[PDF] Land Assembly For Urban Redevelopment eBook

Author : Alan Drew Cander
Publisher :
Page : 461 pages
File Size : 16,81 MB
Release : 2011
Category : City planning
ISBN :

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Urban redevelopment involves the renovation of deteriorating city areas through the rehabilitation or replacement of dilapidated buildings and underutilized parcels with new land uses to meet specific economic goals. Municipalities may invoke eminent domain to facilitate land acquisition for redevelopment. However, eminent domain is only one land assembly tool among other processes and strategies - including blight investigation and designation - that municipalities use to assemble land for redevelopment. This dissertation addresses large scale processes and broader issues that impact how municipalities make land available for redevelopment through formal and informal land assembly processes. It is based on larger questions centering on what land assembly and blight determination strategies municipalities use in their redevelopment efforts, how eminent domain factors into such processes, and how regulations and case law influence municipal redevelopment processes. Using a three-pronged qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews, archival analysis, and site visits, I conducted case studies of four urban redevelopment projects (two in one neighborhood) in Newark, New Jersey spanning a fifty-year period and revealing several overarching themes. I found that land assembly processes and strategies have been aimed at maintaining municipal control over the redevelopment process. City officials have considered Newark a city for sale in which land is a transferrable, deliverable commodity. The need to chase funding streams has heavily influenced redevelopment efforts. Private sector involvement in Newark's earlier urban renewal efforts challenges the conventional view that privatization did not emerge in redevelopment until the neoliberalism of the 1970s. After devolution, as private sector initiatives became increasingly important to Newark's redevelopment efforts, the focus of blight designation shifted from deteriorated outlying neighborhoods to potentially blighted areas downtown where private investment was less risky. Site targeting and land delivery have often preceded blight designation by many months: blight declaration has tended to be a formality. Grass roots opposition has profoundly impacted redevelopment efforts. Finally, much Newark's land assembly process has centered on formal and informal meetings and agreements between public and private actors who target specific sites, suggesting that the public and the media have overemphasized the role of eminent domain in redevelopment efforts.

Author : Melissa Alaine Schrock
Publisher :
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 41,82 MB
Release : 2012
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The land readjustment method of land assembly has an extensive international history, but is virtually unknown to professional planners and real estate developers in the United States. Its potential benefits are many. It promises to produce efficient development patterns, maximize value creation, minimize population displacement, fund the construction of project-related infrastructure and public facilities and protect the rights of property owners. Decades of experience in Japan and Germany, among other countries, have shown land readjustment to be a flexible tool adaptable to many development scenarios and cultural contexts. As part of a joint effort with planners from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), the regional planning body serving the 101 cities and towns of Metropolitan Boston, this investigation seeks to provide insight into the financial economics of land readjustment and to provide guidance on how the tool could be employed in Massachusetts. A case is made for the use of land readjustment in urban redevelopment scenarios in Massachusetts. As socio-demographic changes put pressure on our urban cores, the need for strategic redevelopment of urbanized areas will be reinforced. The land readjustment mechanism can simultaneously address the needs of affected communities and the development goals of the municipality in a consensus-based environment. This investigation uses the Four Corners area of Dorchester in Boston as a hypothetical case study for land readjustment in an urban redevelopment context. A comparative financial analysis is produced to contrast the net economic benefits created by a conventional piecemeal land assembly with as-of-right development to those created by a comprehensive land readjustment process through which community development goals are achieved. The investigation concludes with a discussion of the distribution of these economic benefits. The financial analysis tool created by the researcher is provided in the accompanying spreadsheet.

Author : Lynne B. Sagalyn
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 35,67 MB
Release : 2011
Category :
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A firm premise of urban redevelopment is the need for public action to deal with the practical problems of urban land assembly: numerous small parcels, fragmented ownership, and balkanized derivative interests, all of which hinder spontaneous market-driven transformations. Relying on the process of eminent domain to assemble land has been the stalwart convention of urban revitalization as practiced in the U.S. during the decades following World War II. Nonetheless, the use of eminent domain powers is fraught with obvious political problems. Because it is politically unpopular, public officials typically use it only as a last resort, and they are on the defensive from the first announcement of condemnation intentions. Because it is inherently controversial, ensuing litigation inevitably delays projects, sometimes terminally so. While government often prevails in judicial contests of condemnation, the process is not without its costs, as evident in the Kelo case, which intensified rather than diminished the controversy in the court of public opinion. Given that the condemnation process is so cumbersome and costly, inherently litigious, and full of political risks, what other policy options exist to effectuate public ambitions that call for land assembly? In particular, what is the applicability of land readjustment schemes to public/private redevelopment projects commonly pursed in U.S. cities today? In this paper I explore the lessons learned from the redevelopment of Times Square at 42nd Street, where 13 acres of prime, if blighted, land was assembled by the customary method of condemnation. This experience vividly argues for a more efficient strategy, though in such large-scale redevelopment project where issues of overall control and the redefinition of land uses are often paramount, land readjustment schemes may be difficult to apply. Land readjustment, however, may be a useful mechanism to rationalize land-use patterns in failed subdivisions, obsolete cooperative apartment houses, older inner-city suburbs or neighborhoods blighted by failed projects of any kind. In these situations, land readjustment is potentially a much more efficient process than governmental site ownership precisely because the original owners are retained as participants, thereby eliminating the need for an Request-For-Proposal (RFP) process to choose redevelopers. The process creates either salable publicly owned parcels or public improvements, both potentially at no cost to the public, while at the same time improving property values and thus, the tax base. Land readjustment schemes are complex. They require large up-front expenditures of time and cost, tricky valuations of contributed interests and determinations of cost-equivalent land, and holdouts; in addition, the length of time it takes to execute a readjustment scheme defines owners' opportunity cost of pooling their land interests. To discuss the application of a land-readjustment model to urban land assembly for public/private redevelopment, I review three core policy issues (the creation of new economic interests, the balance of public objectives and private interests, and the implications for public finance of a voluntary land-pooling system) and discuss the perceived difficulties arising from the politics of development opposition and the fragmented character of city property markets. Where these politics obstacles are not dominant, land readjustment schemes hold greater potential application. In particular, the model of a joint-stock development corporation holds much promise in cities and states where the politics of development are less fractious and more consensual.