Land Use Prof Blog

Epstein on Property Rights in Land and Water

Richard A. Epstein (NYU, Chicago, and Stanford--Hoover Institution) has posted Playing by Different Rules? Property Rights in Land and Water, from EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS RELATED TO LAND AND NATURAL RESOURCES, Lincoln Institute, 2010.  The abstract:

This article examines both the similarities and differences between the law of land and water in both a private law and constitutional law setting. The first critical difference is that the nature of the two resources differs enough such that exclusive rights for occupation usually sets the right framework for analyzing land use disputes, while a system of shared, correlative duties work best for water. Once these baselines are established, it follows that an accurate rendition of the constitutional law issues necessarily rests on the proper articulation of private law rules of adjudication. Unless those efficient private rules are used as a baseline for constitutional adjudication, it becomes impossible to explain which government actions result simply in a "mere" loss of economic value and which government actions generate losses that require compensation. Parties can engage in wasteful political arbitrage without limitation.

In dealing with the private law issues, the first step is to develop principles of parity between private claimants, to the extent that this approach is physically possible. The second step then picks the set of rules that maximizes the overall utility of all parties concerned, subject to the parity constraint. This system must yield to reasonableness considerations when the conditions of physical parity cannot be satisfied, which covers all cases of dispute between upper and lower owners of land, as well as upstream and downstream riparians. In both these settings, the objective is to create, whenever possible, rules that treat the last element of loss to one party equal to the last element of gain of the next.

Using these natural law baselines produces by and large efficient results in private disputes. The rejection of these rules in the takings context in both land and water cases yields the opposite result, by conceding far too much power to state authorities in both land and water cases. It is no mistake that the modern law of regulatory takings for land, as developed in the 1978 Penn Central case, explicitly rests on the same intellectual confusions about property rights and economic losses that underlie the 1944 Willow River case, dealing with water rights. The only rationalization of both areas of law requires that the constitutional protection of private property start with the definitions of private property that have worked so well in practice under the natural law traditions of private law.

Matt Festa

Owley on Use of Conservation Easements by Local Governments

Jessica Owley (Buffalo) has posted another informative paper: Use of Conservation Easements by Local Governments, forthcoming in GREENING LOCAL GOVERNMENT, Patricia Salkin and Keith Hirokawa, eds., A.B.A. Publishing, 2011.  The abstract:

This chapter (which will be included in the forthcoming Greening Local Government book published by ABA Publishing and edited by Patty Salkin and Keith Hirokawa) briefly introduces conservation easements, explains how local governments can use them, and discusses the appropriate role and extent of their use. 

Conservation easements are nonpossessory interests in land restricting a landowner’s activities in a way that yields a conservation benefit. Local governments have been on the cutting edge of using conservation easements, engaging with them on multiple fronts. First, local governments hold conservation easements. This enables local governments to enforce individual agreements and prevent landowners from engaging in environmentally destructive practices. Second, as landowners, local governments encumber public land with conservation easements — affirming their commitments to land conservation. Finally, local governments promote conservation easements. By passing laws supporting and funding conservation easements as well as requiring exacted conservation easements for land-use permits, local governments employ mechanisms that increase the number of conservation easements in their communities. 

Conservation easements can protect environmental amenities and deserve praise for their individual nature and ease of establishment. However, conservation easements are static agreements locking in today’s land use preferences and understandings of the natural environment to the potential detriment of future generations with different goals or understandings of the natural world. Furthermore, although praised as an inexpensive method for governments to obtain land conservation, funding necessary for stewardship and enforcement could be significant. As development pressures and understandings of environmental degradation increase, the use of conservation easements by local governments is likely to continue to grow. Local governments should make use of this tool cautiously.

This paper is a helpful resource for practitioners and scholars in understanding the basics of conservation easements.  Along with Owley's forthcoming Stanford Environmental Law Journal piece, Changing Property in a Changing World: A Call for the End of Perpetual Conservation Easements, it cautions local government officials to be wary of the conservation easement as a panacea in pursuing environmental planning objectives.  

Matt Festa

Saxer on Planning Gain, Exactions, and Impact Fees

Shelley Ross Saxer (Pepperdine) has posted Planning Gain, Exactions, and Impact Fees: A Comparative Study of Planning Law in England, Wales and the United States, from The Urban Lawyer, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2000.  The abstract:

Land development projects often involve external costs within the host community. For example, new retail space might generate more traffic, requiring improvements to roads. A new residential development might require new roads altogether as well as enhancements to police and fire services, schools, libraries and even sewers. Historically, these external costs fell on the community. However, increasingly, in both the United States and in England and Wales private land developers, rather than public agencies, are bearing these externalities. This article explores the issues that arise when governments shift the burden of these externalities back on the developer and compares the processes by which the United States and England and Wales have attempted to accomplish this shift in externalities. U.S. jurisdictions use exactions, impact fees and linkage fees to transfer the burden of adverse development impacts to the developer. England and Wales use the concept of planning gain to extract planning conditions or planning obligations from developers before granting development rights. Because of the high level of government involvement in this process of accounting for development externalities, public and private abuse is a concern in the U.S. and in England and Wales.

Part II of this Article identifies the different impacts that occur during land development, including the impacts on municipalities, their citizens, competing developers, competing communities and the environment. Part III compares how development rights are obtained in the U.S. with the approaches used in England and Wales to obtain planning permission and discusses how the respective countries compel developers to internalize the external costs of development. Part IV concludes by proposing the developers and local government use bargaining tools, such as the U.S. development agreements and the section 106 agreements in England and Wales, to distribute development burdens. Further, private and public abuses should be controlled by the market and the requirements that the government act for the benefit of the public, rather than be constrained by existing judicial, legislative and constitutional complexities.

