Urban planning tools and climate change

     While the Obama administration is preparing for negotiations on a new international climate change accord at the December United Nations meeting in Copenhagen, and federal and state initiatives also have begun to address climate change, urban planners and local decision-makers need better ways to judge the climate implications of local growth and redevelopment, and to measure the effects of their decisions. Urban Planning Tools for Climate Change Mitigation, the Lincoln Institute's latest Policy Focus Report, details how urban form will play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, supported by tools that work at the local and regional scale.
     Initiatives at the local and regional level should be comprehensive, capable of being tested and evaluated, intelligible to a wide range of stakeholders, and affordable to implement, the report says. Quick action is imperative because land planning and policy decisions are set to be made at the international, national, state, provincial, regional, and local levels that will have enormous consequences. Scientists have reported that warming impacts are occurring at a faster rate than anticipated, on a number of fronts. The report was authored by Patrick M. Condon, Duncan Cavens, and Nicole Miller, all at the University of British Columbia, where the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Design Centre for Sustainability have convened a series of meetings to assess tools to support land use policy and decision making in the context of climate change mitigation and urban planning at local and regional levels. The goal is to help tool developers and modelers identify critical needs as they design the next generation of planning support tools, identifying strengths and limitations.
     The urban planning tools for climate mitigation detailed in the report are:
n INDEX, planning support software for land use and transportation modeling used in Elburn, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and hundreds of other locations. The software, developed by Criterion Planners, makes quick and easy-to-understand calculations about the energy use and carbon emissions associated with different types of land uses, varying density, and transit availability to reduce vehicle miles traveled.
n  I-PLACE³S, a Web-based, publicly available modeling platform for measuring the climate impacts of the built environment, developed by the State of California and administered by the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, and used in the King County, Washington HealthScape initiative to analyze the transportation and public health impacts of land development alternatives in Greater Seattle.
n   Envision Tomorrow, a suite of urban and regional planning tools developed by Fregonese Associates that models land use decisions ranging from the scale of a specific development site to a much larger area, specifically Superstition Vistas, the 275-square-mile expanse of former state trust lands near Phoenix. The tool includes analysis of the physical and financial feasibility of development, and provides data on the carbon footprint of different scenarios – development using green building techniques, for example, or with greater density, walkable neighborhood design, or multi-modal transportation options.
n    Development Pattern Approach, a database of parcel-scale examples of streets, open space, and buildings across a range of densities, developed by ElementsLAB in the Design Centre for Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, and used in North Vancouver’s sustainability master plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The spatial modeling incorporates GIS and Google SketchUp to produce dramatic visual and quantitative results when changes are made – replacing a single-family house with a duplex, for example.
     Producing comprehensive, three-dimensional, accessible urban planning tools for climate change mitigation, that can be applied to a range of scales from the building to the neighborhood to the metropolitan region, is a daunting task, but the need is great, the report says. Urban Planning Tools for Climate Change Mitigation is designed both to allow public officials and proponents of development projects to make better decisions on climate impacts today, and serve as a foundation to inform the evolution of the next generation of planning support tools and models. The report can be downloaded free here.

Assess this

     Assessors have never had it easy, but these days they are feeling particularly squeezed --strapped homeowners seeking property tax relief are clamoring for valuations that reflect the drop in real estate values, but local governments need the revenue more than ever as the very same economic downturn wreaks havoc with budgets. So it was time to roll up sleeves at the International Association of Assessing Officers 75^th annual conference, held in Louisville, Kentucky September 13-17, where a Lincoln Institute team put on a policy semainr addressing the special challenges facing assessors during the past year’s housing market crisis. Professor Karl Case of Wellesley College offered his perspectives on the causes of the housing collapse, its implications for the larger economy, and prospects for recovery. Two authors of recent Policy Focus Reports presented their findings and recommendations for policymakers seeking to assist taxpayers in difficult economic times: Terri Sexton of California State University, Sacramento, co-author of Property Tax Assessment Limits, analyzed the problems and unexpected consequences of popular assessment limitation measures, while Lincoln Institute visiting fellow Daphne Kenyon, co-author of Property Tax Circuit Breakers, reviewed the positive aspects of targeted measures to extend tax relief to low-income taxpayers. Sally Powers, a BearingPoint, Inc. consultant with experience advising property valuation and taxation projects in Kosovo, South Africa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Bosnia, who recently became a visiting fellow, provided an in-depth review of the new property tax database, Significant Features of the Property Tax. All the presentations were received with great interest by assessors and tax administrators dealing simultaneously with pressing revenue needs of jurisdictions facing downturns in tax collections and state aid, calls for tax relief by taxpayers affected by the economic downturn, and the dramatic reductions in real estate values in many housing markets, said Joan Youngman, senior fellow and chair of the Department of Valuation and Taxation.

