Land Use Prof Blog

Planner Andy: A New Paradigm in Urban Planning?

Urban planning schemes have often been criticized for failing to solicit meaningful public participation.  Now, the city of Burbank, California, is trying to put that criticism to rest in a very creative fashion.  As Curbed LA reports, the website for Burbank's draft 2035 general plan includes an avatar named "Planner Andy" who will "help crowdsource ideas about how residents view their city."  Here's a screen shot of Planner Andy:

 

I guess nothing really fires up the public imagination like a hirsute, bow-tied nerd.  Now at least I know that if the law teaching thing doesn't work out, I can always try being an avatar.

Ken Stahl

Furman Center Reports on NYC Housing and Parking

The MacArthur Award-winning NYU Furman Center recently has produced two reports that are well worth noting.  First, an important policy paper on parking and housing:

We are pleased to share with you the latest policy brief from the Furman Center and its Institute for Affordable Housing Policy: Searching for the Right Spot: Minimum Parking Requirements and Housing Affordability in New York City. The report examines the minimum residential parking requirements in communities throughout the city, and explores the effects the requirements may have on housing affordability and the city's sustainability goals.

 

Our findings suggest that the requirements generally cause developers to provide more off-street parking than they think buyers and tenants really demand, potentially driving up the cost of housing and promoting inefficient car ownership. The  report provides examples of tools other cities have used to refine their parking regulations to better balance concerns about housing affordability, sustainability, and traffic congestion with the needs of car owners.

 

Please find the full report here, and the press release here. We hope you find the report informative, and we look forward to receiving your feedback.

The Center has also released its Fourth Quarter NYC Housing Report:

We are pleased to share with you our latest New York City Quarterly Housing Update (Q4 2011). We find that home sales volume continued to decline, with the number of transactions citywide down 15 percent from the previous quarter and 11 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010.  

 

The report finds, however, that foreclosure starts were down in most of the city, with 33 percent fewer foreclosure notices issued in the fourth quarter of 2011 compared to the same quarter in 2010. Manhattan was the only borough where the number of foreclosure starts increased, although the number of foreclosure notices issued in Manhattan remained well below the numbers issued in any of the other boroughs. You can read the full report here, or the press release here.

 

The Furman Center's Quarterly Housing Update is unique among New York City housing reports because it incorporates sales data, residential development indicators, and foreclosures. It also presents a repeat sales index for each borough to capture price appreciation while controlling for housing quality. The publication is available on a quarterly basis at:

 http://furmancenter.org/research/publications/c/quarterly-housing-reports/ 

Very valuable research and analysis, as usual. 

Matt Festa

Schindler on The Conflict Between Local Governments and Locavores

As regular readers know, we have a fondess for blogging about chickens.  Now our friend Prof. Sarah Schindler (Maine) has given us another opportunity with her new article Of Backyard Chickens and Front Yard Gardens: The Conflict between Local Governments and Locavores, forthcoming in the Tulane Law Review, Vol. 87 (2012).  The abstract:

Locavores aim to source their food locally. Many locavores are also concerned more broadly with living sustainably and decreasing reliance on industrial agriculture. As more people have joined the locavore movement, including many who reside in urban and suburban areas, conflict has emerged between the locavores’ desires to use their private property to produce food — for personal use and for sale — and municipal zoning ordinances that seek to separate agriculture from residential uses.

In this article, I consider the evolution of this conflict and its implications for our systems of land use, local government, and environmental law. Specifically, I investigate the police power rationales for the existence of ordinances that disallow urban homesteading in urban and suburban communities. I then demonstrate that public health, civic virtue, and free market principles can be used to justify the passage of ordinances that would expressly permit these behaviors. Central to this analysis is a discussion of the problems caused by industrial agriculture and the lack of access to locally produced foods — food insecurity, food deserts, obesity tied to processed foods, monoculture-induced environmental catastrophes, harm to animals, and greenhouse gas emissions — all of which could be alleviated, at least in part, through urban agriculture. In recognition of these changing conceptions of harm, some local governments have begun to pass ordinances expressly allowing gardens, chickens, and the sale of produce in residential areas. I conclude by considering what this movement toward loosening restrictions on the use of private property says more broadly about the decline of Euclidean zoning controls and the future of land use law.

