A medida que crece el interés por vivir en las ciudades, el costo de las propiedades residenciales en muchos mercados de moda se ha ido por las nubes. Según el Centro Conjunto para Estudios de la Vivienda (Joint Center for Housing Studies o JCHS, 2015), en 2014 la tasa de viviendas vacantes en el mercado de alquiler alcanzó su mínimo en dos décadas; el precio de alquiler aumentó en 91 de 93 áreas metropolitanas estudiadas, y el índice de precios al consumidor para los contratos de alquiler se incrementó el doble de la tasa de inflación, hasta un 10 por ciento o más en Denver, San José, Honolulu y San Francisco.

A pesar de una interrupción debida a la crisis hipotecaria, los precios de las viviendas a la venta también han seguido aumentando, a menudo más allá del alcance de los compradores potenciales (Olick 2014); en Washington D.C., la mediana del valor de la vivienda casi se triplicó entre 2000 y 2013 (Oh et al. 2015). Cuando los activistas para el derecho a la vivienda comienzan a buscar herramientas efectivas para evitar el desplazamiento de las familias de bajos ingresos fuera de los barrios en proceso de aburguesamiento y crear comunidades inclusivas, muchos recurren a los fideicomisos de suelo comunitario (recuadro 1) como manera de ayudar a construir un inventario de viviendas permanentemente asequibles.

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Recuadro 1: El modelo de fideicomiso de suelo comunitario

Bajo el modelo de fideicomiso de suelo comunitario (CLT, por su sigla en inglés), una organización controlada por la comunidad retiene la propiedad de una parcela de suelo, y vende o alquila viviendas en dicho suelo a familias de bajos ingresos. En contrapartida a precios inferiores a los del mercado, los compradores aceptan restricciones de reventa, de modo que las viviendas sigan siendo económicas para los compradores subsiguientes, permitiendo al mismo tiempo a los dueños acumular algo de patrimonio neto. El fideicomiso de suelo comunitario también prepara a los compradores para adquirir la propiedad, les ofrece apoyo en sus problemas de financiamiento, y gestiona las reventas y las viviendas de alquiler.

De esta manera, el fideicomiso permite a más familias ser propietarias de una casa y apoya a los residentes que quieren comprometerse con sus barrios a largo plazo. En las áreas que se están aburguesando, ofrecen una manera efectiva para que las familias de bajos ingresos mantengan una participación en el barrio, porque aceptan un subsidio único inicial (que puede provenir de diversas fuentes, frecuentemente incluyendo programas públicos como el Programa de Sociedades de Inversión HOME o los Subsidios en Bloque para Desarrollo Comunitario) que queda ligado al edificio, manteniendo el bajo precio de las unidades a lo largo del tiempo sin necesidad de aportaciones adicionales de dinero público. En los mercados de vivienda débiles, también son beneficiosos (Shelterforce 2012), al proporcionar educación en materia financiera para reducir la cantidad de ejecuciones hipotecarias, mejorar el mantenimiento del barrio y mantener una tasa de ocupación estable. En 2009, en el auge de la crisis de ejecuciones hipotecarias, la probabilidad de que los préstamos de la Asociación de Banqueros Hipotecarios (MBA, por su sigla en inglés) se encontraran en el proceso de ejecución hipotecaria era 8,2 veces mayor que para los préstamos de fideicomisos de suelos comunitarios (CLT), a pesar de que los préstamos de los CLT se habían efectuado de manera uniforme a hogares de bajos ingresos (Thaden, Rosenberg 2010) mientras que los préstamos MBA incluían todos los segmentos de ingresos. De las poquísimas casas de un CLT que completaron el proceso de ejecución hipotecaria, la cartera del CLT no perdió ninguna.

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De forma similar a las corporaciones de desarrollo comunitario (community development corporations o CDC), muchos CLT surgieron de organizaciones vecinales de base. La organización comunitaria tradicional (a diferencia del concepto más amplio de “sensibilización comunitaria”) crea una base empoderada de residentes para determinar por si mismos lo que necesitan y se movilizan para lograrlo; como frente común, estos individuos están en mejores condiciones para contrarrestar a los opositores corporativos o gubernamentales y otras formas de poder institucional. La colaboración estratégica y la fortaleza numérica son esenciales para la formación exitosa de un CLT. Pero las destrezas requeridas para organizarse políticamente alrededor de problemas locales son muy distintas a las requeridas para administrar propiedades inmobiliarias. Si bien hacen falta ambas destrezas para implementar y sustentar un CLT, la adquisición de estas competencias centrales bajo un mismo techo puede obstaculizar la capacidad de una organización vecinal para dedicarse a su misión fundamental o alcanzarla.

¿Cómo han pilotado las organizaciones comunitarias que crearon un CLT el desafío de adquirir dos juegos de destrezas aparentemente incompatibles? Examinamos aquí la experiencia de cinco CLT consolidados de distintas regiones del país para ver cómo superaron este desafío y fueron modificando su enfoque a consecuencia de ello. Desde Boston a Los Ángeles, los organizadores comunitarios enfrentaron una amplia gama de problemas, desde barrios con altas tasas de suelo vacante y casi sin mercados de vivienda, a áreas de gran movimiento donde la preocupación principal era el desplazamiento de familias de bajos ingresos. Sin embargo, estas cinco organizaciones tuvieron razones notablemente similares para iniciar un fideicomiso de suelo comunitario: cada uno de los directores de estos CLT señaló que la comunidad quería controlar el suelo para impedir no sólo que los residentes perdieran una casa sino también que no pudieran comprar una por falta de recursos. Incluso los CLT que comenzaron en mercados de vivienda débiles estaban ubicados cerca del centro o cerca de distritos universitarios u otras áreas populares, y reconocieron la posibilidad de desplazamientos a medida que las condiciones de sus barrios mejoraran. Todos señalaron que era esencial contar con una visión comunitaria clara para que un CLT tenga éxito, aunque algunos grupos asumen la responsabilidad directa de crear e implementar dicha visión, mientras que otros se dedican a realizar trabajos por una vivienda en nombre de una organización matriz encargada de orientar la visión más amplia. Las formas de organizar y desarrollar las viviendas también variaron, pero todos estuvieron de acuerdo en que estas dos actividades pueden ser difíciles de combinar.

Dudley Neighbors Inc., Boston, Massachusetts

La organización más antigua en nuestro estudio, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) o Iniciativa del Barrio de Dudley Street, se formó en un mal momento para el mercado en la década de 1980 para combatir el desecho ilegal de residuos en grandes extensiones de suelos que quedaron vacantes a consecuencia de una ola de incendios intencionados. La ciudad estaba proponiendo un plan de ordenamiento territorial para la zona sin tener en cuenta la opinión de los residentes, y los miembros de la comunidad respondieron creando DSNI para reclamar el derecho de la comunidad a participar de las decisiones sobre el uso del suelo en su zona. Conquistaron este derecho y, por medio de DSNI, decidieron que un CLT era la mejor herramienta para ayudar a implementar la visión de la comunidad. “Muchas veces, los grupos quieren formar un CLT creyendo que resolverá mágicamente los problemas de un barrio”, dice Harry Smith, director del CLT de DSNI, Dudley Neighbors Inc. (DNI) u Organizaciön de Vecinos de Dudley. “Pero primero decimos: ‘¿Han plasmado una visión de cómo se debería desarrollar su comunidad, y pueden explicar cómo encaja un CLT en dicha visión?’”

DNI, fundado en 1984, es una organización independiente, pero mantiene estrechos vínculos con su organización matriz. Los dos grupos comparten personal, y DSNI nombra a la mayoría de los integrantes de la Junta Directiva del CLT. El CLT es responsable solamente de proporcionar viviendas asequibles y del control comunitario del suelo, y deja a DSNI la tarea prioritaria de organización y planificación comunitaria. Ni DSNI ni DNI llevan a cabo el desarrollo inmobiliario directamente, sino que se asocian con emprendedores locales de viviendas sociales para ello.

Debido a su larga historia y relaciones ya establecidas, DSNI se dedica menos a actividades de lucha política que en sus días iniciales. Pero no renuncia a ello, de ser necesario. De hecho, Smith señala que mantener un CLT puede ser una fortaleza política única. Cuando DSNI se organiza para determinar el destino de una parcela particular de terreno, “el hecho de tener un fideicomiso de suelo nos da un nivel de impacto adicional”, dice.

Fideicomiso de suelo comunitario Sawmill, Albuquerque, Nuevo México

El CLT Sawmill, ubicado en Albuquerque, Nuevo México, se inició en 1996 cuando, después de una década de realizar actividades de organización comunitaria, los residentes de bajos ingresos se unieron para luchar contra una fábrica vecina que contaminaba el aire y amenazaba su salud. Querían ejercer control sobre el uso futuro del espacio. Después de que los líderes asistieron a una conferencia para aprender más sobre los fideicomisos de suelo comunitario, mantuvieron una serie de reuniones sobre este tema. Aunque algunos residentes mostraron preocupación por no poseer el suelo en el modelo del CLT, un veterano de la comunidad les recordó que de todas maneras no eran dueños de su propiedad ahora, ya fuera porque estaban de alquiler o porque no tenían los recursos para controlar lo que ocurría en su propio suelo. El exdirector ejecutivo Wade Patterson dice: “El hecho de que el objetivo específico estuviera orientado a controlar los costos de la vivienda calmó las inquietudes sobre el aburguesamiento de la comunidad y el desplazamiento de los residentes. El hecho de conseguir viviendas, y no otra fábrica, fue algo indiscutible”.

El CLT Sawmill fue creado como una organización independiente dedicada al desarrollo inmobiliario, a la administración y a la gestión de propiedades. Es uno de los mayores CLT del país, con 17 hectáreas, e incluye viviendas en propiedad, en alquiler y para personas de la tercera edad. Recientemente ganó una licitación de la ciudad de Albuquerque para revitalizar un viejo motel en un nuevo barrio de la ciudad, y el CLT está tratando de resolver cómo introducirse en esa comunidad de manera respetuosa.

Las asociaciones de vecinos de Albuquerque que se encuentran en el área de influencia de Sawmill, incluyendo el Consejo Asesor de Sawmill, que lanzó el CLT, se enfocan en la “construcción de la comunidad” por medio de eventos culturales, según Patterson. El CLT respalda la organización vecinal ofreciendo espacio para reunirse en uno de sus edificios, además de otros tipos de apoyo. “Nuestro objetivo no es liderar sino ofrecer apoyo manteniéndonos detrás”, dice Patterson.

Fideicomiso de suelo comunitario de San Francisco, California

El fideicomiso de suelo comunitario de San Francisco (SFCLT) fue creado en 2003, en un momento en que el mercado inmobiliario de la ciudad era uno de los más activos del país, y los residentes de bajos ingresos estaban preocupados por los altísimos alquileres y desalojos ilegales para convertir las propiedades en condominios. Los organizadores vecinales estaban buscando un modelo que pudiera prevenir los desalojos y dar a los residentes de menores ingresos un mayor control sobre su situación de vivienda.

