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Real Estate & Property Law

Land Use Prof Blog

By Paul Boudreaux

Post Frequency: 9.8/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 11:17:06

The roller coaster of preservation laws ?

Posted on September 04, 2008
Should government pay special attention to the effect of land use laws on distinctive private land uses? Should government act affirmatively to try to preserve these distinctive land uses? Today brings a sad announcement: The operator of Astroland, the unique...

While Gustav misses, the rebuilding from Katrina remains off target ?

Posted on September 02, 2008
While we can be very thankful that hurricane Gustav did not batter Louisiana and Mississippi nearly as badly as Katrina did three years ago, the anniversary also brought some assessment of the government land use projects that were adopted after...

Tacos 1, L.A. County 0, but the game isn?t over ?

Posted on August 28, 2008
In the latest development in the growing field of mobile-food vending land use law, a Los Angeles county judge struck down yesterday a county ordinance (applicable outside the city of Los Angeles) that made it a crime to park a...

Sprucing up foreclosure lanes ?

Posted on August 26, 2008
While Congress is busy mortgaging the nation?s financial future to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, local governments are busy with more urgent efforts to ameliorate the social harms of abandoned and foreclosed homes, especially those concentrated in low-income neighborhoods...

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Which kind of downtown should government offer?

Posted on August 25, 2008
What sort of walkable ?downtown? do Americans like? The answer may inform what types of projects that governments foster and approve, in an area when vitalization of the city is the mantra of urban land use law. Here?s an anecdote...

Is there still growth in the exurbs?

Posted on August 21, 2008
Will high gas prices and tight credit stifle the exurbs? Many stories so assert, of course. But this may not be the complete picture. NPR today ran a nice segment (including some quotes from Penn?s urban commentator Witold Rybczynski) about...

A tale of two regions ? in land-use restricted California ?

Posted on August 20, 2008
A California vacation last week got me thinking about ? well, land use law, of course. Urbanists argue that legal restrictions on sprawl would foster development in the central city and encourage a high-density, walkable sense of community, in contrast...

Unhappy homeless news ? and a debate in Philadelphia ?

Posted on August 07, 2008
Last week I wrote about good news in the effort to assist the chronically homeless in finding stable and fairly permanent housing. This week comes less sanguine news ?- a controversy in Philadelphia over homeless people in downtown Rittenhouse Square...

Replacing smokestacks with cooling towers? ?

Posted on August 05, 2008
What?s the most extreme locally unwanted land use (LULU) that generates the NIMBY response? Is it a half-way house? An oil refinery? Or, as I tell my students when we read the infamous Supreme Court decision in Village of Belle...

Urban residence revival ? even in the OKC ?

Posted on August 01, 2008
In a former job, I got to see a detailed wide-area aerial photo of downtown Oklahoma City, not long after the 1995 bombing. It was an eye-opening sight. Like many American cities, about half of the land use in downtown...

Good results from the ?housing first? approach to homelessness ?

Posted on July 31, 2008
Surprisingly news from HUD this week is that the number of chronically homeless people fell dramatically from 2005 to 2007, according to the agency. Analysts attribute the success largely to a policy of ?housing first,? which focuses on getting homeless...

Socks and the city ... and groceries in the Tenderloin ?

Posted on July 29, 2008
I often suggest to my students that the success of re-urbanization depends on the ?white sock? test. How far does a central city dweller have to travel to buy a pair of plain white socks? (And no, one sock doesn?t...

If we still drive to lunch, will we accept land use changes?

Posted on July 25, 2008
The mainstream news is filled with stories and anecdotes about how Americans, to pay for gas, are doing things such as giving up steak and trying to trade in their SUVs for Priuses. But the big land use policy question...

Birds of a feather ? buy houses together? ?

Posted on July 22, 2008
In the 1950s, economist Charles Tiebout argued that people can choose where to live based on government. Citizens can choose, for example, whether to live a town that is noted for good schools, on one hand, or low taxes, on...

Transit and satire ?