While the urban agriculture issues are very interesting in their own right, the implications of this article go to the heart of the modern discomfort with the legacy of traditional Euclidean land use regulation.  Well worth a read. 

Matt Festa

Saxer on Managing Water Rights Using Fishing Rights

Shelley Ross Saxer (Pepperdine) has posted Managing Water Rights Using Fishing Rights as a Model, forthcoming in Marquette Law Review Vol. 95 (2011).  The abstract:

This Article addresses the need to view water rights as licenses subject to government revocation, without just compensation, in the same way that fishing rights are viewed as licenses subject to government management. It focuses specifically on the methods used to address water resource allocation in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in California, and on fish allocation issues in the Pacific Northwest. It explores property rights in water and fish, particularly in regard to Fifth Amendment takings challenges when government regulations diminish water rights and fishing rights. The Article concludes by recognizing that both water and fish resources should be managed as ecosystems and governed by the public trust doctrine, and rejecting private property rights in either fish or water as a violation of the public trust doctrine, in which public resources are given away to private interests.

Matt Festa

Waldman on Yglesias, Avent, and Zoning and Property Rights

Economics blogger Steve Randy Waldman has a fascinating review post on the Interfluidity blog called Zoning Laws and Property Rights.  From the intro: 

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down and read Matt Yglesias’ The Rent Is Too Damned High and Ryan Avent’s The Gated City back to back. Both were a pleasure to read, for their content, and for the opportunity to kick a couple of bucks to two of my fave bloggers behind an ennobling veil of commerce. As an avid reader of both authors’ online work, there were no huge surprises, but reading the ebooks took me deeper and inspired some more considered thought on their ideas. Ryan Avent and Matt Yglesias (and Ed Glaeser too!) are separate humans with their own identities and ideas. But these “econourbanists” share a core view, and I hope they will forgive me if I consider their work together. Although they arrive at a similar place, the two books take very different roads: Avent’s book is a bit wonkier and more economistic, focusing on the macro role of cities in enhancing productivity through economies of scale and agglomeration; Yglesias treats the same set of issues more polemically and with an emphasis on the personal, thinking about how individuals should expect to make a living in an increasingly service-oriented economy, the importance of accessible cities to the kind of prosperity he envisions, and the perils of any obstacle that makes urban life inaccessible (“the rent is too damned high!”). Read both!

This is a long post with extensive analysis of the reviewed work and the authors' own insights.  Waldman is a qualified skeptic of the authors' approaches.  A very insightful essay that grapples with the issues I am trying to address in my own scholarship.  I am glad to add a new term-- "econourbanist"-- to my land use lexicon!  Thanks to Geoff Corn for the link.

Matt Festa

Sullivan & Solomu on Comparative ADR in Land Use Disputes

Edward J. Sullivan (Portland State) and Alexia Solomu (International Court of Justice) have posted Alternative Dispute Resolution in Land Use Disputes — Two Continents and Two Approaches, published in The Urban Lawyer, Vol. 43, No. 4, p. 1036, Fall 2011.  The abstract:

This paper notes the increasing use of alternative dispute resolution ("ADR"), which includes negotiations among parties, mediation, and arbitration) generally and specifically examines its use in resolving planning controversies in two jurisdictions -- England and Wales in the United Kingdom and the State of Oregon in the United States. ADR is less expensive, more efficient, and may well result in a more satisfactory outcome to the parties. In the United States, the siting of locally unwanted land uses ("LULUs"), property rights, and litigation pose profound conflicts for the land use process. In the United Kingdom, initial issuance of permits without hearings, local resistance to major public works projects (such as airport runways and power plants) and lengthy and costly planning inquiries are similar concerns. ADR may be helpful in the resolution of these disputes.

