Land Use Prof Blog

Atlantic Interview of Myron Orfield on Sustainable Integration

The Atlantic uploaded yesterday an interview by Amanda Kolson Hurley of Myron Orfield (Minn).  Titled "The Persistence of America's 'Easy White Enclaves,'" the interview explores policy decisions about the siting of subsidized housing development, which issues are so topical now that SCOTUS has remanded the Inclusive Communities litigation.  But, Orfield also discusses what his research has shown about what levels of integration (read: diminution of white predominance) lead to resegregation.  The short piece links to a 2013 Housing Policy Debate article Orfield co-authored with Thomas Luce as well as a more recent study of the causes of segregation in the Twin Cities.

Jim K.

Building Industry Seeks Cert in California Inclusionary Zoning Case

Earlier this summer Stephen Miller blogged about the California Supreme Court's decision in the California Building Industry v. City of San Jose case, in which the court held that San Jose's inclusionary zoning ordinance was a valid exercise of police power and not an exaction.  However, the folks at Perkins Coie are reporting on their California land use blog that the California Building Industry Association, through their counsel at the Pacific Legal Foundation, have filed a petition for cert.  The jury is still out on whether inclusionary zoning is an effective affordable housing tool, but if SCOTUS grants cert, the issue may be moot. Stay tuned.

Jamie Baker Roskie

Online Professional Development Course in Adaptive Planning & Resilience

Land Use Prof colleagues -- please share the following information about an online self-paced course in adaptive planning and resilience as broadly as possible.  It's especially relevant for professionals who are engaged in planning and would benefit from skills to make their planning processes more adaptive and resilience-oriented.  Students, professors, and other professionals are welcome too.  Thanks for your interest and help!  All best wishes, Tony Arnold

I’m writing to let you know about an online self-paced professional development course in adaptive planning and resilience.  This course is aimed at any professional who engages in planning under conditions of uncertainty, complexity, or unstable conditions, whether in the public sector, private sector, local community, or multi-stakeholder partnerships. 

The course is ideal for professionals in sectors such as urban planning, community development water supply, water quality, disasters/hazards, environmental protection, land management, forestry, natural resources management, ecosystem restoration, climate change, public infrastructure, housing, sustainability, community resilience, energy, and many others.  I hope that you and the employees and/or members of your organization will consider enrolling in this course.

 The 12-hour course is offered by the University of Louisville for a cost of $150 and is taught by Professor Tony Arnold, a national expert in adaptive planning and resilience, and a team of professionals engaged in various aspects of adaptive planning.  The online lectures are asynchronous, and the course is self-paced; this offering will last until November 22.

 More information is provided below and at the registration web page: http://louisville.edu/law/flex-courses/adaptive-planning.  This offering of the course begins October 12 but registration will be accepted through November 15 due to the self-pacing of the course.  We are seeking AICP CM credits for the course in partnership with the Kentucky Chapter of the American Planning Association, but cannot make any representations or promises until our application is reviewed. 

Please share this blog post or information with anyone who might be interested.  Please contact me at [email protected], if you have any questions. 

Adaptive Planning and Resilience

Online and self-paced

Oct. 12 – Nov. 22, 2015

Adaptive Planning and Resilience is a professional development course in which professionals will develop the knowledge and skills to design and implement planning processes that will enable their governance systems, organizations, and/or communities to adapt to changing conditions and sudden shocks or disturbances.

Adaptive planning is more flexible and continuous than conventional planning processes, yet involves a greater amount of goal and strategy development than adaptive management methods. It helps communities, organizations, and governance systems to develop resilience and adaptive capacity: the capacity to resist disturbances, bounce back from disasters, and transform themselves under changing and uncertain conditions. Adaptive planning is needed most when systems or communities are vulnerable to surprise catastrophes, unprecedented conditions, or complex and difficult-to-resolve policy choices.

The course will cover the elements of adaptive planning and resilient systems, the legal issues in adaptive planning, how to design and implement adaptive planning processes, and case studies (including guest speakers) from various communities and organizations that are employing adaptive planning methods.  Enrollees will have the opportunity to design or redesign an adaptive planning process for their own professional situation and get feedback from course instructors.