El CLT es una entidad independiente, pero mantiene una relación estrecha con los organizadores vecinales que lo fundaron. Cuando sus grupos asociados se organizan para impedir desalojos o conversiones a condominios de un edificio en riesgo de ello (generalmente edificios de departamentos pequeños), SFCLT hace de comprador para preservar el edificio y después lo convierte en una cooperativa en suelo propiedad del CLT. SFCLT cuenta con personal que tiene experiencia inmobiliaria, pero no construye edificios nuevos; todas las obras de rehabilitación se contratan por fuera. Gestiona los aspectos financieros de la adquisición y la conversión, la administración del suelo y la capacitación y respaldo para ayudar a los residentes a formar una junta directiva y administrar el gobierno de la cooperativa. “Los grupos vecinales interesados en temas de vivienda nos remiten a todos los residentes necesitados; nosotros somos la única organización en temas de vivienda que puede ayudar a estabilizar un edificio de departamentos de varias unidades comprándolo”, dice la directora Tracy Parent. SFCLT organiza a sus miembros para apoyar los temas más amplios promovidos por sus socios de la coalición, pero no “inicia las actividades organizativas” sobre estos temas, según Parent.

T.R.U.S.T. South LA, Los Ángeles, California

Cuando se formó T.R.U.S.T. South LA en 2005, los barrios objetivos estaban llenos de lotes vacantes y viviendas deterioradas, mientras que las áreas circundantes estaban amenazadas por la presión del desarrollo inmobiliario. Si bien los fundadores —Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, Strategic Actions of a Just Economy y Abode Communities— pensaron inicialmente en crear un CLT principalmente como una herramienta de vivienda, han asumido un papel más amplio en la implementación de una visión comunitaria. “Originalmente, nos constituimos como un grupo de adquisición de suelos. Después, nuestros miembros quisieron organizarse”, dice la directora ejecutiva Sandra McNeill. El CLT se ha organizado, por ejemplo, contra el propietario malintencionado que estaba tratando de desalojar a los residentes de un edificio que había dejado deteriorar a propósito para aprovecharse del vencimiento de las restricciones en el monto del alquiler de las viviendas de Sección 8. También se ha organizado para recaudar fondos para llevar a cabo mejoras en el transporte y en los espacios verdes en su barrio, y ha participado en coaliciones para el apoyo de políticas municipales más amplias, como, por ejemplo, el aumento de financiamiento para viviendas sociales.

El grupo se describe ahora como “una iniciativa comunitaria para estabilizar los barrios situados al sur del centro de Los Ángeles”. T.R.U.S.T. South LA es una organización independiente que se considera parte del equipo de desarrollo de proyectos de vivienda, y se asocia con otros para comprar, financiar y construir o rehabilitar viviendas.

Aun cuando T.R.U.S.T. South LA realiza muchas tareas de organización, casi todo su trabajo de política se realiza en colaboración con otros grupos, incluyendo sus socios fundadores. A los emprendedores que se dedican a viviendas sociales, en general no les gusta correr riesgos”, dice McNeill. “Pueden involucrarse en actividades políticas para garantizar que se proporcione financiamiento para viviendas sociales, pero no más que eso”.

Fideicomiso de suelo Community Justice, Filadelfia, Pensilvania

El Fideicomiso de Suelo Community Justice (Justicia Comunitaria) de Filadelfia se constituyó en el noreste de Filadelfia en 2010, cuando el mercado inmobiliario estaba atravesando fuertes altibajos. Aunque el barrio estaba plagado de propiedades vacantes y abandonadas, estaba rodeado por todos lados de florecientes mercados inmobiliarios, y parecía probable que estos crecientes precios y presiones inmobiliarias se propagaran. El Proyecto de Revitalización Comunitaria de Mujeres (Women’s Community Revitalization Project o WCRP), junto con una coalición de organizaciones cívicas locales, realizaron docenas de reuniones públicas para ayudar a los miembros de la comunidad a comprender qué significaba la formación de un fideicomiso de suelo comunitario y explorar sus inquietudes sobre las restricciones a la reventa. Los asistentes votaron a favor de formar un CLT.

El CLT Community Justice se constituyó como un programa del WCRP, que cuenta con conocimientos propios de desarrollo inmobiliario y organización comunitaria, incluido un departamento completo dedicado a estas actividades.

Pero la directora ejecutiva del WCRP, Nora Lichtash, advierte: “A veces pierdes algunas relaciones, cuando realizas actividades de organización comunitaria… A ciertas personas no le gusta que les presionen para que haga lo correcto”. En efecto, el WCRP aparentemente presionó tanto a una concejala local sobre ciertos temas que ella se negó a dar al CLT el suelo vacante que este fideicomiso esperaba conseguir para su primer proyecto inmobiliario. Al final, sin embargo, la concejala ayudó al grupo a establecer un banco de suelo para toda la ciudad (Feldstein 2013–14), que promueve algunos de los mismos principios que el fideicomiso de suelo.

A pesar de tensiones potenciales como estas, Lichtash cree que las funciones del CLT y de la organización comunitaria están muy interrelacionadas. Es importante recordar que la organización comunitaria y la construcción de viviendas sociales van unidas”, dice. Las personas que aportan fondos creen que hay que hacer una cosa o la otra, pero no es bueno separar el CLT de las actividades de organización comunitaria. Uno está construyendo capacidad para los trabajos presentes pero también para los trabajos futuros. Cuando uno se organiza, se hace respetar, porque tiene el poder del pueblo”.

Desarrollar o no desarrollar: Una decisión importante

El desarrollo de viviendas sociales es un asunto complicado y caro que ninguna organización comunitaria debería tomarse a la ligera si está pensando en iniciar un fideicomiso de suelo comunitario. “Si te dedicas al desarrollo inmobiliario, tendrás menos tiempo para las actividades de organización comunitaria, que son acumulativas. Para formar una organización vecinal realmente representativa, hace falta mucho tiempo y una gran dosis de sacrificio. Si tomas el camino más fácil, corres el riesgo de poner en peligro gran parte del poder que has construido a través de los años”.

La experiencia de Boston, por ejemplo, comienza con una moraleja. DSNI intervino cuando el emprendedor original del primer proyecto del CLT se echó atrás. Fue “traumático” para el personal y la junta, dice Smith. Nos tomó muchísimo tiempo y It distracted DSNI from its core functions.” distrajo a DSNI de sus funciones principales”.

La idea de controlar los recursos de desarrollo y tener acceso a las cuotas del emprendedor inmobiliario puede seducir a los grupos de base, dice Lichtash, de WCRP. Pero se debe proceder con extremo cuidado. Convertirse en un emprendedor inmobiliario puede enturbiar las aguas”, dice. En estos negocios millonarios, tienes que poner atención en todos los detalles. Y eso te aleja del trabajo educativo”.

El trabajo inmobiliario es muy duro y especulativo”, continúa Lichtash. Crees que estás consiguiendo una cosa y en realidad consigues otra. Yo le digo a la gente que las primeras asociaciones deben durar bastante tiempo. Es difícil mantener contentos tanto a los inquilinos como a las fuentes de financiamiento”.

Patterson del CLT Sawmill está de acuerdo con esta opinión, y agrega que es particularmente difícil “cumplir con todas las fechas de vencimiento y la presentación de informes sobre las necesidades de financiamiento [del desarrollo inmobiliario]. Siempre me sorprendo de la sobrecarga de tareas administrativas que esto requiere”. También aconseja que si no cuadran los números, “lo importante es saber que puedes retirarte de un proyecto si fuera necesario”.

McNeill de T.R.U.S.T. South LA dice: “Sin duda, el desarrollo inmobiliario tiene su propio lenguaje. Es complejo. Las organizaciones sin fines de lucro que se dedican a esto tienen grandes presupuestos y en general también una cantidad considerable de personal. Tengo mucho respeto por las destrezas que hacen falta para sacar adelante estos negocios. Se requieren unas destrezas muy distintas de lo que hacemos nosotros”.

Otra consideración es que no es fácil actualmente participar en una industria como la de las viviendas sociales. En el entorno de financiamiento actual, muchos de los subsidios que los CLT han utilizado tradicionalmente para desarrollar y administrar sus unidades se han reducido mucho, y es difícil encontrar hipotecas para los compradores potenciales de viviendas. Dice McNeill: “La industria de la vivienda ha sufrido enormes cambios. La realidad es que no hay una oportunidad en la actualidad para que una nueva organización se dedique a este negocio. No cabe duda de que este no es el momento”.

Incluso la administración continua de un CLT requiere un tipo de relación con los residentes distinta de la que tendría un organizador comunitario. El cobro de las cuotas del emprendedor y de los alquileres puede afectar la relación con los residentes y la dinámica de poder”, dice Smith de DNI. Uno es responsable tanto ante los inquilinos como ante los propietarios de tu comunidad, así que se producen tensiones”, según Lichtash de WCRP. Como comenta Parent de SFCLT: “Los organizadores comunitarios con frecuencia pintan los problemas como claras opciones morales”, pero cuando administras una propiedad, “hay matices”.

Con la mirada en la meta

Una vez que un grupo comunitario ha determinado que un CLT es la herramienta apropiada para mantener viviendas asequibles para los residentes locales, deberían hacerse las siguientes preguntas: ¿Quién ejercerá el liderazgo para implementar la visión más amplia? ¿Existe ya una organización que esté comprometida y sea capaz de hacerlo, o hay que crear una? ¿Hay grupos comunitarios que ya tengan experiencia en desarrollo inmobiliario y acceso a financiamiento, y que puedan asociarse con un CLT o incluso integrarlo en sus actividades? ¿Cómo puede el nuevo CLT asociarse y apoyar el trabajo de la organización comunitaria, en vez de distraer su labor?

Muchos CLT nuevos están siguiendo el camino de grupos como DSNI y T.R.U.S.T. South LA, estableciendo organizaciones separadas para gestionar las funciones de administración y la propiedad de suelo, y utilizando después la capacidad de emprendedores de viviendas sociales ya existentes por medio de alianzas. Si bien es cierto que cada localidad es distinta, este método parece ser un buen punto de partida para estos grupos, sobre todo si quieren conservar su energía para realizar la importante tarea que originalmente se propusieron: luchar por formar comunidades dinámicas y equitativas.

Miriam Axel-Lute es editora de Shelterforce, una revista dedicada al campo de desarrollo comunitario. Ha escrito extensamente sobre temas de organización comunitaria y fideicomisos de suelo comunitario.

Dana Hawkins-Simons es una galardonada periodista que ha publicado innovadoras investigaciones en U.S. News & World Report. También fue directora de Iniciativa de Oportunidades de Vivienda en el Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda.