Matt Festa

Kelly on Homes Affordable for Good

James J. Kelly, Jr., of Baltimore Law and intrepid Land Use Prof guest blogger, has posted Homes Affordable for Good: Covenants and Ground Leases as Long-Term Resale Restriction Devices, a symposium piece in the St. Louis University Public Law Journal, Vol. 29, p. 9 (2009).  The abstract:

Covenants and ground leases have been, and continue to be, used to create shared spaces that are fundamentally, and often invidiously, exclusive. Famously made a dead letter in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer, covenants banning resale to nonwhite households put the force of law behind the segregated birth of America’s suburbs. Today, gated residential communities and shopping malls assure a degree of class exclusivity through covenants and commercial ground leases, respectively. These same legal mechanisms, however, are now deployed to assure long-term inclusion as well. 

Developers of affordable housing are creating homes that are not only beneficial to the original homeowners but also available for future generations of qualified home buyers. When selling the newly developed homes, they are having subsidized homeowners promise to pass the good deals on to future home buyers. These resale restrictions allow single-family homes to be sold, and later resold, to low and moderate-income households in neighborhoods that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Affordability protections of 15 years or less are relatively common and can be achieved through a number of legal arrangements. Common law and statutory hostility to long-term private arrangements that limit alienability, however, have made the search for perpetual affordability more challenging. Those seeking to sustain economic diversity in residential communities over multiple generations of homeowners have turned to covenants authorized by statute and ground leases as the vehicles by which these promises can be enforced. 

As stand-alone enforceable promises that run with land, covenants have become the primary vehicle for Inclusionary Zoning programs that seek to preserve the mixed-income nature of affected for-profit housing developments for the long haul. Community Land Trusts have generally preferred the ground lease, a standard device for shopping mall creation, to ensure that subsidized single-family homes developed by nonprofit housing organizations can remain affordable forever. As economic diversity in communities is given its proper place as a long-term goal for America’s metropolitan areas, 21st century real estate law will need to integrate both covenants and ground lease reversion interests as stable, effective means of enforcing affordability-preserving resale restrictions. In addition to arguing for the importance of both covenants and ground leases as affordability conservation mechanisms, this article will analyze and evaluate each device as to its effectiveness in achieving the development goal of creating and sustaining economically diverse communities of choice.

Matt Festa

Hester & Wright on the Shifting Scope of Railroad Easements

Jeffrey Hester (William J. Tucker & Assocs.) and Danaya C. Wright (Florida) have posted Pipes, Wires, and Bicycles: Rails-to-Trails, Utility Licenses, and the Shifting Scope of Railroad Easements from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries, published in Vol. 27, Ecology Law Quarterly.  The abstract:

This article responds to a series of class action suits filed against railroads, telecommunication companies, and the federal government claiming that once railroads abandon their corridors, all property rights shift to adjacent landowners. This article reviews the state law on this matter and offers a theory of how courts should handle these cases. After discussing the history of nineteenth-century railroad land acquisition practices, it analyzes the scope of the easement limited for railroad purposes, then discusses the role of abandonment in affecting the rights of third party users of these corridors as well as successor trail owners. The article concludes with a theory of railroad easements that interprets the railroad's powers based on the public participation that helped create and establish these corridors and the tenuous claims of adjacent landowners.

Matt Festa

Barkehall-Thomas on Families Behaving Badly & the Granny Flat

Susan Barkehall-Thomas (Monash University) has posted Families Behaving Badly: What Happens When Grandma Gets Kicked Out of the Granny Flat?, Australian Property Law Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, p. 154, 2009.  The abstract:

There is a substantial body of case law dealing with disputes by members of an extended family over real property. In particular, the cases involve family arrangements where an older generation family member has contributed resources to property owned by a family member in the younger generation. For example, a father agrees with his adult daughter that he will pay for the costs of an extension to her family home and will live in the extension. Such an arrangement may have explicit terms for the care of the older family member and may involve explicit promises that the family member may live there for the duration of their life. Alternatively, the arrangement may be much less formal, with no promises or assurances regarding the older family member’s rights. When the family arrangement breaks down, the courts are frequently called upon to resolve the older family member’s entitlement.

This article will discuss these cases, with particular reference to the judicial methodology being applied to their resolution. It will demonstrate that the cases show a substantial variation in approach, both as to the appropriate course of action and to the appropriate remedy.

Matt Festa

Wiseman on Public Communities, Private Rules

Hannah J. Wiseman (Texas) has posted Public Communities, Private Rules, Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 98, No. 3 (2010).  The abstract:

As the American population grows, communities are seeking creative property tools to control individual land uses and create defined community aesthetics, or distinctive “built environments.” In the past, private covenants were the primary mechanism to address this sort of need. Public communities, however, have begun to implement covenant-type “private” rules through zoning overlays, which place unusually detailed restrictions on individual property uses and, in so doing, have created new forms of “rule-bound” communities. This Article will argue that all types of rule-bound communities are uniquely important because they respond to resident consumers’ heightened demand for a community aesthetic. It will also highlight their problems, however. Many community consumers are marginally familiar with private covenants and traditional zoning, but they are largely unaware of the relatively new zoning overlays used to form public rule-bound communities. Yet the rules in overlays are extensive, are applied to existing landowners, and are not easily modified to meet changing community needs over time. And covenants, despite offering a more traditional tool for aesthetic control, create their own problems of incomplete consumer notice and barriers to effective modification. This Article will analyze the impact of these problems, as well as a lack of responsiveness to ongoing consumer demands for the maintenance of desired rules, on rule-bound communities’ ability to meet consumer demands for a community aesthetic. It will conclude that rule-bound communities should provide better visual notice of rules and should implement processes that allow for residents to better influence the initial content of rules and how rules are perpetuated or changed.

Matt Festa