Panama's frontier

    For a fascinating urban development story, look no further than Panama, which has seen explosive growth both in Panama City, where the towers are rising in a fashion that rivals Shanghai, and in what can only be described as residential sprawl outside the urban core. Almost ten years after the completion of the canal treaties with the USA and on its 490^th anniversary this year, Panama City has a port system that ranks first in terms of container cargo handling in Latin America, and is embarking on an enlargement of the "path between the seas," revenue from which is skyrocketing, due in 2014. Vast new tracts of land are becoming available, whether associated with decomissioned U.S. military properties or adjustments in the canal buffer zone and watershed. Real estate investment is pouring in, producing over 100 20- to 60-story buildings in less than a decade, tripling land values in five years, and putting more pressure on areas with serious infrastructure shortcomings. All of this has led to the creation of a new Urban Law, the first in 60 years, in 2006, and calls for more serious long-range planning.
    "We don't have any rules at the moment, or we have outrageous rules," such as density bonuses for combining residential and hotel use, or generous 20-year property tax exemptions, said Alvaro Uribe, professor in the School of Architecture of the University of Panama and researcher for Panama's International Center for Sustainable Development, who delivered the first Lincoln Lecture in the fall series at Lincoln House September 9. "The city is going everywhere," he said, with little regard for urban tissue or scale or transportation systems, other than new highways. Outside the core, he said, "it's completely horizontal, formal and informal, with very low densities. Barbed wire has become the boundary of the neighborhood, and down the middle, a road."
    Uribe sees promise in a new review process that provides a rationale for massing and height, the creation of boulevards and waterfront parks, and new attention to mass transit. Panama City has the potential to be a great urban laboratory, but, he said, "I think we may need to hit bottom before we really begin to react." 
    Uribe, partner in the firm Urbio, S. A., has collaborated with the Lincoln Institute's Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, and the program's director, Martim Smolka, recently returned from a major conference in Panama City focused on land use planning.

Untimely erosion

     One more case of bad timing. Just when local governments desperately need revenue to provide services, the property tax base has been significantly diminished by tax caps, assessment limitations, relief measures, and expanded exemptions, according to a new book, Erosion of the Property Tax Base: Trends, Causes, and Consequences. A variety of policies designed to reduce property tax burdens -- and to accomplish other social and economic goals through property tax exemptions or abatements – has threatened the largest single source of state and local revenues across the country.  “A tax with a broad base and low rates is generally simpler, fairer, and more efficient than one that raises the same revenue with high rates on a narrow base,” said co-editor Joan Youngman, senior fellow and chair of the Department of Valuation and Taxation at the Lincoln Institute. But the property tax is a prime target for reduction, limitation, and exemption proposals, not least because it is a highly visible tax, and requires cash payments even if property may not be yielding cash income. State lawmakers may also find political gains in tax limitations that reduce local, rather than state, revenue. But the property tax is a mainstay of local government finance in the U.S., and a revenue source that offers many benefits, including greater stability than many sales and income taxes during economic downturns.
      Erosion of the Property Tax Base analyzes efforts to limit property tax growth, reviewing the political, economic, and social reasons for this trend and its implications for local finance. It also examines the growth of property tax exemptions, both for nonprofit organizations and for open space and agricultural land; residential property tax relief measures as well as tax and expenditure limits; the use of override votes to lift tax limits; and the increasing use of property tax abatements as tools to influence business location decisions. The book is based on a 2007 collaborative conference between the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the George Washington Institute of Public Policy. The topics covered include:
     * The value of housing stock of all residential property and owner-occupied property as a share of GDP, noting that since 2000 there has been a clear upward trend in both;
     * Implications of various property tax exemptions on local property tax bases, revenues, and equity;
     * Various tools used by state and local governments to provide property tax relief, primarily to residential property owners;
     * State-imposed limitations on local governments’ ability to raise property taxes, referred to in the literature as tax and expenditure limits (TELs), which include assessment limits, rate limitations, and revenue and expenditure limits; and
     * The growth and impact of tax abatement programs, property tax incentives to support local nonprofit organizations, and incentives to encourage open space through the preservation of land used for agricultural purposes and setasides to create green spaces.