After briefly examining the legal structure of the two planning systems, the authors provide concrete examples of ADR in Oregon (a system that tends to be more informal and geared to solutions in individual cases) and examine the proposed new structure of ADR in planning law in the United Kingdom, including the recent and thoughtful "green paper" on the subject.

Matt Festa

NYU's Controversial Expansion Plans

Property Prof Blogger extraordinaire and official Land Use Prof Blog Buddy Steve Clowney draws attention to an interesting recent column from NY Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman about NYU's plans to expand within Greenwhich Village.  I agree with Steve's assessment that the column focuses too much attention on the effect the expansion would have on a little used plot of park space.  It is curious that Kimmelman opens the column describing NYU's expansion plans as "acrimonious" but then immediately pivots away from describing any of the actual acrimony to an issue that only he seems to care about, to wit, this "underrated" park that nobody know exists.  

Kimmelman's main argument appears to be that NYU itself is responsible for the park space in question falling into disuse, and so the city should leverage its zoning power to force NYU to make the park more accessible.  At this point, I was running for my land use casebook to consult the Supreme Court's exactions jurisprudence (For land use newbies: governments are generally not allowed to leverage their zoning power for concessions absent an "essential nexus" between the concession sought and the land use approval requested).

In any event, I can't say Kimmelman is wrong as a policy matter.  He may be right that the village needs more open space and that NYU's plan is antithetical to that need.  To me, the most interesting part of Kimmelman's piece was his contention that the original Modernist "tower-in-the-park" design that spawned the endangered park space had actually done a good job of bringing much-needed open space to the village before NYU messed it all up.  This is at odds with the conventional wisdom that the tower-in-the-park idea was a monstrosity that necessarily brought about extremely alienating public spaces (wisdom made conventional, of course, by a previous crusader against Greenwhich Village construction plans, Jane Jacobs).  For an example of such an alienating space, check this out:

For those wondering, this is Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York, a gift of Modernist-loving governor Nelson Rockefeller. 

I see an interesting parallel between Kimmelman's affection for Modernist park design in this column and his paean to the virtues of Modernist housing complexes in another column about which I blogged previously.  Kimmelman seems committed to resuscitating a form of urban design that has been largely relegated to the dustbin of bad planning ideas. For that, I commend him!

Ken Stahl 

"Patterns of Pollution" - New EJ Report on Atlanta

I'm proud to announce that today UGA Law Public Interest Fellow David Deganian and the fine folks at GreenLaw published "The Patterns of Pollution: A Report on Demographics and Pollution in Metro Atlanta."    They were assisted by the consultants of NewFields LLC (who have also helped us in our work in the Newtown community of Gainesville, Georgia).

From GreenLaw's media release:

The report analyzes publicly available information to identify eight types of air, water, and land pollution points and compares this pollution information with demographic data on people living in the 14-county region. Using cutting edge mapping technology to visually combine these areas, we were able to see an overall pattern across the region indicating that a person’s race, income, and primary language spoken have a strong relationship to his or her distance from pollution.

The report website features an interactive map where you can enter an address in the metro Atlanta area and view pollution points nearby.

This report contains extensive fact-based analysis of the impact of pollution on communities of color in Atlanta, and I think it will be an influential part of environmental justice initiatives in the region for years to come.  Land Use Clinic students have been working with David and GreenLaw throughout his fellowship, and it's so exciting to see the work come to fruition in such a palpable way.