Referencias

Beckwith, Dave, con Cristina Lopez. 1997. “Community Organizing: People Power from the Grassroots.” http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers97/beckwith.htm

Feldstein, Jill. 2013/14. “Winning a Land Bank We Can Trust.” Shelterforce. Otoño/Invierno 2013/14. www.shelterforce.org/article/3910/winning_a_land_bank_we_can_trust2/

Horwitz, Staci. 2011. “It’s All About Choice.” Shelterforce. www.shelterforce.org/article/2313/its_all_about_choice/

Joint Center for Housing Studies. 2015. State of the Nation’s Housing 2015. Harvard University. www.jchs.harvard.edu/research/state_nations_housing

Oh, Seunghoon, Josh Silver, Annelise Osterberg, y Jaclyn Tules. 2015. Does Nonprofit Housing Development Preserve Neighborhood Diversity? An Investigation into the Interaction Between Affordable Housing Development and Neighborhood Change. Manna, Inc. www.mannadc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Final_Neighborhood_Impact_Analysis_7_1.pdf

Olick, Diana. 2014. “Housing Still Too Expensive Despite Positive Signs.” CNBC.com, 10 de julio. www.cnbc.com/2014/07/10/housing-still-too-expensive-despite-positive-signs.html

Shelterforce. 2012. “What’s the Point of Shared-Equity Homeownership in Weak Market Areas?” Shelterforce. www.shelterforce.org/images/uploads/theanswer171-2.pdf

Schutz, Aaron y Marie G. Sandy. 2011. “What Isn’t Community Organizing.” En Collective Action for Social Change: An Introduction to Community Organizing, London: Palgrave McMillan. pp. 31–44.

Thaden, Emily y Greg Rosenberg. 2010. “Outperforming the Market: Delinquency and Foreclosure Rates in Community Land Trusts.” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/dl/1846_1154_LLA10102%20Foreclosure%20Rates.pdf

Because many brownfield sites are located in areas with depressed property values, the cost of remediation and redevelopment can be greater than the expected resale value. These sites, referred to here as low-to-no market value brownfields, are rarely addressed under current policies and programs. Rather, the current practice of many brownfield redevelopment projects is to select only the most marketable sites for remediation and redevelopment, essentially perpetuating the age-old “creaming” process. Private and public developers’ avoidance of the lowest market value parcels typically excludes disadvantaged neighborhoods from programs aimed at redeveloping brownfields and creates the potential for widening existing inequalities between better-off and worse-off neighborhoods.

The Role of Land Banks

In a recently completed project supported by the Lincoln Institute, I examined the barriers to brownfield redevelopment and focused on promising approaches for improving the prospects of the least marketable sites. The specific research goal was to identify land transfer procedures and processes through which land bank authorities and other community land development entities would be willing to receive vacant brownfield property that is tax-delinquent and environmentally contaminated, and then arrange for its remediation and sale.

A local land bank authority is typically a nonprofit entity established by either a city or county to address the problems of urban blight and to promote redevelopment. The original motivation for this project was to seek a solution to the problem of land banks being unwilling to accept some tax-delinquent brownfield properties due to fears of becoming liable for the contamination on these properties. Removing that barrier improves the prospects for promoting productive land redevelopment and reducing property vacancies to enhance a community’s economic development.

Over the course of this project, the nature of the original problem shifted in a positive way when recent federal guidelines clarified that land bank authorities that are part of a local government and acquire brownfield properties involuntarily (e.g., because they are tax-delinquent) are not liable for any contamination. With removal of this legal liability, it became clear that the real problem land banks face in taking on tax-delinquent, low-to-no market value properties is a lack of financial resources to arrange for their subsequent remediation, sale or redevelopment.

For example, the Atlanta/Fulton Country Landbank operates on a model of clearing title on properties to allow for private redevelopment, since it does not have the financial resources to act as the redeveloper itself. The Landbank, like most of the public or quasi-public entities we have identified as engaging in brownfield redevelopment, is promoting a market-based, creaming process of redevelopment. While there is validity in employing such processes, to do so exclusively poses a serious public policy issue. It serves to widen the inequality between the most depressed neighborhoods, where the low-to-no market value properties are most likely to be found, and the neighborhoods experiencing revitalization and brownfield cleanup.

Barriers to Brownfield Redevelopment

Our review of current land bank activity in other cities has revealed that, overall, land bank authorities do not take a pro-active stance on brownfield redevelopment for several reasons: operational limitations, fear of legal liability, and/or lack of funds to cover remediation costs. Our national search yielded only two exceptions: the Cleveland Land Bank and the Louisville/Jefferson County Land Bank Authority. But of these two, only the Louisville/Jefferson County Land Bank has pursued brownfield properties actively and has made the required changes in its by-laws to effectively acquire, remediate and redevelop contaminated properties. The Cleveland Land Bank experience in brownfield redevelopment was with a donated parcel that was suspected of being contaminated.

Operational Limitations

The two major operational requirements that currently deter land banks from entering into brownfield redevelopment are the need to identify an end user for a property before the property can be acquired by the land bank and the limited scope of activity for which the land banks were established originally. For example, the Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard land banks in Massachusetts were established for conservation purposes; they rarely deal with properties that would be considered brownfields, although their organizational structure makes them ideal candidates to do so.

Fear of Legal Liability

As with any owner of contaminated property, land banks are concerned about the legal liability associated with brownfields. Although most state volunteer cleanup programs offer liability exemptions for municipalities, the issue of federal liability still has to be addressed when land banks choose to acquire contaminated properties.

Federal legal liability arises from the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as Superfund, but both federal and state governments have developed programs and guidelines aimed at eliminating that barrier. As a point of clarification, it is not the intent of federal or state programs to release responsible parties from their legal obligation to clean up property that they have contaminated, but, rather, to facilitate brownfield remediation and redevelopment by reducing the fear of unwarranted legal liability.

Landowners who are not responsible for contaminating the property, who did not know, and had no reason to suspect contaminants were present on the property are not liable under CERCLA sections 107(b) and 101(35). This is often referred to as the “innocent landowner defense.” Sections 101(20)(D) and 101(35)(A) protect federal, state and local governments from owner/operator liability if they acquire contaminated property involuntarily as a function of performing their governmental duties, including acquisition due to abandonment, tax delinquency, foreclosure, or through seizure or forfeiture authority. This process was further clarified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in June 1997 to facilitate the work of state and local brownfield redevelopment programs.

For land bank authorities that are a part of local government, the above-mentioned program should protect the acquisition of contaminated properties through the land bank’s normal operational functions. However, any land bank seeking to acquire contaminated properties should contact its regional EPA office for further legal clarification and assistance with the redevelopment process.

Lack of Funds for Remediation Costs

The often costly remediation process is another significant problem for land banks seeking to redevelop brownfields. Even when the mission of the land bank is to eliminate blight and spur revitalization, both of which are directly related to brownfield reuse, limited budgets prevent interested and willing land banks from acquiring brownfields for remediation and redevelopment. Therefore, while the land bank authority could be helpful in forgiving the property taxes owed on the parcel as an incentive for reuse, the property’s redevelopment potential is still thwarted by its having little-to-no market desirability.

Promising Alternatives for Low-value Sites

When the focus of this research project became the identification of promising approaches for improving the redevelopment prospects of low-to-no market value brownfield sites, we began to examine different kinds of roles for land banks. These included identifying possible ways of raising revenues for land banks and other community development agencies to use in financing the remediation and redevelopment of low-to-no market value sites, and considering potential reuses of such sites, including open space, residential or commercial/industrial uses.

One alternative is found in community land trusts, which generally are private non-profit corporations in both urban and rural areas engaged in social and economic activities, such as to acquire and hold land for affordable housing development. While traditionally they have not focused on conservation issues, their model could be adapted for brownfield redevelopment efforts. One approach for solving the problem of low-to-no market value brownfields is a community land trust modeled after Boston’s Dudley Neighbors, Inc., which received from the city the power of eminent domain to acquire vacant land and buildings in its neighborhood. This strategy provides an alternative mechanism to a citywide land bank for acquiring brownfield properties, and it can be used to target geographic areas in greatest economic decline.

Another promising alternative to the traditional land bank is modeled after Scenic Hudson, an environmental advocacy organization and land trust located in Poughkeepsie, New York. It has an urban initiative to acquire, remediate and develop environmentally friendly reuses for derelict riverfront sites. Among its projects has been the redevelopment of a twelve-acre abandoned industrial waterfront for a public park, the Irvington Waterfront Park. Scenic Hudson has proven that, with cooperation from public and private organizations, land trusts can be effective vehicles for brownfield redevelopment.

The most popular form of land trust is one founded to protect natural areas and farmlands. Such land trusts most often operate at the local or regional level to conserve tracts of land that have ecological, open space, recreational or historic value. If land trusts choose to expand their conservation goals to include urban open space, they could become very helpful partners in public/private projects to create green space and parks from remediated brownfields. The Scenic Hudson land trust model specifically addresses brownfield redevelopment for the stated purpose of stemming greenfield development.

To address the needs for financing the redevelopment of low-to-no market value brownfields, the Louisville Land Bank Authority’s approach is promising. It established a fund that uses the profits from the sale of remediated brownfields to fund future remediation projects. Another possibility for raising funds for land banks is suggested by the two-percent transfer fee the state of Massachusetts authorized for its Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard land banks to purchase open space. The transfer fee idea could be adapted by land banks to create a fund for brownfield remediation.

The research project also sought to identify municipalities that did not have a specific land bank authority, but did have a municipal office or program that dealt with tax-delinquent properties and their redevelopment. Two municipalities found to be engaging in noteworthy and innovative brownfield redevelopment are Kalamazoo, Michigan, and, Emeryville, California. Kalamazoo’s brownfield pilot approach of creating brownfield redevelopment districts emphasizes community development over traditional, market-based economic development goals. The city uses stakeholder groups to design brownfield projects and to plan for redevelopment.

Emeryville has determined, through surveying its property owners and developers, that offering financial assistance for site assessment alone is not effective; it must be backed up by financial assistance for remediation. The city’s brownfield program is based on the principle that “sharing of risks should lead to sharing of rewards.” That is, if a community bears the residual risk for permitting the private sector to conduct risk-based cleanup, a portion of the private sector’s savings on remediation expenses should be shared with the community. The Emeryville approach to brownfield redevelopment also recognizes that smaller sites and projects require proportionately more loans, grants and technical assistance than do larger sites and projects.

Conclusion

At the present time, there is a paucity of programs and strategies to address tax-delinquent, low-to-no market value brownfield properties in marginal urban neighborhoods. If this deficiency persists, the current brownfield redevelopment movement will likely lead to a widening of intraurban inequalities. If municipalities, land bank authorities, and community development organizations will recognize the need for, and move towards, promoting more equitable brownfield redevelopment, the approaches presented in this article hold promise for correcting this deficiency and preventing wider inequalities. Further, such actions could remove potential polution sources and health hazards from the neighborhood, provide much-needed open space, and hold the remediated property until the surrounding area increases in value and the site can be redeveloped through traditional market processes.

References

City of Emeryville, Project Status Report, Emeryville Brownfields Pilot Project. Emeryville, California. November 1998. See also

Rosenberg, Steve. “Working Where the Grass Isn’t Greener: Land Trusts in Urban Areas.” Land Trust Alliance Exchange. Winter: 5-9, 1998.

U.S. EPA. Handbook of Tools for Managing Federal Superfund Liability Risks at Brownfields and Other Sites. Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. November 1998.

Nancey Green Leigh, AICP, is associate professor of city planning in the Graduate City and Regional Planning Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She teaches and conducts research on urban and regional development, industrial restructuring, local economic development planning, and brownfield redevelopment.

Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 4 del libro Perspectivas urbanas; Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.