The six-week course totals about 12 hours broken into 30-minute segments. It is conducted online and is asynchronous. Cost is $150.

 About Professor Tony Arnold

Professor Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold is the Boehl Chair in Property and Land Use at the University of Louisville, where he teaches in both the Brandeis School of Law and the Department of Urban and Public Affairs and directs the interdisciplinary Center for Land Use and Environmental Responsibility. Professor Arnold is an internationally renowned and highly-cited scholar who studies how governance systems and institutions – including planning, law, policy, and resource management – can adapt to changing conditions and disturbances in order to improve social-ecological resilience. He has won numerous teaching awards, including the 2013 Trustee’s Award, the highest award for a faculty member at the University of Louisville.

Professor Arnold has clerked for a federal appellate judge on the 10th Circuit and practiced law in Texas, including serving as a city attorney and representing water districts. He served as Chairman of the Planning Commission of Anaheim, California, and on numerous government task forces and nonprofit boards. He had a land use planning internship with the Boston Redevelopment Authority, did rural poverty work in Kansas, and worked for two members of Congress. Professor Arnold received his Bachelor of Arts, with Highest Distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1987 from the University of Kansas. He received his Doctor of Jurisprudence, with Distinction, in 1990 from Stanford University, where he co-founded the Stanford Law & Policy Review and was a Graduate Student Fellow in the Stanford Center for Conflict and Negotiation. He has affiliations with interdisciplinary research centers at six major universities nationwide and is a part of an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars studying adaptive governance and resilience.

 Professor Arnold will be joined in co-teaching the course by a team of his former students who are

professionals knowledgeable in adaptive planning. They include:

• Brian      O’Neill, an aquatic ecologist and environmental planner in Chicago
• Heather      Kenny, a local-government and land-use lawyer in California and adjunct      professor at Lincoln Law School of Sacramento
• Sherry      Fuller, a business manager at the Irvine Ranch Conservancy in Orange      County, California, and former community redevelopment project manager
• Andrew      Black, who is Associate Dean of Career Planning and Applied Learning at      Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and a former field      representative for two U.S. Senators in New Mexico
• Andrea      Pompei Lacy, AICP, who directs the Center for Hazards Research and Policy      Development at the University of Louisville
• Jennifer-Grace      Ewa, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Inequality and the Provision of Open Space      at the University of Denver
• Alexandra      Chase, a recent graduate of the Brandeis School of Law who has worked on      watershed and urban resilience issues with the Center for Land Use and      Environmental Responsibility and now lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Dates

October 12 – November 22, 2015,

Online, asynchronous, and self-paced

Cost

$150

For more information

Visit louisville.edu/law/flex-courses.

 

Edsall in NY Times on Milliken v. Bradley and Overconcentration of Poverty

Last week in the NY Times, Thomas Edsall (Columbia-Journalism) had an op-ed that looks at the past, present and future of overconcentration of poverty in the U.S.   In "Whose Neigborhood Is It?", Edsall begins with the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal in Milliken v. Bradley to extend school desegregation remedies across a municipal boundary without a showing that a defendant suburban district had a history of de jure racial segregation.   Legal scholars have frequently pointed to this 1974 case as a signal from SCOTUS that the suburban schools would be protected from inner-city decline. Interestingly, Edsall emphasizes the resulting exodus of middle-class African-American families to inner-ring suburbs.  The op-ed moves on to discuss the findings of Thomas, David Card and Paul Jargowsky, quickly bringing the reader into strong insights on a crucial issue. 

Today's op-ed is just one in a series that Edsall has written this year on the metropolitan geography of poverty.  Although  I found his criticism last month of low-income housing developers misplaced, that op-ed and others on the political fallout from the Inclusive Communities litigation and educational opportunities for low-income children make good resource material for supplemental assigned reading.

Jim K.