State vs. local

     As housing continues to be a lynchpin in urbanization worldwide, policymakers are confronted with the question: what is the proper mix of state versus local authority in planning initiatives? Earlier this summer at Lincoln House, Harvard Law professor Gerald Frug and Edesio Fernandes, a recent visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute, had a brisk exchange on the pros and cons of both. Fernandes was critical of the decentralized system in Brazil, arguing that municipal government jurisdictions don't match up with the reality of how metropolitan regions have grown, leaving little room for regional or national planning. Land use planning in environmentally sensitive areas in the Amazon, for example, is left to a patchwork of municipal authorities, each with their own mission. "Why do we create institutions ... that do not express the territorial order they seek the regulate?" Fernandes asked.
     Frug, co-author with David J. Barron of City Bound – How States Stifle Urban Innovation, noted that cities in the U.S. can only do what state governments allow -- that cities are creatures of the state, going back to 19th century law, when it should be the other way around. With over 80 percent of the U.S. population in metro areas, he said, "we need to rethink the city-state relationship for the 21st century." Frug agreed that "we're not locating government organization in the places we actually inhabit," allowing a wide range of local policy challenges -- housing, education, crime -- to go unaddressed on a regional basis. State legislatures may be the least appropriate authorities for setting regional land policy. Frug cited the Metro regional government in Portland, which figures prominently in the documentary film Portland: Quest for the Livable City, as a better approach.
    The conversation with Frug and Fernandes, “Legal-institutional designs supporting urban planning and management in federal systems: US and Brazil,” was co-sponsored by the Affordable Housing Institute as part of its Exchange program, made possible by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The exchange will be posted in video on the Lincoln Institute Web site.

Building town and gown

    This is a tough time for colleges and universities, with shrinking endowments, layoffs and budget cuts, and campus expansion plans put on hold. Harvard University, for example, is moving slowly in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, across the Charles River from the main campus. Other universities are keeping the focus within, for new student housing. But a new Lincoln Institute report urges anchor institutions to maintain close working relationships with the urban neighborhoods where they reside. Town–Gown Collaboration in Land Use and Development, by Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz, the Lincoln Institute’s latest Policy Focus Report, advises balancing university and community roles as part of a large, complex urban environment; working together toward common goals by sharing responsibility, authority, and accountability; and creating lasting change founded on ongoing communication and long-term, relationships.
       “The ‘town-gown’ relationship has clearly evolved,” says Lincoln Institute president Gregory K. Ingram. “These anchor institutions have entered a new era of community engagement – no longer enclaves of intellectual pursuit, but rather centers of employment, spending, and workforce development, and economic engines that attract new businesses and highly skilled individuals to revitalize urban environments.”
       Over 80 percent of U.S. colleges and universities are in urban neighborhoods. To fulfill their mission, these institutions often become involved in land development at the campus edge, whether to construct new dormitories and research facilities or to offset neighborhood decline. These activities usually have an immediate impact on the neighborhood and on the entire city. When the use of urban land for university purposes competes with its use for local priorities, conflicts inevitably arise. A variety of stakeholders—ranging from local governments to nearby residents—may mobilize to counter university land development for reasons related to social and economic concerns, quality of life in the neighborhood, the planning and design process, and loss of property tax revenue.
       The report includes a matrix of what works and what doesn’t in approaches to land use and development, categorized by community concerns:
     * Social equity. Efforts to mitigate displacement and gentrification, and to generate job opportunities for local residents and businesses works; ignoring the neighborhood’s social and economic context doesn’t.
     * Planning. A joint planning process that involves the university, the community, and city leaders works; land banking, finalizing university plans internally, or consulting only with citywide organizations doesn’t.
     * Design. Planning and developing the university or college campus in ways that blend the academic and local communities works; development that is out of character with the surrounding neighborhood scale doesn’t.
     * Leadership. Close involvement of the university president or other top-level leaders in developing and sustaining the commitment to community engagement works; having no formal mechanism for senior officials to work with the community, except on an ad hoc basis, doesn’t.
     * Tax-exempt status. Recognition of inequitable tax burdens due to institutional status and use of alternative payments works; long-running disputes and court cases between the universities and cities over development projects and tax-exempt status doesn’t.
       The challenges for anchor institutions in a highly competitive environment and in a period of extreme fiscal pressure, the report says, is to blend their goals and the interests of the city and the community.

Land and property values

     Because land and structures are so inexorably blended in the U.S., pinpointing the value of land is a difficult task. Morris A. Davis, assistant professor of real estate and urban land economics at the Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the Wisconsin School of Business and a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, has made the task easier with a new online database that provides separate price indices for land and structures. Land and Property Values in the U.S. provides data sets covering the ratio of rents to prices for the stock of all owner-occupied housing; values and price indexes for all land, structures, and housing in residential use; and values and price indexes for land, structures, and housing for single-family owner-occupied housing units in 46 major U.S. metropolitan areas.
      “Price indexes and values of land inform the analysis of trends and cycles in house prices,” says Davis, who tells the story of how he created the data sets here. “If housing were simply a manufactured good, and location or land had no value, then the price of housing would be determined by construction costs, and housing prices would increase at roughly the same rate as the price of other goods in the US economy.” But housing is on land with a specific location, and good locations are often scarce and valuable. If construction costs rise slowly over time and desirable locations are in limited supply, increases in the demand for housing can translate directly to increases in the price of good locations – the land – and in house prices. Accordingly, information on changes in the price and value of land over time often relate to trends and cycles in housing demand.
      Few of these data can be directly observed. In the case of the rent-to-price ratio, the implicit rents accruing to homeowners must be estimated based on market rents of similar rental units. In the case of land, direct land sales are rarely observed in built-up areas and occur mainly where new suburban development occurs. To estimate the value of land in built-up areas requires separating the directly observed sale price of housing into the underlying values of the housing structure and the land, neither of which is separately observed.
     The online database provides disaggregate estimates of property value for real estate analysis, and will be a useful tool for researchers analyzing housing trends. The data sets can be found in the Databases section of Resources and Tools at www.lincolninst.edu.