Jamie Baker Roskie

Harris on a Railway, a City, and Public Regulation of Private Property

Douglas C. Harris (UBC Faculty of Law) has posted A Railway, a City, and the Public Regulation of Private Property: CPR v. City of Vancouver, published in CANADIAN PROPERTY LAW STORIES, James Muir, Eric Tucker, and Bruce Ziff, eds., Osgoode Society and Irwin Law, 2012.  The abstract:

The doctrine of regulatory or constructive taking establishes limits on the public regulation of private property in much of the common law world. When public regulation becomes unduly onerous — so as, in effect, to take a property interest from a private owner — the public will be required to compensate the owner for its loss. In 2000, the City of Vancouver passed a by-law that limited the use of a century-old rail line to a public thoroughfare. The Canadian Pacific Railway, which owned the line, claimed the regulation amounted to a taking of its property for which the city should pay compensation. The case, which rose to the Supreme Court of Canada in 2006, marked that court’s first engagement with the doctrine of regulatory taking (also known in Canada as de facto expropriation) in nearly twenty years. This chapter explores the intertwined histories of a railway company and a city that gave rise to CPR v. City of Vancouver. It then analyzes the court decisions and considers the role of courts in mediating the appropriate boundary between private property and public regulation in a jurisdiction where there is no constitutional protection for private property.

Matt Festa

Miller on Building Legal Neighborhoods

During his great guest-blogging stint here in January, it appears that Stephen Miller (Idaho) was also busy finishing his article Building Legal Neighborhoods, which has been accepted for publication by the Harvard Environmental Law Review.  The abstract:

Political and legal tools have emerged since the Seventies, and especially in the last two decades, that provide political and legal power to neighborhoods. However, these tools are often used in an ad hoc fashion and there has been scant analysis of how these tools might work together effectively. This article seeks to explore this trend, and further argues that cities consciously overlay these neighborhood legal tools. This approach is referred to in the article as a de facto “legal neighborhood.” This approach does not call for secession of neighborhoods from cities or for the wholesale privatization of public functions, as have others that argue for neighborhood empowerment. Rather, the article asserts that the collective operation of these neighborhood tools is greater than the sum of their parts, providing a method for civic engagement at a level city-wide politicians feel comfortable serving and in which residents feel comfortable participating. The article also provides approaches for linking the neighborhood to city and regional affairs, and a history and theory of the concept of the neighborhood as an argument for the important role and function of neighborhoods in American life.

Looks like a very timely and interesting piece.

Matt Festa

Claeys on the Bundle of Sticks

Eric R. Claeys (George Mason) has posted Bundle-of-Sticks Notions in Legal and Economic Scholarship.  This piece is part of the Econ Journal Watch symposium Property--A Bundle of Rights, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 205-214, September 2011.  The abstract:

The phrase “bundle of rights” does not serve as an accurate conceptual definition of property. Nor has that phrase provided a helpful metaphor as used in Ronald Coase’s article “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960) and subsequent legal and economic scholarship. Coase’s usage portrays property rights as a collection of individualized permissions to use an asset, when in sound conceptual usage “property” signifies a domain of authority to decide how to use the asset. The “bundle” metaphor may be understood to state that an owner has a right to deploy his property in any specific manner fairly implied by his general rights of ownership. Although this metaphorical usage is helpful, it remains parasitic on a sound conceptual definition of property. Property is best conceived of as a right securing a normative interest in determining exclusively the use of an asset external to the person of the owner.

Matt Festa

Markell on Climate Change and the Roles of Land Use and Energy Law

David L. Markell (Florida State) has posted Climate Change and the Roles of Land Use and Energy Law: An Introduction, Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law, Vol. 27 (2012).  It's the intro to a Symposium issue.  The abstract:

The challenges posed by climate change are daunting and have spawned an enormous literature, indeed many literatures. The legal regimes that govern our use of land and energy have already been and will continue to be integral to the effort to devise effective responses. My aim in this introductory essay is to identify and review six aspects of climate change in an effort to capture some of the ferment that now exists as policy makers, scholars, and others wrestle with the challenges that climate change poses for extant legal regimes. I then briefly summarize the articles in this symposium volume.