Posted on July 18, 2008
Satire is notoriously difficult, and attempts at it often leave me cold. But I picked up an ?environmental? issue of the satirical newspaper the Onion recently and laughed out loud at a ?news? story about public transportation, which neatly and...

A toilet tale .. and its meaning ?

Posted on July 17, 2008
Here?s a story that crystallizes the challenges of American urban public land use policy: Seattle is junking its public toilet system. Four years ago, the high-tech-savvy city ballyhooed the introduction of the sleek and expensive potties that gave aural instructions...

Too many TDRs?

Posted on July 16, 2008
High agricultural prices have encouraged many farmers to plant on land that has been left unplowed in recent years, often because of government subsidies or incentives to leave wetlands and other lands undisturbed. What should government do to keep land...

The battles of booze and land use law ?

Posted on July 14, 2008
Since at least 1856, in which a New York court held in Wynehamer v. People that liquor restrictions can violate the right to property, public efforts to suppress alcohol consumption have often clashed with assertions of land use rights. And...

The Rockies and the never-ending federal-private squabbles ?

Posted on July 10, 2008
The sweltering days of July send the mind toward the cool altitudes of the Rocky Mountains. With this mind, I recently picked up at second-hand store a copy of Frank Clifford?s ?Backbone of the World,? in which the author travels...

The foreclosure crisis: local government to the rescue?

Posted on July 02, 2008
Okay, here?s your challenge, local government: You?ve got an explosion in home foreclosures, which pushes thousands out of their homes, pulls down neighborhood values even further, encourages crime, and shrinks government tax coffers. And for years, you?ve fretted about the...

A depressing story about social integration ? and crime ?

Posted on July 01, 2008
In this space and elsewhere, I have written about the success and promise of better-low cost housing and better social understanding offered by the federal ?section 8? voucher program and other efforts to integrate recipients of housing assistance within a...

Infill in a venerable old city ?

Posted on June 26, 2008
Infill in a western city might mean building a garden apartment complex on land formerly used as a parking lot of the edge of downtown; infill in an established suburb might mean construction of three-story houses in a neighborhood of...

Infill and neighborhood control, in Tulsa and elsewhere ?

Posted on June 25, 2008
One of the dilemmas of infill ?- allowing new construction in an already developed area ?- is that it often upsets the expectations of landowners and residents concerning the land use and density of the community. Whether it is allowing...

Infill week ?

Posted on June 23, 2008
Infill! One can?t tune into the domestic policy debate this year without encountering assertions that we are experiencing a sea change in the nation?s metropolitan land use: the end of cheap oil, the end of rapid sprawl, and even the...

The LULU of offshore drilling ...

Posted on June 20, 2008
One more post about federal land law use before a return to local law next week. The big domestic news this week was President Bush?s call for lifting the moratoria on drilling for oil off American shores (okay, it?s not...

What to do when the water rises? ?

Posted on June 17, 2008
Just as we Floridians begin to worry about the approach of another hurricane season, overflowing rivers in and around Iowa remind us that far more people are harmed by interior fresh water than by salt water. Both types of flooding...

Some surprising data about the biggest culprits in land use and greenhouse gas emissions ?

Posted on June 12, 2008
So, it?s finally time for land use policies to take account of global climate change and carbon footprints, right? Sure. But what types of consumer activities contribute most to the dilemma of too much carbon in the atmosphere? Often, policy...

The housing bust and the role of the government ?

Posted on June 10, 2008
Here?s a shocker: The Washington Post reports today that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development encouraged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase subprime-mortgage-backed securities early in the decade. This encouraged risky loans that are now often resulting...

Bucking the anti-oil land use trend, in South Dakota ?

Posted on June 04, 2008
With much of the domestic politics in the nation addressing plans for a future with less oil (such as the big climate change bill now pending before Congress) and efforts to develop energy from sources other fossil fuels, energy companies...

Land use and the maybe-navigable L.A. River ?

Posted on June 03, 2008
The federal Clean Water Act has long served as a thorn in the side of land developers, in large part because construction work that dumps soil or fills in a stream or wetland can be considered a form of water...

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