Kudos for Shifting Ground

    "Outstanding original research, excellent personalization of the stories, excellent use of natural sound, and interesting interviews to clarify each story ... Exactly what enterprising radio journalism should be ... Each piece was entertaining and together formed a series on land-use conflicts not often reported on by the media." Those are the words of high praise for David Baron and the National Public Radio series Shifting Ground, an exploration of land use in America, which won the first-place award for best in-depth radio reporting in the 2008-2009 Society of Environmental Journalists Awards for Reporting on the Environment, according to the SEJ awards announcement. In the series, which the Lincoln Institute supported, Baron, the independent producer for NPR 's All Things Considered, looks at conflicts and tensions concernign land use, growth, and development, but also relates stories of innovation and progress: a Nevada community rallying to preserve its rural character in the face of suburban sprawl, a tussle over conservation easements in Wyoming, the local perspective on a large wind farm in upstate New York, erosion on the Texas coastline, and what the public sees on the land beside the road in Florida. The Lincoln Institute provided support for the series and made resources on land use available, through the Department of Planning and Urban Form. The series was also made possible by support from The Orton Family Foundation, based in Middlebury, Vermont. The Society of Environmental Journalists Awards for Reporting on the Environment is the world's largest and most comprehensive awards program for journalism on environmental topics. Pollution near schools, longwall mining, biological invaders, climate change, environment and heredity, predator tagging, and tar sands were among the topics being recognized, in 31 entries in 11 categories. Reporters, editors and journalism educators who served as contest judges reviewed over 187 entries to choose the finalists representing the best environmental reporting in print and on television, radio, the Internet and in student publications.

Lincoln-Loeb ties

The 2009-2010 Loeb Fellows include three mid-career professionals with connections to the Lincoln Institute. Julie Campoli, landscape architect and principal of Terra Firma based in Burlington, Vermont, is author of the Lincoln Institute book Visualizing Density, and plans to explore how greater density can be combined with renewable energy and local food production for a more sustainable urban infrastructure. Gil Kelley, former city planner for Portland, Oregon, has been a longtime particpant in the Big City Planners program in partnership with the American Planning Association and Harvard's Graduate School of Design, appears in the documentary film Portland: Quest for the Livable City, and is the Lincoln-Loeb Fellow for 2009-2010. And Jose de Fillippi Jr., former mayor of Diadema, Brazil, is well known in the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean for his engagement on crime, housing, and urban land development, and was featured in this Land Lines article in 2005.

HUD eyes metro regions

        President Obama’s Office of Urban Affairs is up and running, but for those tracking a new relationship between the federal government and metropolitan regions, there has been equal ferment at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, under Secretary Shaun Donovan. HUD has been forging new partnerships with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy, and a key player moved to Washington recently to help set the administration’s sustainability agenda: Ron Sims, former executive of Washington’s King County.
      “Our idea is to sync things up,” Sims said at a gathering of the Citistates Associates, led by Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group, for three days of brainstorming on regional initiatives on climate, energy, infrastructure, and transportation at Bridgewater, New Hampshire at the end of June. “I have never seen people moving more directionally on sustainability livability.”
     Sims said the aim is to change the culture of HUD, and turn it back into an activist community development agency. “We must stop losing the opportunity to have an impact,” he said, not just by focusing on cities but broader regions.
     The new policy pathways are numerous, and they are all happening now: the $787 billion stimulus package and its implications for infrastructure, recently analyzed by SmartGrowthAmerica and the New York Times; the evolving cap-and-trade Markey-Waxman climate bill; and reauthorization of federal transportation spending.The Citistates group called for a “recalibration” based on the recognition that metropolitan regions are population centers that are hubs of innovation in the new green economy, requiring new ways of thinking of how they function most efficiently – and competitively -- in the US economy. Currently states and individual cities compete for funds and conduct planning more like individual fiefdoms.
     “We need a new narrative,” said Bill Shutkin, director of the Initiative for Sustainable Development at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado. “The question is, can we respond to feedback, can we read the signals? Do we have the capacity to recalibrate and recover? We are at critical moment,” he said, citing Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
     Regional initiatives on climate and transportation show signs of promise. But the group was guarded and pessimistic, and continued to look to Washington to seize the moment.