Matt Festa

Rosser on Progressive Property

Ezra Rosser (American) has posted The Ambition and Transformative Potential of Progressive Property , forthcoming California Law Review (2013).  Last year, I posted about Ezra's presentation at the 2nd annual ALPS gathering.  He's done quite a bit with it since.  Here's the abstract:

The emerging progressive property school of thought champions and finds its meaning in the social nature of property. Rejecting the idea that exclusion lies at the core of property law, progressive property scholars call for a reconsideration of the relationships owners and non-owners have with property and with each other. Despite these ambitions, so far progressive property scholarship has largely confined itself to questions of exclusion and access. This paper argues that such an emphasis glosses over the race-related acquisition and distribution problems that plague American history and property law. The modest structural changes supported by progressive property scholars fail to account for this racial history and, by so doing, present a limited vision of the changes to property law that progressive scholars should support. Though sympathetic with the progressive property political and scholarly orientation and the policy arguments made regarding exclusion and access, I argue that the first priority of any transformative project of progressive property must be revisiting acquisition and distribution.

Jim K.

Rule on Airspace and the Takings Clause

Troy A. Rule has a very interesting article up: Airspace and the Takings Clause, forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review.  The abstract:

This Article argues that the U.S. Supreme Court’s takings jurisprudence fails to account for instances when public entities restrict private airspace solely to keep it open for their own use. Many landowners rely on open space above adjacent land to preserve scenic views for their properties, to provide sunlight access for their rooftop solar panels, or to serve other uses that require no physical invasion of the neighboring space. Private citizens typically must purchase easements or covenants to prevent their neighbors from erecting trees or buildings that would interfere with these non-physical airspace uses. In contrast, public entities can often secure their non-physical uses of neighboring airspace without having to compensate neighbors by simply imposing height restrictions or other regulations on the space. The Supreme Court’s existing regulatory takings rules, which focus heavily on whether a challenged government action involves physical invasion of the claimant’s property or destroys all economically beneficial use of the property, fail to protect private landowners against these uncompensated takings of negative airspace easements. In recent years, regulations aimed at keeping private airspace open for specific government uses have threatened wind energy developments throughout the country and have even halted major construction projects near the Las Vegas Strip. This Article highlights several situations in which governments can impose height restrictions or other regulations as a way to effectively take negative airspace easements for their own benefit. The Article describes why current regulatory takings rules fail to adequately protect citizens against these situations and advocates a new rule capable of filling this gap in takings law. The new rule would clarify the Supreme Court’s takings jurisprudence as it relates to airspace and would promote more fair and efficient allocations of airspace rights between governments and private citizens.

Troy, our excellent guest blogger, has written before about sun, wind, and air, so this article is coming from one of the emerging experts in property rights above the dirt. 

Matt Festa

Long on Property Rights, Property Privileges, and the Physical Consequences of Word Choice

Jerrold A. Long (Idaho), who just posted an article last week, has another one up: Waiting for Hohfeld: Property Rights, Property Privileges, and the Physical Consequences of Word Choice.  The abstract:

An important part of our institutional and cultural history is our understanding of a system of property interests. The most common trajectory of land-use regulation (or the lack thereof) appears consistent with a property meta-narrative that informs multiple academic disciplines and levels of human interaction. This meta-narrative suggests that all land-use decisions begin with an assumption about the nature and extent of property rights held by potentially affected landowners, and that the ultimate end of any land-use regime is to “protect” those assumed property rights from unwarranted or unjustified intrusion by government. Because the law is a distinct linguistic environment in which word choices, and definitions, have significant consequences, the rhetorical landscape of a property dispute plays a significant role in determining the dispute’s ultimate outcome. In most land-use disputes, all participants make one important concession, or assertion, before the discussion begins. The often unchallenged assertion is the claim that the discussion is about property rights. Once a particular property interest is characterized as a “right,” the community’s political capacity to regulate that property diminishes substantially. Consequently, our decisions to characterize as “rights” those settings, circumstances and relationships that are better and more accurately understood as “privileges” changes our focus from the community to the individual, and necessarily weakens the political justification for, and community understanding of, most resource- or community-protective ordinances. This article considers contemporary property jurisprudence, theory, and conflict in a Hohfeldian context to demonstrate how our default rhetorical landscape leads to real and unnecessary negative social and environmental effects.