Brasilia, la capital de Brasil, fue inaugurada a principios de los años 1960 como una “nueva ciudad” que daría comienzo a una era distinta para las metrópolis en América Latina y que demostraría cómo el gobierno hacía un uso eficaz de la tierra en aras de un crecimiento urbano planificado. Tal propósito se servía de dos instrumentos básicos: un control normativo del uso de la tierra basado en un plan general diseñado por Lucio Costa y el gobierno como propietario de las tierras de la capital federal, lo que permitiría que ésta fuera planificada sin los tipos de restricciones y conflictos que normalmente surgen cuando la tierra está en manos privadas. Sin embargo, tres décadas y media más tarde, los problemas asociados con el desarrollo urbano en Brasilia no se diferencian sustancialmente de los que padecen otras ciudades grandes de América Latina.

Falta de visión para la tenencia de la tierra y padrinazgo administrativo

Brasilia se presenta como un ejemplo único de la gestión de tierras urbanas en América Latina porque la responsabilidad de administrar las tierras públicas siempre ha recaído sobre el gobierno local. Sin embargo, la periferia de la ciudad ha sufrido un índice explosivo de crecimiento con un patrón concomitante de ocupación irregular de la tierra, subdivisiones ilegales y carencia de infraestructura. En Brasilia la posibilidad de dirigir el proceso de crecimiento urbano a través de una política explícita de acceso a las tierras públicas se ha visto comprometida de forma lenta e irremediable por la ocupación espontánea (e ilegal) de la tierra. Esta falta de visión en el uso de las tierras públicas suele ser disfuncional tanto para la densidad urbana como para las finanzas públicas, por lo que obstruye los esfuerzos que hace el gobierno local para proveer infraestructura a esos asentamientos irregulares.

Más aún, las influencias políticas que intervienen en el proceso de desarrollo han menoscabado en gran medida las posibilidades de manejar con eficacia la oferta de tierras públicas en Brasilia. A principios de los años 1990 el gobierno distribuyó unas 65.000 parcelas en áreas que carecían de infraestructura básica. Además de reducir las reservas de tierras públicas, este “padrinazgo de la tenencia de la tierra” generó la necesidad de encontrar otras fuentes para financiar nueva infraestructura. Dado que el principal recurso que tiene disponible la entidad de desarrollo urbano del Distrito Federal (Terracap) es la tierra misma, esta política de padrinazgo trajo como resultado la venta de otras tierras públicas para financiar la construcción de infraestructura en los asentamientos irregulares. Este círculo vicioso ha provocado graves distorsiones que la administración local actual pretende resolver usando tierras públicas como “capital” para crear una política efectiva que permita controlar los ingresos provenientes de la tenencia de la tierra y los costos urbanos.

La experiencia de Brasilia parece confirmar los argumentos de Henry George y otros de que la propiedad de tierras públicas no conduce por sí sola a un crecimiento urbano más equilibrado y equitativo socialmente. La estrategia del gobierno local actual de definir maneras de manejar el ingreso proveniente de tierras públicas para así controlar el uso de tierra urbana indica una nueva modalidad de interacción gubernamental con el mercado inmobiliario. En tal sentido, el gobierno cambia su función y deja de ser el propietario principal para convertirse en el administrador de los beneficios de la tierra.

Tierras públicas como capital de tenencia de la tierra

El principio medular de la nueva estrategia de Brasilia para administrar la equidad de la tierra es la definición de tierra pública como “capital de tenencia de la tierra”. El uso de esta tierra se somete a una serie de acciones estratégicas que transforman el capital de las tierras públicas en un factor que propicia la consolidación del complejo tecnológico del Distrito Federal. Se trata de la contraparte pública en el proceso de reconvertir el uso de la tierra en el centro de la ciudad en un instrumento de promoción social en el programa de regulación de la tenencia de la tierra: las tierras públicas se usan como activos mediante ventas, arrendamientos y asociaciones en proyectos urbanos.

La aplicación de estrategias diferenciadas para la tenencia de la tierra confiere mayor flexibilidad al gobierno para coordinar sus acciones. La búsqueda del equilibrio entre las iniciativas de índole social y otras en las que el gobierno intenta maximizar sus ingresos está cobrando la apariencia de una verdadera política de administración de tierras públicas que rompe con las anteriores prácticas de padrinazgo.

En este contexto de exploración de nuevos enfoques para el uso de tierras públicas con la finalidad de controlar el desarrollo urbano en Brasilia, el Instituto Lincoln, el Instituto de Planificación del Distrito Federal y Terracap organizaron un seminario internacional sobre gestión de ingresos provenientes de la tenencia de la tierra y costos urbanos en junio de 1998.

El programa reunió a expertos internacionales, ministros gubernamentales y administradores locales con miras a evaluar las experiencias internacionales en el uso de tierras públicas para financiar el crecimiento urbano en Europa, los Estados Unidos y América Latina. Martim Smolka del Instituto Lincoln describió las relaciones entre las operaciones del mercado inmobiliario, las regulaciones sobre el uso de la tierra y la recuperación pública de plusvalías. Alfredo Garay, arquitecto y exdirector de planificación de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, expuso las experiencias en el desarrollo de terrenos públicos en los alrededores del puerto de esa ciudad.

Bernard Frieden del Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts describió cómo se usan las actividades comerciales realizadas en tierras públicas en el oeste de los Estados Unidos para recaudar fondos para la educación y otros fines locales. Henk Verbrugge, director del organismo fiscal de Rotterdam y representante de Holanda ante la Asociación Internacional de Peritos, describió el sistema que tiene el país para la tenencia hereditaria, una regulación legal con la cual la tierra puede tener uso y beneficios completamente privados al tiempo que permanecen bajo control y propiedad económica de la municipalidad.

Los participantes discutieron la medida en que estas experiencias eran comparables a la situación en Brasilia y concluyeron que el éxito de varias estrategias para el uso de tierras públicas depende de la idoneidad de los proyectos específicos para la cultura empresarial del país en cuestión y las prácticas institucionales vigentes en la administración local.

The shift to a multi-racial government in South Africa is as pronounced and dramatic a transition as that of the new independent states of Central and Eastern Europe. In the past five years, South Africa has adopted a new constitution, elected a new government, redrawn state and municipal boundaries, and undertaken basic reform of its legal and political system. Land policy is central to this transformation, for “since the 1913 Natives Land Act, rights to own, rent or even share-crop land in South Africa depended upon a person’s race classification.” (1) Among the major land-related issues currently under scrutiny are property tax reform, restitution of land rights, and improvements in tenure security and access to landholding.

Land and Property Taxation

South African real property taxes take a number of forms, including “site rating,” a tax on unimproved value alone; “flat rating” on land and structures uniformly; and “composite ratings,” which tax land and improvements at different rates. Multiplicity and change are the norm, as Cape Town has recently decided to adopt site rating, Durban is considering replacement of its composite rating system with site rating, and Pretoria has introduced a temporary tax on improvements to supplement its site rating system.

The property tax in South Africa is not at present applied to rural land, although its potential extension to non-urban areas is the subject of intense debate. It is in the cities, however, that the struggle to transform the country will succeed or fail. In 1995, the urban sector accounted for about 65 percent of South Africa’s population and more than 80 percent of its GDP. Property taxes are an important source of revenue for cities to meet the cost of providing services within their newly redrawn boundaries.

These new boundaries are another index of the pace and variety of change in South Africa. Efforts to consolidate wealthy residential and commercial areas with impoverished townships and settlements have taken different forms in different regions. The central business districts of Johannesburg and Durban have been divided among several taxing jurisdictions that extend beyond their city limits. By contrast, the most of Cape Town’s business and residential regions were combined this summer with a set of neighboring townships in a new administrative region. It consists of 19 former administrations consolidated into 7, involving a transfer of more than 10,000 municipal staff and many assets. These measures have extremely important political and fiscal implications, bringing together as they do residential areas with living standards equal to or even surpassing European norms and settlements without electricity, paved roads or running water.

From a land policy perspective, perhaps the most dramatic legacy of past racial policies is the imbalance between white and non-white landownership. Under apartheid, 87 percent of the country’s land was reserved for white residents, who in 1995 constituted only 13 percent of South Africa’s population. Under these circumstances, property taxation takes on special importance as a potential means for expanding access to the land market. Roy Bahl and Johannes Linn have written:

[A]n equity argument may be at the heart of the matter: urban land prices are frequently so high that low-income groups cannot afford to purchase land…. To the extent that the revenue from property taxes is capitalized into lower current land values (since the tax reduces the expected future private yield on the land), it partially expropriates landownership rights from the present owner and also constitutes a loan to future owners, who can now acquire the land at a lower price but will have to pay property taxes in the future. If low-income groups cannot buy land because they lack liquidity and access to capital markets, property taxation may be one of the policy instruments to improve their access to landownership. (2)

Tax Collections and Tax Revolts

The government faces the challenge of reversing a “culture of nonpayment” for municipal services among township residents. During the apartheid era, the African National Congress (ANC) encouraged its supporters to refuse payment of water and utility charges as a means of contesting the legitimacy of the state-sponsored black local authorities. The resulting arrears were a major financial burden on all levels of government. Now the ANC seeks to promote voluntary payment for these same services, and as well as payment of real property taxes by those who now are able to hold title to their property.

Ironically, one tax protest that received wide publicity took the form of a property tax revolt in one of the nation’s wealthiest white residential areas, the Sandton suburb of Johannesburg. When property tax rates doubled and tripled there in 1996, many local property owners withheld payment in protest. This situation illustrates one of the most paradoxical aspects of the fiscal challenge to the new South Africa: the need to redress the enormous imbalance in resources across racial groups while commanding support from white citizens who feel over-taxed.

On the one hand, the disparities in needs and resources are overwhelming. Households falling below the official poverty level include only 0.7 percent of the white population, but 65 percent of the black population. At the same time, many white taxpayers feel overburdened by taxes-income tax rates, for example, can reach 45 percent on earnings over $22,000-and resentful of nonpayment by some township residents. In Alexandra, a black township inside Sandton, last year’s tax collection rate was only 3 percent. Any effort to meet the pressing fiscal needs of the new South Africa must take into account the vastly different perceptions of contribution and entitlement across its diverse population.

Perspectives on Future Directions

In July, a conference at the University of South Africa in Pretoria brought together governmental officials, policy analysts, academics and international experts to consider local government design and fiscal capacity. Brief overviews of two of the more than 30 presentations at that conference give a sense of the range of issues debated there, from concrete points of physical engineering to theoretical questions of intergovernmental fiscal relations.

At the most basic level, the definition of revenue needs depends on a prior decision as to the scope of local services to which all citizens are entitled. Given that large township areas have grown up without standard infrastructure, what goals should the government set for provision of water, electricity and roads?

Peter Vaz of the official Financial and Fiscal Commission outlined an approach to the monumental task of estimating the cost of providing the minimum services that each citizen can expect. The South African constitution enumerates 27 guaranteed rights, including the right to equality, to human dignity, to life, to freedom of expression, to a healthy environment, to housing, to health care services, to sufficient food, water and social security, to education, to information. The Commission is considering attempts to identify three levels of services-basic, intermediate and full provision. It is also looking at the cost of extending six services to urban and rural areas: water, sewerage, solid waste, roads, stormwater, electricity. For example, the basic level of water provision might be a communal standpipe, the intermediate level a yard tap, and full provision a house connection. The capital cost of each service package then provides a first estimate of the revenue necessary to meet the guarantees relevant to local government activities.

