Land Use and Services: A More Perfect Union
This is the conclusion of a three-part series about the place of statewide land-use reform in a Strong Towns approach. The Strong Towns approach that recognizes that cities are complex adaptive systems for which the goal should not be to impose solutions on problems, but to ensure that our systems are able to respond to local, bottom-up feedback and produce solutions.
In the first part of this series, we discussed the pitfalls of statewide efforts to “fix” problems in our complex cities. The second article introduced the idea of Purchased Annexation as a justifiable statewide reform: a way to rectify a widespread problem while honoring the complex system that drives real estate development.
Today’s article will discuss a further reform that “gets us to a system that produces a solution”: a comprehensive planning regime that pairs urban services with land use to make explicit the connection between development intensity, tax revenue, and the services a city can afford to provide.
A Numbers Game
“The goal should not be to impose solutions on problems, but to ensure that our systems are able to respond to local, bottom-up feedback and produce solutions.”
A central theme of the Growth Ponzi Scheme is the ability of some neighborhoods to receive expensive city services while failing to contribute enough taxes to cover their costs. As the data show (see “Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments,” by Chuck Marohn), the kinds of neighborhoods that don’t pull their own weight tend to be low-density and further from the urban core, yet they receive the same services for street maintenance, infrastructure upkeep, parks, and public safety.
The numbers are unambiguous in cases across North America, and yet this fact remains hidden in plain sight, largely because doing the math isn’t something cities are required to do when making planning decisions. If cities were required to conduct a full accounting of costs and revenues, most places would come to the same uncomfortable truth as Lafayette, LA, Cobb County, GA, and many others who have opened their books.
Comprehensive?
Many states impose requirements for comprehensive plans whose purpose is to rationalize the provision of public facilities and direct future growth. The topics covered by a comprehensive plan vary from state to state but there are several common areas, usually given as chapters or sections of the plan document:
Land use
Housing
Transportation
Infrastructure
Agriculture
Economic development
The goal is to periodically engage the public in a process to set priorities, while signaling some certainty around major infrastructure decisions for agencies, businesses, and developers. It seems likely that comprehensive planning, despite its flaws, is an improvement over the free-for-all that characterized urban development during the rapid expansion in the mid-20th Century. One of those flaws is that dollars and cents are missing from “comprehensive” plans: they rarely address the wealth created by different development patterns and the costs to serve them. Let’s assume comprehensive planning isn’t going away anytime soon and imagine a reform that focuses the conversation on development patterns that create real wealth.
Planning for Proportionality
A simple addition to state comprehensive planning statutes would foster conversation around financial sustainability without forcing a specific “solution” upon residents: a Proportionality section.
The purposes of the Proportionality section would be:
To conduct a thorough accounting of the life-cycle costs of municipal infrastructure and services for each area of the city;
To document the real wealth embodied in each area of the city (ie. a value-per-acre analysis) and the tax revenue generated thereby; and
To define service and maintenance levels for each area of the city that are proportional to the wealth generated by the development pattern.
Some critics of city planning, including many of the voices here at Strong Towns, focus on regulations that force a particular way of life from the top down. Some push back against high density housing, claiming it is incompatible with existing lower-density development. Others focus on unnecessary transportation facilities. A frequent Strong Towns critique is that modern municipal infrastructure and services are more costly than the revenue generated by the private activities they support. We currently offer a binary choice—municipal services or no services—that fails to account for the important variations in private investment and tax revenue embodied in different development patterns.
The Proportionality section recasts decisions about development and municipal services into choices about the kind of development pattern each neighborhood aspires to and the kinds of investment and services a city can afford to provide from the resulting private actions supported by them. Does your neighborhood wish to remain an enclave of single family homes? You are free to express that preference, and the city will tailor services and investment in your area accordingly. The key is that the math of costs and revenues is a neutral arbiter guiding the conversation.
An Example
Comprehensive plans generally divide the city into various land use categories. These are a little different from zoning maps; they’re more general and not legally binding in the same way zoning applies to each individual parcel. A sample of land use categories under current comprehensive planning would be a one-dimensional matrix that looks something like this:
Contrast this with a similar matrix under a Proportionality section. This one introduces the additional dimensions of infrastructure and services contingent upon a neighborhood accepting incremental change, and uses more of a transect classification:
Accompanying this is a description of infrastructure and service priorities that describe the varying levels of municipal investment:
The shape and specific content of the Proportionality section, like other sections of the comprehensive plan, would be determined by the planners and civic leaders spearheading the effort. The point is to make consideration of costs and revenues a central part of the comprehensive planning effort.
A True Choice
The concept of a Proportionality section respects the complexity of cities by altering the calculus employed in deciding how and where development should occur in cities. It does not “give a solution” from on high, rather it “gets us to a system that produces a solution.” Residents are empowered to make their own choice about neighborhood change, armed with an understanding of the costs associated with their decision.
Read all of Spencer Gardner’s series on state-level reform:
Part One: When should the state jump in to address local problems?
Part Two: The Annexation Lottery
Part Three: Land Use and Services: A More Perfect Union
Spencer Gardner has been writing for Strong Towns since 2016. He is a transportation planner based in Spokane, WA, who spends his spare time chasing his children, riding bikes, and doing hobbyist computer programming. He's also getting started on his own missing middle development project in Spokane's West Central neighborhood.