Free Monthly Program on Land Use Law

As the Vice Chair of the Land Use Committee of the ABA State & Local Government Law Section, I’m pleased to share a number of opportunities for land use law profs, students and practitioners. Committee Chair Jessica Bacher, Executive Director of the Pace Land Use Law Center, will be guest blogging in October, so subscribers to the Land Use Prof blog can also expect live reporting from the Section’s Fall Meeting in Louisville, Kentucky.

ABA State & Local Government Law Section members are welcome to join the Land Use Committee for its monthly teleconference, at which we briefly discuss business before turning to a substantive program featuring cutting edge subjects in the area of land use, planning and zoning law. ABA law student members can join the Section for free. (Join by clicking here or calling 1-800-285-2221.)  

The Land Use Committee’s next meeting is scheduled for Friday, September 11, 2015, at 2:00 pm EST, and we will feature as speakers David L. Callies, FAICP, Kudo Professor of Law at the University of Hawaii, and Tim Iglesias, Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco School of Law. Professor Iglesias organized and co-authored an amicus brief in support of the City of San Jose. They will be presenting a 30-minute program on the Law of Affordable/Workforce Housing Exactions and Set-Asides.

The speakers will discuss the holding and rationale of the recent California Supreme Court decision in California Building Industry Association v. City of San Jose, which challenged an inclusionary zoning ordinance, and the effect of this decision on the law of affordable/workforce housing exactions and set-asides, and implications for exactions and impact fees generally. The court found that the challenged inclusionary zoning ordinance was a land use regulation subject to rational basis review and not an exaction subject to heightened judicial scrutiny.

The Law of Affordable/Workforce Housing Exactions and Set-Asides

Friday, September 11, 2015

2:00 p.m. EST

Dial-in 888-3967955

Passcode 797687#  

Sarah J. Adams-Schoen, Assistant Professor of Law and Director of Touro Law’s Institute for Land Use & Sustainable Development Law, and managing author of the blog Touro Law Land Use here.

Malloy on Land Use Law and Disability

Cambridge University Press has just announced the release of Robin Paul Malloy's new book, Land Use Law and Disability: Planning and Zoning for Accessible Communities (2014).   In it, Robin argues for a new generation of inclusive design standards to foster more housing opportunities for persons living with mobility impairments.  Robin's scholarly work in this area has further developed land use law as a basis, independent of civil rights statutes and constitutional guarantees, for inclusionary claims made by marginalized persons.

Jim K.

Should More Land Use Professors be Libertarians?

In case you missed it, I am cross-posting something I initially posted to Concurring Opinions, that may be of interest to our readers here.  Parts II and III to follow:

Many professors who study land use and local government law, myself included, consider ourselves leftists rather than libertarians. That is, we have some confidence in the ability of government to solve social problems. Nevertheless, were you to pick up a randomly selected piece of left-leaning land use or local government scholarship (including my own) you would likely witness a searing indictment of the way local governments operate. You would read that the land use decisionmaking process is usually a conflict between deep-pocketed developers who use campaign contributions to elect pro-growth politicians and affluent homeowners who use their ample resources to resist change that might negatively affect their property values. Land use “planning” – never a great success to begin with – has largely been displaced by the “fiscalization” of land use, in which land use decisions are based primarily on a proposed land use’s anticipated contribution to (or drain upon) a municipality’s revenues. Public schools in suburban areas have essentially been privatized due to exclusionary zoning practices, and thus placed off limits to the urban poor, whereas public schools in cities have been plundered by ravenous teachers’ unions.

Continue reading

Serkin and Wellington on Exclusionary Dynamics Beyond Zoning Ordinances

Chris Serkin (Vanderbilt) and Leslie Wellington have posted Putting Exclusionary Zoning in its Place: Affordable Housing and Geographical Scale, 40 Fordham Urb. L. J. 1667 (2013).  Here's the abstract:

The term “exclusionary zoning” typically describes a particular phenomenon: suburban large-lot zoning that reduces the supply of developable land and drives up housing prices. But exclusionary zoning in its modern form also occurs both within the urban core and region-wide. Exclusionary zoning at the sub-local and regional scales results in property values that fully capitalize the benefits of living in higher-wage regions, and the value of local public goods (like high-quality schools). Lower-income households then cannot meaningfully access those advantages, even if every municipality accommodates its fair share of regional need. The long-standing focus of exclusionary zoning on the content of local ordinances, instead of on these broader exclusionary dynamics, has defined the problem of exclusionary zoning too narrowly. We remedy that deficiency in our contribution to the Fordham Urban Law Journal’s Fortieth Anniversary issue.