The broadest fiscal questions concern the allocation of taxes and functions among levels of governments. Rudolph Penner of the Barents Group stated that his general support for decentralization in transition economies was tempered in the case of South Africa. The model of voters as consumers choosing a set of local services in exchange for payment of local taxes is not necessarily applicable or desirable in this context. The strong ideological background to politics in South Africa means that voters are not primarily making a local electoral choice on the basis of economic policy. Moreover, the history of apartheid makes self-selected homogeneous groupings unacceptable if they lead to segregation by income class or race. Penner concluded that fiscal decentralization in South Africa must be of a more restrained variety than might be appropriate elsewhere.

These considerations serve only to highlight the sweeping reconsideration of all public institutions and their mandates that has accompanied the initiation of a new era in South African history. Improvements in land policy and taxation may play a significant role in assisting this immense task of national self-transformation.

Joan Youngman is a senior fellow of the Lincoln Institute, where she directs the Program on the Taxation of Land and Buildings. She and Martim Smolka, senior fellow for Latin America Programs, served on the faculty of the July conference at the University of South Africa.

Notes:

1. South African Department of Land Affairs, Our Land: Green Paper on South African Land Policy (1996), p. 9.

2. Roy W. Bahl and Johannes F. Linn, Urban Public Finance in Developing Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 168.

What are the names of South Africa’s official languages?

A recent newspaper trivia puzzle gives a startling perspective on the enormity of the political, legal and cultural changes experienced by South Africa since 1993, and the difficulty foreign observers face in grasping the scope of these transformations.

The original answer to the question about official languages was given as English and Afrikaans. One week later, a correction noted that South Africa’s major tribal languages should also be included. So the full answer lists ten official languages:

English

Afrikaans

Ndebele

Northern Sotho (Sepedi)

Southern Sotho (Sesotho)

Swati

Tsonga

Tswana (Setswana)

Venda, Xhosa

Zulu

Local governments exercise greater land use authority in the United States than in any other advanced democracy. Yet local governments have themselves evolved piecemeal in the typical U.S. metropolitan area, producing a pattern of fragmented authority. Most notably, as metropolitan areas have exploded outward, the local government system has adapted mainly by creating new suburbs and single-function districts rather than by expanding the boundaries of existing central cities.

Illustratively, when Robert Wood studied the New York metropolitan region in the late 1950s, he counted roughly 1,400 local governments. When Jameson Doig and Michael Danielson examined the same region in the early 1980s, the number had grown to 2,200, of which more than 800 exercised land use regulatory authority.

Critics levy numerous charges against this system. Above all, they contend it invites parochialism and, in dealing with issues of regional scale, gridlock. These failings are particularly apparent when the potential ends of land use policy are controversial. But they are visible in many other circumstances as well—wherever, for example, there is substantial risk that the instruments of policy (from regional overrides of local zoning to the siting of new incinerators) will be highly controversial and no consensus has yet emerged about the severity of a crisis that might justify accepting such risk.

In other respects, however, the system is both adaptive and finely tuned to citizen desires. Numerous functions have been shifted from localities to regional authorities and higher levels of government in recent decades, yet the changes have been highly selective and incremental.

When broad agreement has emerged that a particular function—such as mass transit or environmental protection—requires decisionmaking and management at supra-local scale, the political leaders in many metropolitan areas have frequently crafted new institutional arrangements. They have typically defined the new institutions quite precisely, however, so as to avoid sapping local authority any more than necessary to deal with the specific problems that gave rise to the consensus for change. Where large numbers of voters still favor local control, moreover—as, preeminently, in the field of land use regulation—metropolitan-area political leaders have taken great care to avoid disturbing it.

To be sure, certain objectives are all but impossible to realize through this piecemeal, consensus-dependent mode of institutional adaptation (most notably, greater class and racial integration at regional scale, and prevention of urban sprawl). But others (e.g., the preservation of neighborhood character and vigorous grassroots democracy) are accomplished much more reliably than would be likely in a more “rationalized” system.

Balancing Communal and Individualistic Values

Controversies about this system invariably reflect a mix of conflicting interests and values. Since a considerable body of scholarship exists on the interests most commonly in dispute, let us concentrate here on the values.

Americans consider land use issues within the framework of two disparate ideologies: one communal and egalitarian, the other individualistic and disposed to leave distributional outcomes to the marketplace. In any given controversy, self-interested groups organize their briefs around aspects of one or the other of these ideologies. So it is easy to miss the crucial fact that both enjoy near-consensual support. Americans favor both private capitalism and government action to further collective values–each in its place. The disputes typically arise in situations where parties disagree about which ideology ought to take precedence or about how the differing ideological claims should be balanced.

The land use arena is chock full of such points. Ownership is private. Most development initiative is private. And tradition favors viewing land as a market commodity. But most human activities take place on land; the byproducts of land use profoundly affect every aspect of the human environment; and no one is an owner every place he or she goes. So everyone has a powerful stake in the preservation of some common spaces, in society’s rules for behavior in such spaces, and in some regulation of land use “overspill” effects.

Owners themselves, moreover, are eager for collective services. The value of urban real estate hinges critically on the availability and quality of such services, from highway access to public safety to education. In addition, neighborhood characteristics and the level of investor confidence in the neighborhood’s future profoundly affect real estate values. As a result, whether their aim is development or simply enjoyment of what they already have, property owners are drawn inevitably to the public realm.

Within the public realm, however, communal values–including the presumption of equal access to collective services regardless of income or wealth–predominate. This poses a severe problem for relatively affluent property owners who are reluctant to trigger wide egalitarian claims.

The fragmentation of metropolitan areas into independent suburbs, a problem for some, is for these voters a solution. It provides a means of confining the application of communal norms within relatively small population groups. And it makes available to such groups an instrument of extraordinary power for the pursuit and preservation of homogeneity: land use regulation.

Public Regulation vs Market Forces

Pressures have built in recent decades, nonetheless, for public land use action on a wider scale. Some of these pressures (e.g., for major infrastructure investments and for environmental protection) come largely from property owners themselves and do not pose much redistributive threat even when higher-level governments assume responsibility for action. Nearly all of the centralization that has occurred has been in response to pressures of this sort.

A second set of pressures for supra-local action has come primarily from less favored groups and their political representatives, seeking fiscal equalization and residential integration. There have been considerable shifts of money in response to these pressures. But resistance has been fierce to reforms that might force racial or class integration at the neighborhood level. With rare exceptions it has been successful.

The reform idea with the greatest apparent potential to override local land use parochialism would be a shift of some land use regulatory authority to the state level. Movement in this direction occurred in about one-quarter of the states during the 1970s and 1980s. Except in the notable cases of Oregon and Florida, however, the changes were slight, and the historic pattern of local land use autonomy remained firmly entrenched. Concerns about growth, moreover, rather than concerns about equality or integration drove these state land use reforms. Consequently, with weak real estate markets in the early 1990s interest in them has waned.

The question remains whether shifting land use authority from the local to the state level, if it does occur, will be likely to produce more egalitarian and integrationist outcomes than would the existing pattern of fragmented land use governance. One can plausibly argue that it will, stressing that egalitarian norms tend to prevail within (even if not between) U.S. public jurisdictions. Thinking of the immediate future, however, the likelihood is that such shifts will be rare and that, even when they occur, their egalitarian impacts will be meager.

For better or worse, the overwhelming trend of the 1990s, at all levels of government, is toward greater market deference rather than more vigorous public action to achieve redistributive objectives.

_____________

Alan Altshuler is professor in urban policy and planning and director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is also a faculty associate of the Lincoln Institute, which distributes several of his publications. This article is reprinted with permission from the 1995-96 Annual Report of the Taubman Center.

Lavea Brachman is a lawyer and a city planner who has worked and taught in the area of community involvement in brownfields redevelopment projects for the last decade. She is currently director of the Ohio office and associate director of the Chicago-based nonprofit, the Delta Institute, which engages in the policy and practice of improving environmental quality and promoting community and economic development in the Great Lakes region. She is also an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University in the City and Regional Planning Department. Last year, pursuant to passage of legislation and approval of a statewide bond bill, Ohio Governor Bob Taft appointed Brachman to serve on the Clean Ohio Council, which is charged by the legislature with selecting and disbursing $200 million for brownfield projects throughout the state.

Brachman developed and taught a new course at the Lincoln Institute last spring, called “Reusing Brownfields and Other Underutilized Land: A Seminar for Senior Staff of Community-Based and Non-profit Development Agencies,” and she will teach a similar course in 2003. She also wrote an article on “Key Success Factors in Brownfield Property Redevelopment” for a forthcoming Lincoln publication on redevelopment of vacant land.

Land Lines: How did you become involved in and concerned about brownfield redevelopment?

Lavea Brachman: Brownfield redevelopment was just emerging as a special focus of urban planning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was working on my master’s degree in city planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a student, I joined a student-professor team on an early brownfields project for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) to determine what it could do with some previously utilized property it owned in Quincy, Massachusetts, just south of Boston. We assessed three primary aspects (social, legal and physical) to determine the site’s redevelopment potential.

That experience and the challenge of dealing with multiple parties and multiple issues that brownfield redevelopment entails peaked my interest intellectually, and I recognized that changing land uses could have profound and positive implications for social change. Previously, as an attorney with a Washington, DC, law firm, I had practiced in the environmental and land use areas, so the interdisciplinary nature of brownfields redevelopment seemed to bring together my legal and planning training with my professional skills and areas of knowledge and expertise.

LL: What are the primary obstacles to brownfield redevelopment and how have these changed over time?

LB: Contrary to general public misperceptions, the primary obstacle to brownfield redevelopment today is not environmental contamination per se, even though the prior use and associated environmental conditions of these properties distinguish them from other underutilized properties. The primary obstacle to redevelopment remains the threat of liability that by statute arises from acts that cause or contribute to contamination and/or to those with an ownership interest in the property. A second major obstacle is financing, since brownfields are many times more expensive to redevelop than regular real estate projects. The liability threat also has dampened interest from investors or banks that might be perceived as being in the chain of title.

A third obstacle can be lack of local support. The need for public involvement in brownfield redevelopment, from financing, to regulatory oversight, to local zoning and planning, means that community support is instrumental to making brownfield redevelopment work. The potential fear and lack of understanding about the impact of contamination on a community can also interfere with local support. A fourth obstacle is obtaining site control or clear title to the property. Many brownfield properties are tax delinquent or burdened with liens, and the title may remain in the name of a defunct company. Of all the obstacles, the solutions to title problems vary most widely from state to state.

A final obstacle is location, because many of these properties are found in areas that are littered with multiple vacant properties or they are not readily accessible to all-important interstate highways or rail networks. Sometimes brownfield sites with a long history of use were at one time accessible to key transportation lines, but those roads or rails have been superseded by new highways located several miles or more away, leaving the abandoned sites isolated from current development activity.

LL: How has the brownfield redevelopment practice evolved over the last decade?

