbonell helped inaugurate the two-day symposium at MIT, describing much of what was discussed as an exercise in building in resilience. Martim Smolka, director of the Lincoln Institute's Latin America program, also served as a commentator following remarks by Medellin mayor Anibal Gaviria Correa. Planning needs its heroes "and its meccas," Smolka said, noting the successes of many interventions such as a tram network in Medellin. But the question remains, he said, how leadership emerges in struggling cities.

The infrastructure of everything

     Infrastructure is famously not the sexiest topic in the world, but for global cities, it's vitally important, whether energy, transport, telecommunications, or water supply and sanitation, just to name a few sectors.  New strategies in the development, financing, and maintenance of infrastructure are detailed in the Lincoln Institute's latest publication, Infrastructure and Land Policies. 
     While infrastructure is as old as cities, technological changes and public policies on taxation and regulation have prompted new issues, ranging from megaprojects and greenhouse gas emissions to involuntary resettlement. For urban areas, the challenges of balancing economic growth with infrastructure development, funding, and maintenance are reflected in debates about finance, regulation, and location and about the sustainable levels of infrastructure services.
    Infrastructure services have technical and economic features such as economies of scale, externalities, and spillovers from users to nonusers that make many of these services difficult to provide as a normal private good. Because of these attributes, much infrastructure is provided either by public entities or privately with regulatory oversight. Infrastructure also delivers economic and poverty-alleviation benefits when it responds to demand and is provided efficiently.
     Recent research is finding that inadequate infrastructure is associated with income inequality. This is likely linked to the delivery of infrastructure services to households, such as direct health benefits, improved access to education, and enhanced economic opportunities.
    Because so much infrastructure is energy intensive, efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other negative impacts need to address services such as electric power and transport. Bringing the management of infrastructure up to levels of good practice has a large economic payoff, and performance levels vary dramatically between and within countries. A necessary, but so far unmet, challenge is to convey to policy makers and voters that large economic returns can be derived from improving infrastructure performance and maintenance.
    The book covers urban infrastructure in China, the use of mobile phones in Africa, tolling strategies, public-private partnerships and financing experimentation in cities such as Chicago, infrastructure associated with "mega-events" such as the Olympics, next scheduled to be in Rio, green infrastructure and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, urban infrastructure and business location, and maintenance and service delivery.
     Infrastructure and Land Policies, which  is based on the seventh annual Land Policy Conference at the Lincoln Institute held in 2012, where economists, social scientists, urban planners, and engineers convened to discuss how infrastructure issues impact low-, middle-, and high-income countries,  also includes material from the keynote talk,  Sustainable Infrastructure for Urban Growth, by Katherine Sierra of The Brookings Institution. 

The peninsula and the prairie

     The American Prairie Reserve seeks to create an unprecedented prairie-based wildlife reserve of more than three million acres in Montana that, when combined with public lands already devoted to wildlife, will protect a unique natural habitat, provide lasting economic benefits and improve public access to and enjoyment of the prairie landscape. The Peninsula Open Space Trust, a traditional land trust operating on the San Francisco Peninsula, has for decades approach land conservation in a targeted and strategic fashion in a more developed and defined area of human habitation. Audrey Rust, with experience with both initiatives, will examine the differences -- and surprising similarities -- in these distinct and highly successful preservation efforts in the American West, as the spring lecture series continues Wednesday May 1, with The Peninsula and the Prairie Regional and Large Landscape Conservation. Key components to be covered  include basic strategy, building relationships and partnerships, and fundraising.
     Audrey Rust, the 2012 Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute, is a leader in California land conservation work. She served for nearly a quarter-century as president of Peninsula Open Space Trust, a land trust working on the San Francisco Peninsula. At the organization, she is credited with raising hundreds of millions of dollars to conserve tens of thousands of acres of wildlife habitat and farmland. She is a founder of the Bay Area Open Space Council, Peninsula Working Group and California Council of Land Trusts.  Active in California bond issue initiatives, she has also served on the boards of the Land Trust Alliance, the League of Conservation Voters, Midpeninsula Citizens for Fair Housing and Rebuilding Together, and is currently on the boards of the American Prairie Reserve and the California Council of Land Trusts. Before coming to POST she served in positions of management and fundraising at Stanford University, Yale University, and the Sierra Club. She is the recipient of many awards including the Cynthia Pratt Laughlin Award from the Garden Club of American, Conservationist of the Year from the California League of Conservation Voters, the Jacqueline Kennedy award from JFK University, and the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from Sunset Books and Magazines.