 

Davidson and Foster on the Mobility Case for Regionalism

So excited about this one.  Nestor Davidson (Fordham) and Sheila Foster (Fordham) have posted The Mobility Case for Regionalism, 47 U. C. Davis L. Rev. 63 (2013).  Here's the abstract:

In the discourse of local government law, the idea that a mobile populace can “vote with its feet” has long served as a justification for devolution and decentralization. Tracing to Charles Tiebout’s seminal work in public finance, the legal-structural prescription that follows is that a diversity of independent and empowered local governments can best satisfy the varied preferences of residents metaphorically shopping for bundles of public services, regulatory environment, and tax burden.

This localist paradigm generally presumes that fragmented governments are competing for residents within a given metropolitan area. Contemporary patterns of mobility, however, call into question this foundational assumption. People today move between — and not just within — metropolitan regions, domestically and even internationally. This is particularly so for a subset of residents — high human-capital knowledge workers and the so-called “creative class” — that is prominently coveted in this interregional competition. These modern mobile residents tend to evaluate the policy bundles that drive their locational decisions on a regional scale, weighing the comparative merits of metropolitan areas against each other. And local governments are increasingly recognizing that they need to work together at a regional scale to compete for these residents.

This Article argues that this intermetropolitan mobility provides a novel justification for regionalism that counterbalances the strong localist tendency of the traditional Tieboutian view of local governance. Contrary to the predominant assumption in the legal literature, competition for mobile residents is as much an argument for regionalism as it has been for devolution and decentralization. In an era of global cities vying for talent, the mobility case for regionalism has significant doctrinal consequences for debates in local government law and public finance, including the scope of local authority, the nature of regional equity, and the structure of metropolitan collaboration.

Jim K.

Kirp in NY Times on Mt. Laurel Today

David Kirp (UC Berkeley--Public Policy)  has published an op-ed in the NY Times entitled "Here Comes the Neighborhood."  In it, he discusses the overwhelmingly positive impact of the affordable housing built in the New Jersey township of Mt. Laurel.  Referencing the recently published book, Climbing Mt. Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb by Douglas Massey (Princeton-Sociology) with others, Kirp counters the claims of those who saw the judicial response to exclusionary zoning as grafting urban cancer onto healthy suburban tissue.  The cancer metaphor comes from Mt. Laurel's then-mayor Jose Alvarez and seems absurd in light of the overwhelmingly positive effects documented four decades later.

My good friend and NDLS clinic colleague, Bob Jones, sent the link to me because I am working on a paper looking at Catholic Social Teaching's response to overconcentration of poverty.  I think this anectdotal account from the birthplace of judicially mandated inclusionary zoning should complement the 2011 study American Murder Mystery Revisited by Ingrid Gould Ellen, Michael Lens and Katherine O'Regan undercutting some loose talk about spreading violence and disorder through the Housing Choice Voucher program that followed the controversial eponymous 2008 Atlantic Monthly article.

 

Jim K.

Iglesias on the Legality of Local Inclusionary Zoning Ordinances

Tim Iglesias (USF) has recently published Framing Inclusionary Zoning: Exploring the Legality of Local Inclusionary Zoning and its Potential to Meet Affordable Housing Needs, 36 No. 4 Zoning and Planning Law Report 1 (2013).  The Report is a West publication, so even if you cannot find the piece on SSRN or bepress, it is available here at Westlaw (login required). Apart from clicking on the link, you can copy the citation above into the Find By Citation box on the Westlaw sidebar.