LB: A decade ago, brownfields were not identified or defined as such. They were the legacy of a manufacturing and industrial economy that left behind vacant properties and blighted urban areas and the remnants of laws that, through the nature of the liability schemes, provided disincentives for cleanup. The federal government had not formally recognized the value of redeveloping these properties, and those of us who were involved in the field early on worked with regulators to convince them to pay more attention. Also, the fear of another Love Canal (that is, illness among residents arising from property contamination) was still fresh, so there was little flexibility in cleanup standards. Brownfields were redeveloped, if at all, outside the regular, legal constructs or under special agreements between owner and regulator, or by using special contracts such as prospective purchaser agreements, which prevented a future buyer from being held liable for previous contamination.

Now brownfield redevelopment has been increasingly streamlined, approached by developers as a real estate deal with a twist—the environmental cleanup. Many of the primary obstacles mentioned above remain, although they have been somewhat diminished over time, as new state and federal policies, laws and regulations have been passed and implemented to address the specific issues with brownfields liability, provide new funding sources, alter title processes for expunging tax delinquent and other liens, and even require community involvement. Last December, for example, Congress passed the “Brownfields Revitalization and Environmental Restoration Act of 2001,” which provides for additional grants and loans for certain activities as well as clarifications on liability.

Brownfields offer an interesting case study of how informal processes that originally emerged out of necessity outside the legal, policy and financing mainstream have been increasingly institutionalized. For instance, where once a property would remain unremediated and fenced off because the cleanup was too burdensome and expensive, or the cleanup would be the subject of years of litigation, now a property that is marketable can act as an incentive for all parties to proceed rapidly.

In the strong market of the 1990s, the real estate pressures allowed even some hard-to-develop properties, like long-abandoned brownfields, to be redeveloped, although it was primarily the “low hanging fruit” or the brownfields that were already either well-located, had minimal contamination, or were not complicated by multiple parties contributing to past contamination. The liability on these properties could be capped and financial institutions thus could reduce their risk. Also the regulatory climate has become less aggressive with the passage of “voluntary cleanup statutes,” which allow cleanups to be accomplished without regulatory oversight in many states. The ultimate carrot is a government agreement not to hold future owners liable (that is, a covenant not to sue) if they meet certain standards. To date, fewer cleanups that predicted have actually been accomplished under these new state laws, but they create a climate ultimately more conducive to redevelopment. Nevertheless, in the weaker economic market of 2002, with greater risk, more uncertainty and less development generally, there will be less brownfield redevelopment, particularly of those sites that do not have the easily marketable attributes.

LL: Who are some of the key players involved in successful brownfield redevelopment projects?

LB: Like most real estate deals, brownfield redevelopment inherently involves multiple parties. Public-private partnerships are particularly crucial to the success of brownfield redevelopment projects, because of the quasi-regulated nature of the cleanup and the complicated financing arrangements. The list of potential key players is a long one. It includes state and or federal regulators, elected community officials and other community leaders, private developers (both for-profit and not-for-profit), past and future property owners, private financial institutions or investors and public funding sources. Often those essential parties are traditional adversaries. For instance, designating the future use of a brownfield property must involve a state (and sometimes federal) regulatory agency, which can approve the cleanup standard for the particular use (normally higher for residential and lower for industrial) and plan to remove the contamination, as well as previous and/or future owners who under previous legal standards would have been held liable by the regulatory agency.

Funding for the cleanup and redevelopment inevitably comes from a variety of sources. Notably, up to 70 to 80 percent of funding for brownfield projects can be from public funding sources, but usually those public monies are predicated on private (often local) institutional financing as well, making the public-private nexus very important.

LL: What is the role of community-based organizations in brownfield redevelopment and to what extent is this type of redevelopment an extension of broader community planning efforts facing many urban neighborhoods?

LB: Community support and leadership from the local government are essential to the successful redevelopment of a brownfield property. For instance, localities often must be the applicant for the essential public (state or federal) funds needed to accomplish the project. If zoning or subdivision changes must be made through local boards, local support and leadership is crucial. Community-based organizations such as community development corporations should play an active role in brownfield redevelopment as well, particularly in areas that are not as naturally attractive to private market actors, either due to location and limited access of the properties or to general neighborhood blight and lack of economic activity. In these areas, broader community planning efforts undertaken by community groups, such as community-wide master plans, are often productive starting points if multiple brownfield and other underutilized properties need to be addressed. Master plans encompassing these properties should take into account neighborhood and community needs, such as local stores, recreational areas, and other facilities. The biggest barrier to brownfield redevelopment in these areas is the market and the physical and economic condition of the surrounding area.

Nevertheless, to many community groups these sites remain intimidating for several reasons: the technical aspects of the contamination; the stigma attached to the properties by their condition; their negative impacts on surrounding properties; and, as mentioned, their location in generally blighted and hard-to-market areas. Furthermore, brownfield sites present more upfront barriers not present in the kinds of housing development projects traditionally undertaken by community-based organizations, such as site remediation, title issues, the assembly of multiple parcels, and the complex financing that is necessary from multiple sources. Getting community organizations past these threshold issues through capacity building and training in technical skills will position them to address more strategic brownfield redevelopment challenges.

Given recent state and federal statutory changes and multiple sources of public funding, the redevelopment of single brownfield properties in stable or improving markets now involves fewer legal and financial barriers. It also requires a very different strategy from developing properties in declining markets where there are other non-brownfield barriers to be overcome. The challenge for addressing brownfield properties in these latter areas remains to be solved, but community involvement is certainly a key aspect to its resolution.

In June 2003 the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Sonoran Institute established a Joint Venture project to assist diverse audiences in improving state trust land administration in the American West. The goal of this partnership project is to ensure that conservation, collaborative land use planning, and efficient and effective asset management on behalf of state trust land beneficiaries are integral elements of how these lands are managed. The two institutes seek to utilize their core competencies to broaden the range of information and policy options available to improve state trust land management. This article introduces the Joint Venture and describes some of the work now under way in Arizona and Montana.

State trust lands are a phenomenon that dates back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1785. With this ordinance, the U.S. Congress established a policy of granting land to states when they entered the Union as an asset to generate funding to support the public education system, a fundamental state responsibility. Starting with Ohio in 1785 and ending with Arizona and New Mexico in 1910, each new state received a set of federal lands that, under federal enabling legislation and the corresponding state constitution, were to be held in trust for the benefit of the public schools. The trust mandates established by the U.S. Congress and the states are clear: to generate revenue to support the public schools and other institutions. In some cases there are other minor institutional beneficiaries as well, but the public schools (K–12) are by far the largest beneficiary throughout the state trust land system. That singularity of purpose continues today and distinguishes state trust lands and the state programs that administer them from other types of public lands.

While Congress intended state trust lands to be perpetual, the lawmakers expected that over time some lands would be sold to produce revenue. Initially Congress provided little guidance to states on how they should manage their state trust lands. Many states that entered the Union soon after 1785 quickly sold all or most of those lands for profit, and today little remains of that heritage. Because of these actions, Congress placed increasingly stringent requirements on new states in order to limit the use of state trust lands. Since most western states entered the Union in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they retain most of the original state trust lands designated at the time of statehood.

Today these lands continue to be managed to generate income for the authorized beneficiaries. This revenue is either made available in the year in which it was generated (typically from leasing activities) or, in the case of outright sale of land or nonrenewable resources, deposited into a permanent fund that generates annual income for the beneficiaries. In Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Wyoming these permanent funds or endowments are in excess of one billion dollars each.

What Is a Trust?

A trust is a legal relationship in which one party holds property for the benefit of another.

There are three participants in this relationship: a grantor or “settlor,” who establishes the trust and provides the property to be held in trust; a trustee, who is charged by the settlor with the responsibility of managing the trust in keeping with the settlor’s instructions; and a beneficiary, who receives the benefits of the trust.

The trustee has a fiduciary responsibility to manage the property held in trust (the trust corpus) in keeping with the instructions of the settlor and for the benefit of the beneficiary. This fiduciary responsibility can be enforced by the beneficiary if the trustee fails to meet the obligations outlined in the trust documents.

Fifteen western states continue to own and manage appreciable amounts of state trust land (see Table 1). The nine states with the largest and most significant holdings are the initial focus of the Lincoln Institute and Sonoran Institute Joint Venture: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming (see Figure 1). Collectively these states manage more than 40 million acres of state trust lands. The landholdings are as diverse as the states that manage them and include coastal forests in Washington, mountaintops in Montana and low deserts in Arizona.

Traditionally these lands have been managed almost exclusively for natural resource production, with the leasing and sale of natural products being the principal sources of revenue. The reliance of state trust land management on natural resource extraction is understandable in the context of the natural resource–based economies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But today, as the West continues to urbanize and the region’s economies shift to the information age, trust land managers are recognizing a need to broaden the land use activities of their trust land portfolios. Invariably that means rearranging the portfolio from one that is overly reliant on natural resource extraction to one that recognizes the real estate value associated with commercial, industrial and residential development, as well as recreation and conservation.

Like many land use decisions, particularly in areas experiencing explosive growth, state trust land administration is increasingly controversial. As on federal public lands, traditional uses (i.e., cropland, grazing and timber production, and oil, gas, coal and mineral extraction) are at odds with public interests in recreation and natural open space. Efforts to sell and lease lands for commercial and residential development can create tensions between a state agency acting as a trustee and a local community vested with managing growth. Balancing the protection of the public values inherent in many of these lands with traditional and new uses, all within the context of the state trust’s fiduciary responsibilities, is a challenge for trust land managers.

At the same time, population pressures in the West have increased demands on public education funding. State trust lands are one obvious source of revenue to meet these funding demands, which in turn may generate even more pressure on trust land managers who as trustees of a permanent trust need to achieve both short- and long-term financial returns from the trust’s assets. An additional complexity is that the application of trust principles varies among the states, based in part on differing state trust land enabling legislation created in each state at the time of statehood.

Recognizing the value of bringing diverse interests together and providing solid information to stakeholders and key decision makers in land use planning and development environments, the Lincoln Institute and Sonoran Institute Joint Venture project seeks to

• facilitate efforts to modernize state trust land laws and regulations in key western states
• foster education and research efforts that focus on key issues related to state trust land administration
• increase public awareness of the resource and economic values of state trust lands along with the impacts of state trust land management decisions on local communities, including implications for public finance
• develop and implement on-the-ground model projects designed to explore innovative approaches to collaborative land use planning and conservation management of state trust lands
• provide relevant technical information and tools to decision makers and agency staff involved in state trust land management.

Trust Land Reform in Arizona

Arizona is in the midst of a three-year discussion among diverse stakeholders to reform its laws governing state trust lands. Arizona is noteworthy because the burgeoning growth of Phoenix and Tucson is reaching significant tracts of state trust lands. These lands are some of the most valuable real estate holdings in the Intermountain West and comprise 12 percent of the land in the state. Unlike many other western states, Arizona has long recognized the real estate value of its holdings and has an active real estate disposition program that has sold thousands of acres into the urban marketplace. The revenue from these sales has been deposited into the permanent fund of the state trust entity, and the income from the fund is directed to the trust’s beneficiaries. The permanent fund is now valued at more than one billion dollars and is predicted to double in value over the next 10 years.

