True value

     The story of Frank McCourt, the embattled L.A. Dodgers owner, provided some fitting context for the discussion of value capture at the 6th Annual Land Policy conference last month. McCourt owned a premiere L-shaped 25-acre parcel on the South Boston Waterfront, Boston’s new frontier for urban development. In the 1990s, two big projects got underway. The $15 billion Central Artery and Tunnel project, otherwise known as the Big Dig, included an underground extension of I-90 connecting to the Ted Williams Tunnel to Logan Airport – and an interchange letting out right at McCourt’s property. At the same time, the Silver Line, Boston’s experiment in bus rapid transit, ran in a dedicated tunnel with a station also positioned at the center of McCourt’s land. The Silver Line, which has since exceeded all ridership projections, provides access to the Seaport and Logan airport from South Station, the hub for the city’s subway, commuter rail, and Amtrak.
         When it came time for McCourt to put the financing together for the Dodgers, he found that all this infrastructure had boosted the value of his property, from the roughly $10 million he paid for it to $200 million. “These investments were a tremendous boon to the landowners in the area,” said Richard Henderson, at the time part of Massport, one of the agencies involved in the Seaport’s transformation, at the opening night dinner at “Prospects For Land Value Capture,” a three-day gathering of over 100 scholars, researchers, and practitioners.
         The Seaport story would have been different if a system of value capture was in place, where private owners who benefit from public investment in infrastructure contribute to the financing of projects, based on a formula for the land value increment. Forms of value capture are familiar policy in Latin America; Certificates of Participation and other mechanisms support urban development in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and numerous studies have shown that the bus rapid transit system in Bogota, Colombia, increased property values along the network. Until recently, value capture has been a foreign concept in the U.S. Its use is being considered to help finance the planned 62-mile Cotton Belt rail line in Dallas, and inherent in the establishment of a Business Improvement District -- where private owners pay for services like maintenance, in recognition that a clean street or well-run downtown park can have a positive impact on property values. Consideration of value capture and a new BID has been ongoing along the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston.
        Lincoln Institute president Gregory K. Ingram said it was not surprising that value capture was "in the air," given the fiscal strains on local, state, and the federal government, and the need for new financing mechanisms for major infrastructure. The conference examined the myriad ways that value capture or value capture-like mechanisms are in place -- whether special assessments, betterment tax, community improvement districts, airport improvement fees, inclusionary housing, or public land leasing. The presentations included Perry Shapiro, University of California, Santa Barbara, Takings and Givings: The Analytics of Land Value Capture and its Symmetries with Taking Compensation; Philip A. Booth, University of Sheffield, The Unearned Increment: Property and the Capture of Betterment Value in Britain and France; Lawrence C. Walters, Brigham Young University, To What Extent are Property Related Taxes Effective Value Capture Instruments?; John E. Anderson, University of Nebraska, Collecting Land Value Through Public Land Leasing; Dean J. Misczynski, Public Policy Institute of California, From City-wide Special Assessments to Localized Business and Community Improvement Districts; Michael I. Luger, University of Manchester, Expanding Town and Gown Partnerships to Research Parks; Laura Wolf-Powers, University of Pennsylvania, Community Benefits Agreements in a Value Capture Context; Bishwapriya Sanyal, MIT, Land Pooling: Town Planning Schemes in Gujarat, India; Susan M. Wachter and Richard P. Voith, University of Pennsylvania, Assessing the Durability of Inclusionary Housing and Community Land Trusts; Jin Murakami, University of California, Berkeley, Transit Value Capture: New Town Co-development Models and Contemporary Market Profiles in Tokyo and Hong Kong; Anming Zhang, University of British Columbia, Airport Improvement Fees, Benefit Spillovers and Land Value Capture Mechanisms; Joseph J. Cordes, George Washington University, Arguments for Taxing Charitable Non-Profit Entities for Using Local Public Goods; and Susan K. Culp and Dan W. Hunting, Sonoran Institute, Experimenting with Land Value Capture on Western State Trust Land.
     Susan S. Fainstein, professor at Harvard University, took matters a step further, suggesting that the model of outright government ownership of land and housing in The Netherlands and Singapore had resulted in community balance and equity.
     The final conclusion: the idea of harnessing the power of public infrastructure investments shouldn't be so exotic after all.
      The proceedings of the three-day conference will be published in a book next spring. The proceedings of the previous Land Policy Conference, in 2010, were recently published in the volume Climate Change and Land Policies. Another version of the Frank McCourt story appeared at The Infrastructurist, including numerous interesting reader comments.