Tim's briefly examines how opponents and supporters have attempted to frame various kinds of inclusionary zoning ordinances as land use regulation, exactions, rent control or something distinct from all three.  His review of leading cases on the validity of local inclusionary zoning measures looks at each of the three frames in turn, with the latter two involving state preemption as well as constitutional issues. 

I don't plan on returning to the Land Use Planning course for a few semesters, but I recommend this piece as supplemental reading for students trying to get their heads around the legal vulnerability of inclusionary zoning ordinances, particularly in the wake of Koontz.

Jim K.

Kelly on Calavita and Mallach on Global Inclusionary Housing

Our own James J. Kelly (Notre Dame) has posted a review essay on Calavita & Mallach eds., Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective: Affordable Housing, Social Inclusion, and Land Value Recapture.  Jim's review essay, Inclusionary Housing on a Global Basis, appears in his own Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law, Vol. 20, p. 261, Spring/Summer 2011. The abstract:

This is a book review of Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective: Affordable Housing, Social Inclusion, and Land Value Recapture (2010, Nico Calavita and Alan Mallach, eds.). The book offers a comparative look at land-use based approaches to the creation of affordable housing in a broad range of developed countries. A little less than a sixth of the book is dedicated to the U.S., with special attention given to the development on inclusionary programs in California and New Jersey. The editors then devote a chapter each to Canada, England, Ireland, France, Spain and Italy. The penultimate chapter looks at inclusionary practices in a variety of other countries including India, Israel, Colombia and South Africa. The review welcomes this addition to the study of affordable housing programs across the developed world.

A link to the Lincoln Land Institute publication is at Jim's earlier blog post on the book. 

Matt Festa

Ostrow on Land Law Federalism

Ashira Ostrow (Hofstra) has posted Land Law Federalism, 61 Emory L.J. ___ (forthcoming 2012). A must-read, this foundational work explores the theoretical framework for appropriate federal intervention in the state/local-dominated area of land use regulation. Here's the abstract:

In modern society, capital, information and resources pass seamlessly across increasingly porous jurisdictional boundaries; land does not. Perhaps because of its immobility, the dominant descriptive and normative account of land use law is premised upon local control. Yet, land exhibits a unique duality. Each parcel is at once absolutely fixed in location but inextricably linked to a complex array of interconnected systems, natural and man-made. Ecosystems spanning vast geographic areas sustain human life; interstate highways, railways and airports physically connect remote areas; networks of buildings, homes, offices and factories, create communities and provide the physical context in which most human interaction takes place.

Given the traditional commitment to localism, scholars and policymakers often reflexively dismiss the potential for an increased federal role in land use law. Yet, modern land use law already involves a significant federal dimension resulting, in part, from the enactment of federal statutes that have varying degrees of preemptive effect on local authority. Moreover, this Article maintains that federal intervention in land use law is warranted where the cumulative impact of local land use decisions interferes with national regulatory objectives (such as developing nationwide energy or telecommunications infrastructure).

Finally, this Article advances an interjurisdictional framework for federal land law that harnesses (a) the capacity of the federal government, with its distance from local politics and economic pressures, to coordinate land use on a national scale and (b) the capacity of local officials, who have detailed knowledge of the land and are politically accountable to the local community, to implement land use policies.

Jim K.

 

Von Hoffman on Housing Rights and Inequality in Post-War America

Alexander Von Hoffman (Harvard-Joint Center for Housing Studies) has posted Housing Rights and Inequality in Post-War America, a paper he presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA).  His brief abstract reads:  In the United States the extension of social rights, as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, has been contested and uneven. The politics that have shaped the American welfare state has provided some population groups greater access to these rights than others. By examining the extension of government housing subsidies during the middle decades of the twentieth century era, this paper reveals the dynamics that created social rights for some groups of citizens but not for others.

Jim K.

[email protected]

Ramapo Village Spent $450,000 in Losing Battle over Discriminatory Zoning

Most land use professors are familiar with the town of Ramapo, New York, whose phased-growth program was upheld as constitutional nearly 40 years ago.  Among other things, the court in the famed Ramapo case found that the town’s program was “far from being exclusionary” and sought only to “provide a balanced and cohesive community.”  Interestingly, certain land use controls in one Ramapo village have proven far more vulnerable to constitutional challenge for their exclusionary effects.