In the mid-1990s state trust land sales in metropolitan Phoenix came to a screeching halt when the development interests of the Arizona State Land Department encountered conflict with the goals of local communities interested in preserving some of this land as natural open space. Attempts to accommodate local concerns through state legislation have met with mixed results due to the strictures of the Arizona enabling act and state constitution. Several key court decisions interpreting these laws have constrained the Arizona State Land Department from conserving open space or enabling the department to achieve the highest and best use on these lands when sold or leased for residential and commercial purposes. An attempt in 2000 to secure voter approval to revise aspects of Arizona’s constititution and modernize state trust land management failed at the ballot box in the face of unanimous opposition from the conservation community.

This situation has set the stage for a diverse group of interests to convene in the hopes of developing a comprehensive reform proposal that the Arizona legislature and governor’s office will consider. Even with their support, the final package will need voter approval to amend the state constitution, followed by changes in the federal enabling act that will require the approval of the U.S. Congress.

The Joint Venture directed its initial efforts toward working with the conservation organizations participating in the stakeholder group. We provided analyses of the current laws and proposed changes, with assistance from the law firm of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, to help the conservation community promote a constructive agenda that has been incorporated into the package. In addition, our information related to land use planning was useful to other stakeholders in developing elements of the package that will ensure more collaborative planning between the Arizona State Land Department and local governments charged with land planning responsibility, while also increasing the range of tools available to local communities to protect natural open space on state trust lands.

We are also working with officials from the City of Tucson (the second largest city in Arizona) and the Arizona State Land Department to assist their efforts to develop 10,000 acres in the city’s growth corridor. This Houghton Area Master Plan includes more than 7,500 acres of state trust lands. Our work is directed toward the planning effort by providing examples of smart growth development at the urban edge. A key element is to document evidence that greenfield projects are not necessarily synonymous with sprawl and that a number of examples of recent master-planned communities at the urban edge are incorporating smart growth elements, such as interconnected open space for active and passive recreational use, pedestrian orientation, mixed-use development accessible to public transit, and a diverse mix of housing types, sizes and prices. As important, these progressive master-planned communities are achieving success in the marketplace, which is a preeminent concern of the Arizona State Land Department.

While the City of Tucson, in partnership with the Sonoran Institute, is working to promote infill and brownfield development, even under the most optimistic of scenarios more than 50 percent of the city’s explosive growth will be greenfield development. If successful, this master-planning effort will guide development on 50 square miles of state trust lands within the city and can serve as a local land use planning model for other state trust lands.

Trust Lands in Montana

The Joint Venture has also initiated an assessment of policy issues affecting state trust lands in Montana. Working with a local advisory group chartered by the Department of Natural Resources (the manager of Montana’s state trust lands), we have provided information that will help guide land use planning on 12,000 acres of state trust lands in Flathead County at the gateway to Glacier National Park. This effort will serve as a template for future department plans for land uses other than grazing and forest management. For example, the department has shown an interest in generating revenue from leasing land for conservation, recreational, residential, commercial and industrial uses. Increasing interest in these “special uses” is creating a paradigm shift in how the Department of Natural Resources interacts with local governments and how local governments interact with state trust lands.

As growth expands throughout much of western and central Montana, the department seeks to capture additional revenue opportunities through the development of special uses. While local communities are recognizing that state trust lands can be a source of economic growth and can contribute positively to meeting growth demands, they are also requiring those land uses to be responsive to local community values and concerns. Sound, objective land planning and valuation information are essential to the development of policies that will guide Montana state trust land management in the future.

Final Comments

In the brief time since the Joint Venture was established there has been no shortage of issues that could benefit from better information and collaboration among diverse parties. This fall the Lincoln Institute and the Sonoran Institute will convene a small group of experts from academia and the public and private sectors to identify the issues of greatest concern that will guide further research efforts. Our work in Arizona and Montana will continue as we seek to develop a broad-based approach to increasing awareness about state trust lands. The successful resolution of the issues affecting state trust land management will benefit not only local school children, but also many conservationists, developers, ranchers and businesses throughout the West.

Reference

Souder, Jon, and Sally K. Fairfax. 1996. State trust lands: History, management and sustainable use. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Andy Laurenzi is the program director for state trust lands at the Sonoran Institute, a nonprofit organization established in 1990 to bring diverse people together to accomplish shared conservation goals. The Sonoran Institute is based in Tucson, Arizona, with offices in Phoenix and Bozeman, Montana (www.sonoran.org).

The Mississippi River watershed has, since the administration of Thomas Jefferson, played a central role in American life. This centrality has been both literal, in a geographic sense, and figurative, in the sense that the mighty river runs through America’s agricultural and cultural heartland.

One of the nation’s greatest conservationists, Aldo Leopold, grew up along the banks of the Mississippi, in Burlington, Iowa. After gaining a forestry degree at Yale University and serving in the U.S. Forest Service in the desert Southwest, Leopold returned to the upper Midwest to teach and write his most enduring prose at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Leopold and his family also devoted themselves to the restoration of a farm and forest landscape that included a ramshackle home, affectionately known as “the Shack,” on the sandy soils adjacent to the Wisconsin River, a tributary of the Mississippi.

In his work at both the university and the Shack, Leopold gained a first-hand view of the enormous challenges Americans face in attempting to conserve the nation’s soil, water, wildlife, and landscape. As the instigator of the first “wilderness” designation of a federally owned landscape in the Gila National Forest in Arizona, and as a founder of the Wilderness Society, Leopold was a prominent proponent of conservation on public lands. Still, he understood that unless private lands were also conserved for the long term, the conservation community would not be able to effectively protect America’s natural heritage. He wrote presciently for The Journal of Forestry in 1934:

Let me be clear that I do not challenge the purchase of public lands for conservation. For the first time in history we are buying on a scale commensurate with the size of the problem. I do challenge the assumption that bigger buying is a substitute for private conservation practice … . Bigger buying, I fear, is serving as an escape-mechanism—it masks our failure to solve the harder problem. The geographic cards are stacked against its ultimate success. In the long run, it is exactly as effective as buying half an umbrella … . The thing to be prevented is destructive private land use of any and all kinds. The thing to be encouraged is the use of private land in such a way as to combine the public and private interest to the greatest degree possible … . This paper forecasts that conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest. It asserts the new premise that if he fails to do so, his neighbors must ultimately pay the bill. It pleads that our jurists and economists anticipate the need for workable vehicles to carry that reward. (Leopold 1991)

More than seven decades after Leopold penned those words, American jurists, economists, policy makers, public natural resource agency administrators, nonprofit conservation leaders, and concerned citizens are still working on his challenge. In October 2005 the Lincoln Institute convened more than 30 conservation leaders to consider the most effective ways to design and use such “workable vehicles.” The Johnson Foundation cohosted the conference at its Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin.

From that base the participants visited several sites in the Upper Mississippi watershed in south-central Wisconsin that showcase impressive public-private conservation efforts. Brent Haglund and Alex Echols of the Sand County Foundation led the group to an expansive site on the Portage River managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where participants learned how cooperative public-private land management practices effectively enhanced wildlife habitat and helped restore native ecosystem functions. At the nearby Baraboo River we saw a public-private effort that had restored the river to health through the removal of several aged dams.

For historical perspective, the group visited the site of Leopold’s Shack, where we read from his posthumously published volume, A Sand County Almanac. Leopold (1949) lyrically describes the critical role of private stewardship in maintaining the long-term value of the region’s ecosystems. The participants also visited the campus of the International Crane Foundation (ICF), where we stood face-to-face with several of the world’s rarest birds and learned of cofounder George Archibald’s nonprofit efforts to restore their populations.

Over the next two days at Wingspread, the group discussed ways to enhance a broad array of conservation incentives in an economically efficient, measurably effective, and reasonably equitable manner. The participants focused on three types of incentive programs of interest to the conservation community in the early twenty-first century: tax incentives, market-based incentives, and fiscal (or budgetary) incentives.

Tax Incentives

Jean Hocker, president emeritus of the Land Trust Alliance (LTA), explained how the federal tax incentives associated with the donation of conservation easements, codified in the 1970s and 1980s, have become a key driver of growth in the U.S. land trust movement. Jeff Pidot, chief of the Natural Resources section of the Maine Attorney General’s office, and a 2004–2005 visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute, followed Hocker with a critique of easement policy and practice, explaining how the use of conservation easements has resulted in a variety of unintended consequences. He argued that reform of easement law and regulation at the state and national levels would both reduce misuse of the tool and improve its effectiveness in achieving conservation purposes (Pidot 2005).

Responding to Pidot’s critique, the participants, led by Mark Ackelson of the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, considered a number of potential reforms, paying special attention to opportunities for strong voluntary standards, improved training and accreditation programs, stronger enforcement of existing regulations, and revision of appraisal standards. Several of these reforms have since been implemented, including LTA’s establishment of a voluntary accreditation program.

In response to persistent advocacy by the conservation community, the U.S. Congress in August 2006 approved an expansion of conservation easement tax benefits. In the opinion of James Connaughton, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the new provisions provide “substantial new incentives to landowners who want to commit their land to open space while keeping our nation’s working farms and ranches working” (The Chattanoogan 2006).

Market-based Incentives

Adam Davis, a California-based expert on ecosystem services, explained how private interests, in the context of public cap-and-trade regulatory structures, were becoming increasingly active in providing public and private goods, by employing new ecosystem service trading mechanisms for land and biodiversity conservation (Davis 2005). He noted that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regulations for the mitigation of adverse impacts to wetlands were evolving to require all mitigators to meet measurable, relatively efficient performance standards. Such developments, he reported, would allow commercial wetlands banking firms to compete effectively and efficiently, improving the per-unit cost and quality of mitigation banking initiatives over time.

Davis’s remarks were expanded upon by several speakers, including Fred Danforth, who offered a case study of his own entrepreneurial experience in ecosystem service provision on a ranch in Montana’s Blackfoot River valley; George Kelly of Environmental Bank & Exchange (EBX) and Wiley Barbour of Environmental Resources Trust, who offered insights on the importance of clear norms and standards in ecosystem service markets; and Leonard Shabman, resident scholar at Resources for the Future and a widely respected economist, who has published several papers on the future of mitigation banking.

Recent events offer considerable hope that some of the legal and regulatory reforms discussed at the session will be implemented in the near future. Specifically, in the spring of 2006 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published new draft regulations that appear to address many of the concerns raised about wetlands mitigation. As reported by Ecosystem Marketplace (2006), “central to the proposed new regulations is the requirement that all forms of mitigation meet the same environmental standards already required of mitigation banks … . The proposed regulations will raise accountability levels for projects funded by in-lieu fee payments and will implement a more timely approval process for mitigation banks.”

Fiscal Incentives

The third type of incentive is generally funded through governmental budgets. Ralph Grossi of the American Farmland Trust; Craig Cox of the Soil and Water Conservation Society; Roger Claassen of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and Jeff Zinn of the Congressional Research Service offered a variety of perspectives on the complex negotiations associated with reauthorization of the Farm Bill, which offers opportunities to expand and change federal farm programs in 2007.

Whether or not the next Farm Bill provides for growth or shifts in incentive programs, achieving measurable impacts will depend on skillful program implementation. Jeff Vonk, director of Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources, offered detailed insight into the challenges of using a conservation budget to address agricultural water quality problems. He argued persuasively that even if conservation budgets increase over time, they will not achieve their intended effect without careful resource allocation analysis and follow-through.