Matt Festa

Smith on Property as the Law of Things

Henry E. Smith (Harvard) has posted what looks to be a very important property theory piece, Property as the Law of Things, forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review.  The abstract:

The New Private Law takes seriously the need for baselines in general and the traditional ones furnished by the law in particular. One such baseline is the “things” of property. The bundle of rights picture popularized by the Legal Realists downplayed things and promoted the expectation that features of property are detachable and tailorable without limit. The bundle picture captures too much to be a theory. By contrast, the information cost, or architectural, theory proposed here captures how the features of property work together to achieve property’s purposes. Drawing on Herbert Simon’s notions of nearly decomposable systems and modularity, the article shows how property employs a thing-based exclusion-governance architecture to manage complexity of the interactions between legal actors. Modular property first breaks this system of interactions into components, and this begins with defining the modular things of property. Property then specifies the interface between the modular components of property through governance strategies that make more direct reference to uses and purposes, as in the law of nuisance, covenants, and zoning. In contrast to the bundle of rights picture, the modular theory captures how a great number of features of property – ranging from in-rem-ness, the right to exclude, and the residual claim, through alienability, persistence, and compatibility, and beyond to deep aspects like recursiveness, scalability, and resilience – follow from the modular architecture. The Article then shows how the information cost theory helps explain some puzzling phenomena such as the pedis possessio in mining law, fencing in and fencing out, the unit rule in eminent domain, and the intersection of state action and the enforcement of covenants. The Article concludes with some implications of property as a law of modular things for the architecture of private law.

Matt Festa

The Greatest Grid: New Exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York

While visiting New York City recently for the Association of American Geographers' annual meeting, I took in a great exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York entitled The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011.  The exhibit coincides with the 200th anniversary of the adoption of the famous street grid for the island of Manhattan.  It is a fascinating exploration of one of the most significant urban planning endeavors in American history.  You can see an overview of the exhibit here, and the New York Times Review of the exhibit here.  My thoughts on the exhibit, with pictures, are below:

Continue reading

Byrne on the Contemporary Role of Preservation Law in Urban Development

J. Peter Byrne (Georgetown) has posted Historic Preservation and its Cultured Despisers: Reflections on the Contemporary Role of Preservation Law in Urban Development, George Mason Law Review, Vol. 19 (2012).  The abstract:

The past years have seen widely noticed critiques of historic preservation by “one of our leading urban economists,” Edward Glaeser, and by star architect Rem Koolhaas. Glaeser, an academic economist specializing in urban development, admits that preservation has value. But he argues in his invigorating book, Triumph of the City, and in a contemporaneous article, Preservation Follies, that historic preservation restricts too much development, raises prices, and undermines the vitality of the cities. Koolhaas is a Pritzker Prize-winning architect and oracular theorist of the relation between architecture and culture. In his New York exhibit, Cronocaos, he argued that preservation lacks an organizing theory, imposes inauthentic consumer-friendly glosses on older structures, and inhibits architectural creativity. Although these critiques are as different as the cultural spaces inhabited by their authors (although both are professors at Harvard), both seemed to strike nerves, suggesting an underlying unease about how large a role preservation has come to play in urban development. This article assesses these critiques as part of an ongoing effort to make sense of historic preservation law.

This article proceeds as follows: First, it presents Glaeser’s critique in detail, placing it within the context of his larger argument about what makes cities attractive and dynamic. Grappling with the strengths and weaknesses of Glaeser’s critique leads to a discussion of how preservation regulation actually works and clarification of some of the benefits it confers. Second, this Article will attempt to specify Koolhaas’s critique, connecting it to similar complaints about preservation by more linear thinkers. Weighing objections to the coherence or authenticity of preservation leads to further discussion of the role that preservation plays in the larger culture. This article concludes with a call for future research.