Recently, the Village of Airmont (which is located within Ramapo) settled a lawsuit filed under the RLUIPA and Fair Housing Act relating to the Village’s zoning prohibition on boarding schools.  The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office brought its claim against the Village back in 2005 after the Village denied a permit application from the Hasidic Jewish Congregation Mischknois Lavier Yakov to construct a religious boarding school in the community.    

According to recent stories in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, the Village finally settled the lawsuit a couple of weeks ago after expending more than $450,000 in legal fees.  The May 9 consent decree formalizing the settlement gives the Village until October 15, 2011, to amend its zoning code to allow construction of the religious school and to otherwise bring its code into compliance with federal laws “prohibiting discrimination and unreasonable imposition on religious freedom.” 

This isn’t the first time that Airmont has effectively lost a discriminatory zoning claim.  According to the New York Times, the Village previously had to amend its zoning ordinances in response to a 1991 Fair Housing Act claim contesting a zoning prohibition on the use of private homes as places of worship.

These constitutional zoning challenges in the decades following the Ramapo case offer at least some support for the theory offered by Fred Bosselman back in the 1970s (see generally 1 Fla. St. L. Rev. 234, 248-50 (1973)) that exclusionary motives were partly behind the town’s famous phased-growth scheme. 

Troy Rule

Glover Blackwell on Social Equity and Geographic Inclusion

 
Just in time for this week's discussion of the Mt. Laurel responses to exclusionary zoning, Shelterforce, the magazine of the National Housing Institute, features an article by PolicyLink's founder and CEO, Angela Glover Blackwell.  In Equity Is Not Optional, she makes the case for both social equity as indispensable to sustainable national success and commitment to inclusionary, place-based strategies as critical to social equity.  She then sets out five principles for a social equity strategy illustrating each with model programs such as Harlem Children’s Zone and San Diego's Market Creek Plaza.   With Patrick Maier's sidebar on Inclusionary Zoning, it may make for some timely supplemental reading.

Jim K.

Callison on the LIHTC and Geographic Desegregation

Bill Callison (Faegre & Benson, LLP; also ABA Forum on Aff. Housing and Comm. Dev. Law) has posted Achieving Our Country: Geographic Desegregation and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, 19 S. Cal. Rev. L. & Soc. Just. 213 (2010).  Here's the abstract:

This Article, which blends educational policy, housing policy, and tax policy, argues that one path down the precipice of racial inequality is to reverse a path that led us to where this problem began; namely, the racial segregation of the places where we live. This Article examines the country’s most important subsidy for creating affordable housing, the Federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (“LIHTC”), and considers whether the tax credit program has served as a tool for desegregating metropolitan neighborhoods. After concluding that the LIHTC program has not been an effective tool for reducing or eliminating continuing patterns of racial segregation and poverty concentration, this Article proposes numerous programmatic changes that could allow the tax credit program to promote greater geographic desegregation. Others have considered the impact of fair-housing laws on the LIHTC program. This Article contributes to that literature by going beyond fair housing to examine both the “cooperative federalism” concepts embedded in the program and the economic structure of tax credits, and by making practical suggestions on how the program can be improved to obtain racial integration. It takes a two-prong approach: First, this Article encourages more robust national guidance in order to encourage states to use credits to foster desegregation. Second, this Article considers changes to the economic structure of the program to provide incentives to developers and investors who undertake to provide affordable housing that results in desegregation.

Jim K.

Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective

 The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has recently released Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective: Affordable Housing, Social Inclusion and Land Value Recapture, edited by Nico Calavita (Planning-San Diego State) and Alan Mallach (Brookings).  After 60 pages on the U.S., the book devotes a chapter each to Canada, England, Ireland, France, Spain and Italy.  The penultimate chapter looks at inclusionary practices in a variety of other countries including India, Israel, Colombia and South Africa.

Jim K.

James J. Kelly, Jr.

Visiting Prof. of Law, W&L

[email protected]

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