The Resilient City

The 6th annual Journalists Forum on Land and the Built Environment was held Saturday at the Lincoln Institute, attended by 35 leading writers and editors focused on cities. The theme was resilience, broadly defined, from coastal cities preparing for future storms such as Sandy, to legacy cities trying to forge a path with diminished populations and business activity.
     Kai-Uwe Bergmann, principal at Bjarke Ingels Group, opened the forum with a look at urban design as loop in Copenhagen, recapturing waste and maximizing efficiency in land, housing, and major infrastructure projects, such as a landfill turned into a ski slope.  Johanna Greenbaum from Kushner Companies, detailed New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's micro-housing initiative, which she helped run, as well as other similar efforts around the country to accomodate singles and couples who can live in just 300 square feet.
     Alan Mallach, nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of next month's Policy Focus Report Regenerating America's Legacy Cities, noted signs of resurgence in places like the Central West End in St. Louis or Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati, but was realistic in ackowledging that Detroit cannot "come back" if only a handful of technology industry entrepreneurs move downtown.
     The task of building $16 billion in resilient transportation infrastructure in the Toronto area is aided by the use of social media, apps and a conversation kit, said Antoine Belaieff, Innovation Director at MetroLinx. The region is testing a range of financing methods including value capture, fuel and sales tax, and congestion pricing and tolling.
     John Macomber from Harvard Business School led off a session on the global city by recognizing the hundreds of millions of people continuing to migrate from rural areas into cities, requiring large-scale planning for infrastructure. He contrasted the explosive growth in Gurgaon, India where traffic snarls at a 52-lane toll booth and the water table recedes at a rate of one meter per year, to better planned projects in Suzhou, China, and Phu My Hung, Vietnam. Martim Smolka, director of the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, lamented widespread dislocations in preparations for the World Cup and the Olympics in Rio. Bing Wang from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, noted there are 11 cities in China over 10 million -- and yet the rapidly growing nation is only halfway to its expected urbanization.
     The theme of property rights is increasingly prevalent in rebuilding and recovery following storms such as Sandy, and the GSD's Jerold Kayden asserted that government is within legal bounds by restricting owners from building on a vacant lot that is subject to flooding and sea level rise, or rebuilding a home that has been destroyed, but that "politically, it's another story."  He predicted that the Supreme Court would likely support regulatory requirements in the case of Koontz v. St. John's River Water Management District. 
     Pratap Talwar, principal at Thompson Design Group, detailed the long planning process and local building rules at Long Beach, N.J. -- the one mile of New Jersey coastline that did not sustain major damage during Sandy -- and the integration of natural systems at Buffalo Bayou in Houston.
     John Werner, chief mobilizing officer at Citizens Schools, spelled out how urban school systems can ignite passion in students by bringing in outside professionals as teachers and mentors. Gordon Feller of Cisco Systems envisioned a completely connected world and an Internet of everything, joined by Washington Post investigative reporter Dan Keating, who shared his experiences extracting data from various levels of government. 
    The forum had to be shortened because of the manhunt and investigation in the Cambridge-Watertown area for the Boston Marathon bombers -- but the event prompted dialogue about the "shelter in place" request by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, security and public space, and another kind of resilience in the Boston area. Several participants wrote about the events, including Emily Badger at The Atlantic Cities and Donald Luzzatto at the Virginian Pilot.
    The annual springtime gathering is a partnership of the Lincoln Institute, Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.