Matt Festa

Stahl on Local Government, One Person/One Vote, and the Jewish Question

I have just posted my most recent paper on ssrn. It is entitled Local Government, One Person/One Vote, and the Jewish Question.  It can be downloaded for free here, and has recently been submitted to law reviews for publication.  I presented a version of this paper at the ALPS conference last week  Here is the abstract:

This article argues that the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence regarding the application of the 'one person/one vote' rule to local governments, while often considered hopelessly confused, actually contains an internal logic that reflects the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment in this country. There are three broad strands within the one person/one vote jurisprudence: the first, beginning with Avery v. Midland County, requires cities to apportion votes based on a 'one person/one vote' principle; the second, exemplified by Ball v. James, permits certain municipalities to apportion votes according to a 'one dollar/one vote' formula; and a third, captured in Holt Civic Club v. City of Tuscaloosa, gives the state plenary power to allocate votes with regard to some local government matters. Although these three strands seem impossible to reconcile, they are all consistent with an Enlightenment jurisprudential project to consolidate the power of the central state by suppressing the ability of entities exercising authority over particular territories, such as local governments, to challenge the state’s hegemony. Each line of cases accomplishes this end by creating an idealized standard for political participation that conceptualizes voters as abstract, homogenous individuals who are divorced from their parochial territorial commitments and thus capable of being acted upon by the state without regard to such commitments.

The article further reveals, however, that the evisceration of territory in these cases is actually an illusion. Under the guise that territory has been rendered immaterial, the courts surreptitiously permit local governments to exercise a substantial degree of territorial control. For example, in the case of City of Eastlake v. Forest City Enterprises, the Court upheld a tiny suburban municipality’s parochial exercise of the zoning power (excluding an affordable housing complex) by invoking the municipality’s subjection to the one person/one vote rule. Because one person/one vote purports to remove territorial affiliations from the political realm, it had the power in Eastlake to transform a small fragment of a large metropolitan region into 'the people,' a despatialized abstraction that was entitled, by virtue of its ostensible remove from territorial particularity, to exercise the zoning power in its own interest.

I explain the ambiguous use of territory in the jurisprudence by drawing upon the Enlightenment obsession with 'the Jewish question,' or the problem of incorporating territorially-bound subgroups like the Jewish ghetto into a modern nation-state predicated on the idea of a uniform citizenry. The tension between the surface homogenization and the underlying fragmentation of territory in the one person/one vote cases reflects an uneasy compromise between the Enlightenment attempt to incorporate groups such as the Jews into the abstract 'rights of man' and a pragmatic realization that territorial sovereignty is a precondition to securing human rights. This compromise, I argue, has troubling consequences: it enables those with sufficient political or financial power to retreat into insulated enclaves under the aegis of state neutrality, while foreclosing recompense for those excluded from such enclaves by deploying the fiction that they still retain their abstract rights. The article concludes accordingly that the egalitarian promise of the one person/one vote jurisprudence rings hollow.

Ken Stahl 

Mandelker on the Design Problem in Planned Communities

Here's another new SSRN paper from Daniel R. Mandelker (Washington U): The Design Problem in Planned Communities.  The abstract:

Planned communities are a dominant form of development, both in suburban areas and as infill in urban settings. Planned communities can be clusters of homes with common open space or master-planned communities covering thousands of acres, but in any form they provide opportunities for excellent design. This is the first chapter in a book that reviews the concepts and ideas that go into the design of planned communities, and explores how local governments can encourage and provide for their good design through land-use regulation.

The book is Designing Planned Communities, which Chad posted about last year.  It's a concise, highly-readable introduction to the issues with lots of really helpful maps, diagrams, and images. 

Matt Festa