Johannes Linn joins board

        Johannes F. Linn, a resident senior scholar at the Emerging Markets Forum in Washington, D.C. and an economist with three decades of experience at the World Bank, has joined the Board of Directors at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
       “We are honored to have someone with such extraordinary expertise and global perspective join the board,” said Kathryn J. Lincoln, chair of the board and chief investment officer of the Lincoln Institute.
       Gregory K. Ingram, president of the Lincoln Institute, noted that Linn’s expertise in international aspects of urban development and local public finance will enhance ongoing programs.
        Linn served as director of the Wolfensohn Center for Development at the Brookings Institution from 2005-2010, and remains in association with Brookings as a non-resident senior fellow in scholarship and practice. Prior to joining Brookings in 2003, Linn worked for three decades at the World Bank in various capacities. After eight years of research on urban development issues, he was country economist and economic advisor in the Bank’s East Asia Region. In 1987-88, staff director of the 1988 World Development Report on public finance in development, and then served in various managerial functions in the World Bank’s research department. In 1991, he became the Bank’s Vice President for Financial Policy and Resource Mobilization.  From 1996 to 2003, he was the Bank’s Vice President for Europe and Central Asia.
        Linn has published extensively on development and global governance issues, including a book jointly authored with Roy W. Bahl, Urban Public Finance in Developing Countries  (Oxford University Press, 1992), and another jointly edited with Colin Bradford, Global Governance Reform: Breaking the Stalemate (Brookings Press 2007). His current research interests and recent publications are in the areas of aid effectiveness, with a special focus on scaling up successful development interventions, global governance reform, and on regional cooperation with a special focus on Central Asia. He currently serves as the External Chair for the ninth replenishment of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the United Nations agency addressing poverty in rural areas.
       He holds a Bachelors degree from Oxford University (1968) and a doctorate in economics from Cornell University (1972).
       The other members of the Lincoln Institute board include former Interior secretary and Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt; Roy Bahl, Regents Professor of Economics at Georgia. State University; 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; Thomas Nechyba, professor of economics and public policy studies, Duke University; Kenneth T.W. Pang, adjunct professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University; 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.

Sprawl repair

     The business of retrofitting suburban environments is steadily maturing, but with progress come questions -- does rehabilitating strip malls along arterials require, by definition, the muscle of a regional planning approach? Or are incremental steps the more realistic intervention? Two cases studies were highlighted in the panel "Sprawl Retrofit at the Micro Scale: Repairing in All Dimensions" at the 19th Congress for the New Urbanism in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this month: the ongoing transformation of State Road 7 in the Fort Lauderale-Hollywood area in south Florida, part of the Lincoln Institute's Redesigning the Edgeless City program,  and the Long Island Index initiative and Places to Grow report prepared by partner the Regional Plan Association.
    Along State Road 7 in Florida, the focus has been on replacing a deteriotated commercial strip with complete and more concentrated development at transit nodes, bolstered by a new land-use category for transit corridors and an increase in the sales tax in Broward County dedicated for transit. Yet close attention was also required for conditions on the ground. Planners do not want to displace, for example, the entreprenuers, many of them immigrants, who have taken advantage of the depressed real estate to occupy storefronts with small businesses or carts in the vast empty parking lots.
    On Long Island, RPA identified 8,300 acres for potential redevelopment in suburban downtowns and around train stations -- half of which was currently used for parking cars. Mixed-use development in these areas, all within a half-mile radius of transit stations, could produce 90,000 new homes. But concerns about density and "unprotected open space" required going slow, starting the conversation with mapping tools that display how the areas could be filled in.
    Both initiatives have been powered by regional planning agencies, and for the critical component of transit, given the fiscal strains on state and local government, future suburban retrofits may depend on the reauthorization of federal transportation funding, currently being tracked by Transportation for America. At the same time, said R. John Anderson, principal at Anderson|Kim Architecture + Urban Design, "developers have got to think much smaller." Given the unstable financial "soil conditions," he said, a one-quarter block of rental units and workspaces is much more likely than big developments coming in to save the day. "Tactical urbanism," he said, is a counter to scenario planning maps and big-picture "vision fatigue." Mike Lydon, founder of The Street Plans Collaborative, was of the same mind, suggesting that "tactical urbanism" such as pop-up cafes, temporary pavement painting, and chairbombing -- dropping in free Adirondack chairs built from shipping crates -- could be applied along suburban commercial strips.
    The panel was moderated by Ellen Dunham-Jones, co-author with June Williamson of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. Extensive coverage of all the proceedings of CNU 19 in Madison is available here. Related: Kaid Benfield also has a post on the challenges of transforming a dead mall near St. Louis.

Into the eBooks frontier

         Last month Amazon disclosed that eBooks sales were outpacing printed titles, and the Lincoln Institute has taken note. We are now publishing selected titles as eBooks, available through Amazon’s Kindle Store, as part of an ongoing initiative to broaden the availability of publications across multiple platforms.
        “We seek to make our timely research available in a variety of formats, taking advantage of the advances in electronic publishing and the convenience of eReaders,” said Gregory K. Ingram, president of the Lincoln Institute.
        The first Lincoln Institute eBooks available for ordering at the Kindle Store are:
        * Working Across Boundaries: People, Nature, and Regions, by Matthew McKinney and Shawn Johnson, a look at theory and practice in regional collaboration;
        * Municipal Revenues and Land Policies, edited by Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong, a collection of papers presented at the 2009 Land Policy Conference on public finance;
        * Climate Change and Land Policies, edited by Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong, the proceedings of the 2010 Land Policy Conference on global warming and land use.
        The next volume to be published as an eBook is The Community Land Trust Reader, edited by John Emmeus Davis, a collection of essays tracing the past, present, and future of the community land trust movement. 
        These publications can be ordered and read on Amazon’s Kindle, as well as on the Apple iPad and other eReaders by downloading the free Kindle app. The display includes the original text, illustrations, charts, and tables, and allows navigation such as bookmarking and easy viewing of citations.
        As part of the eBooks initiative, Ann LeRoyer, director of publications at the Lincoln Institute, said that several additional existing books will be converted to the eBook format, and selected future titles will be published simultaneously as printed volumes and as eBooks.
        All print editions of Lincoln Institute books and other publications continue to be available for ordering at the Lincoln Institute Web site under Publications and Multimedia.