Howard Learner, director of the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center, offered a detailed case of how a federally funded agricultural renewable energy program benefited from focused legislative design and follow-through on implementation. Andrew Bowman of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation added the idea that, if implemented in a well-coordinated fashion, the State Wildlife Action Plans submitted to the federal government by the 50 states offered another important opportunity to make progress in wildlife and habitat conservation.

Help for the Mississippi River Watershed

Recent progress in strengthening U.S. tax and market-based incentives for land and biodiversity conservation, combined with potentially significant fiscal incentives, could provide an historic opportunity to realize ambitious conservation objectives in the next decade. There are many thorny conservation challenges that might be addressed with such incentives.

One of most urgent is associated with the Mississippi River watershed where Aldo Leopold spent much of his life. Stretching from Montana to Pennsylvania to Louisiana, the watershed picks up an enormous load of phosphorus and nitrogen from farms, parking lots, and lawns. These chemicals and other pollutants are carried by the great river into the Gulf of Mexico, where they are instrumental in creating hypoxia—an ecological condition characterized by a shortage of available oxygen. It can be caused by surplus amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen that feed huge, oxygen-consuming algal blooms on the ocean’s surface. As the blooms grow rapidly, deeper ocean waters may become relatively depleted of oxygen, sometimes resulting in the death of massive numbers of fish.

A combination of innovative tax, market-based, and fiscal incentives could make a significant impact in improving the ecological character of the watershed and reducing hypoxia in the Gulf. For example, incentives targeted to encourage stream bank restoration, the establishment and stewardship of buffer strips, the implementation of crop rotation schemes that reduce fertilizer runoff, and the reduction of impervious surfaces near watercourses could, after sufficient trial and error, prove to be efficient, measurably effective, and reasonably equitable across geographic and socioeconomic lines. If implemented across the Mississippi watershed, such tools would benefit marine and bird populations, as well as the Gulf fishing industry and local economies. Aldo Leopold would likely applaud news of such an effort’s success, seeing private landowners rewarded to conserve the public interest.

James N. Levitt is director of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest, and a research fellow at the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

References

The Chattanoogan. 2006. Conservation incentives pass Senate: Waiting on President’s signature, August 7. http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_90539.asp.

Davis, Adam. 2005. Mainstreaming environmental markets. In From Walden to Wall Street: Frontiers of conservation finance, James N. Levitt, ed., 155–171. Washington, DC: Island Press in association with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Ecosystem Marketplace. 2006. Ecosystem Marketplace Commentary: Draft mitigation regulations signal growing private sector role in conservation, Press Release, March 27. http://www.ewire.com/display.cfm/Wire_ID/3033.

Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County almanac. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 1991. Conservation economics. In The river of the Mother of God and other essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan Flader and J. Baird Caldecott, eds., 193–202. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Pidot, Jeff. 2005. Reinventing conservation easements: A critical examination and ideas for reform. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

The rapid and intense urbanization in Latin America over the last 50 years is often contrasted in the literature with an inadequate urban planning system as a way to explain many resulting social problems: high land prices and property speculation, rampant informality, extreme sociospatial segregation, inadequate urban infrastructure and services, environmental degradation, and the like. The literature is largely silent, however, on the role played by national legal systems, which have both contributed to this situation and reacted against it. The pivotal role of the legal order cannot be underestimated.

Conservation Leadership Dialogue

On March 1, 2011, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy hosted its tenth annual Conservation Leadership Dialogue with a focus on The Future of Large Landscape Conservation in America. The session was organized by James N. Levitt, a fellow at the Lincoln Institute, with support from Armando Carbonell, senior fellow and chair of the Department of Planning and Urban Form. Held in the Members of Congress Room of the Library of Congress, across the street from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, the meeting took place on the 100th anniversary, to the day, of President William Howard Taft’s signing of the landmark legislation that allowed for creation of national forests in the eastern part of the country. The Weeks Act of 1911, named for Congressman (later Senator) John Wingate Weeks of Massachusetts, changed the nature of cooperative conservation involving citizens active in the public, private, nonprofit, academic, and research sectors in the United States.

In the tradition of previous conservation dialogues, a cross-sectoral, geographically diverse group of conservationists convened to seek a path forward—in concert with the Obama administration’s recently released report on America’s Great Outdoors (Council on Environmental Quality 2011), as well as myriad initiatives at the state and local level. Their goals were to advance collaboration on a large landscape scale among landowners, land managers, and citizens from the public, private, nonprofit, and academic sectors. They also sought to understand and expand on the example set by large landscape initiatives that are achieving measurable, durable conservation outcomes that will provide benefits for generations to come.

Just as we can now appreciate the revival of the White Mountains of New Hampshire from their barren, moonscape-like conditions around 1900 to their majestic, verdant stature today, twenty-second century Americans ought to be able to appreciate how our foresight in working across property, jurisdictional, and even national boundaries has become a key element in the nation’s multigenerational effort to preserve essential sources of clean water, sustainably produced forest products, and expansive recreational opportunities.

Speakers’ Comments

The conference speakers emphasized the importance of sustained cooperation across many organizations and sectors to achieve lasting results. Proudly recounting how some two million acres of Maine forestland has been conserved over the past dozen years, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, reported that “we have done this by building a partnership among government at all levels, the forest products industry, environmental, forestry and recreation groups, and landowners. Through this partnership, we have been able to maintain or increase productivity for wood and harvest levels, supporting a diverse and robust forest products industry that employs tens of thousands of workers who produce paper, other wood products, and renewable energy. At the same time, we have been able to protect biodiversity, old growth and late succession forest, and public access to recreation, and also increase opportunities for tourism” (Levitt and Chester 2011, 72).

Representatives Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, and Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, each stressed the importance of perseverance in such efforts. Welch remarked on the value of sustaining land conservation budgets during the current round of budget negotiations. He reminded the audience that in 1864 President Abraham Lincoln took his attention off a monumental crisis—the Civil War—in order to sign a bill deeding the area of Yosemite to the state of California for public use and recreation. If Lincoln could create Yosemite in the midst of the Civil War, Welch asserted, we can do our part in a time of tight budgets and economic volatility.

Holt focused his remarks on achieving a longstanding promise to fully fund the federal and stateside portions of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), as well as a number of other legislative initiatives such as the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act. Holt was emphatic in urging the conservation community to respond to the need for urgent action for our own sake, and for the sake of future generations. He reminded the audience of the admonition of President Lyndon Johnson, signer of the original LWCF legislation and the Wilderness Act in 1964: “If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow,” said Johnson, “we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it” (Henry and Armstrong 2004, 123).

It was evident from the discussions that leaders from every sector stand ready to help implement the cooperative conservation aspirations of Collins, Welch, and Holt. Bob Bendick, director of U.S. government relations at The Nature Conservancy, stated that “the overall objective of AGO [America’s Great Outdoors] should be to create and sustain a national network of large areas of restored and conserved land, water, and coastlines around which Americans can build productive and healthy lives” (Levitt and Chester 2011, 74). Accordingly, Bendick shared with the assembled group his personal dream that someday his young granddaughters might, as adults, look out from the arch at the gateway to Yellowstone National Park and note that “all across America, 400 million people have been able to arrange themselves and their activities across this remarkable country in a way that reconciles their lives with the power, grace, beauty and productivity of the land and water that ultimately sustain us all” (Levitt and Chester 2011, 75).

Will Shafroth, acting assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks of the U.S. Department of Interior, and Harris Sherman, undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shared their frank assessments of the current situation. Shafroth described the hard work and extensive comments that helped shape the America’s Great Outdoors report. While this work serves as a good foundation for the effort ahead, Shafroth noted that it takes considerable creativity and proactive thinking to sustain conservation momentum in these times of sharp budgetary constraints.

Sherman added that the whole idea of landscape-scale conservation implies that we need to move from performing random acts of conservation to more comprehensive and collaborative large-scale initiatives that engage many agencies and ownership types. Of particular importance, he noted, will be the outcome of the debate on the 2012 Farm Bill, because its conservation provisions will be critically important to the success of large-scale conservation efforts.

The enthusiasm for large landscape conservation on the part of speakers from large public and nonprofit organizations was strongly reinforced by Jim Stone, a private landowner and ranch operator in Montana’s Blackfoot Valley. Stone helped to start the Blackfoot Challenge, a grassroots organization that has yielded impressive, measurable results over the last three decades using a landscape-scale approach.

Stone’s colleague Jamie Williams of The Nature Conservancy explained that the Blackfoot Challenge has achieved remarkable success over the years because it has taken the time to engage so many landowners and partners in consensus-based approaches to conservation. Initial small successes were critical to building the foundation of trust that led to larger successes later (Williams 2011). In the area of stream restoration alone, the Blackfoot Challenge has helped to engage more than 200 landowners in some 680 projects involving 42 streams and 600 stream-miles that have contributed directly to an 800 percent increase in fish populations in the 1.5 million acre valley. Stone is emphatic in saying that, with the right people in the right places, what has been done in the Blackfoot region could be done across the nation.

Complementing the program was a panel of researchers and academic officials representing universities, colleges, and research institutions that are helping to catalyze large landscape initiatives. Matthew McKinney of the University of Montana moderated a dialogue with David Foster of Harvard Forest and Harvard University, Perry Brown of the University of Montana, and Karl Flessa of the University of Arizona. They explored how institutions, within their own walls and beyond, can use their analytic and convening capacities to advance initiatives with extensive impacts.

Perry Brown pointed out that those universities that will play a role in real-world conservation initiatives will not be insular, but rather will cherish their relationships with nonacademic partners such as Indian tribes, state and federal government agencies, and large national and small local nonprofits. David Foster reinforced that idea by describing the Harvard Forest’s outreach efforts to develop and disseminate its recent report on Wildlands and Woodlands New England (Foster et al. 2009).

Large Landscape Cases

There are many exemplary cases of on-the-ground progress in large landscape conservation across the country from Maine to Montana and from Southern Arizona to Northern Florida. One of the longest operating and most important cases is in the ACE Basin in South Carolina’s celebrated Lowcountry. The ACE Basin, comprised of some 350,000 acres that drain into the Ashepoo, Combahee, and South Edisto Rivers between Charleston and Beaufort, is one of the largest undeveloped estuaries along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard (figure 1).

In the late 1980s, a group of public, private, and nonprofit organizations banded together to form a partnership that would protect the remarkable scenic, wildlife, and water resources in the region. Among members of the ACE Basin Partnership are federal agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; state agencies including the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources; national nonprofits including The Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited; local nonprofits including the Coastal Conservation League and the Lowcountry Open Land Trust; philanthropic organizations and individuals including the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and private interests such as MeadWestvaco Corporation.

Partnership members have conserved more than 134,000 acres, covering a contiguous core in the heart of the ACE Basin that stitches together easements on private land, a National Wildlife Refuge, South Carolina Wildlife Management Areas, and a Charleston County natural and historical interpretive center, among other properties.

As a large landscape initiative, the ACE Basin truly stands out from other efforts. Mark Robertson, the executive director of The Nature Conservancy in South Carolina, has noted that the effort “set a standard of how to get conservation done on a large scale using collaboration between private landowners, conservation groups and government agencies.” Asked about the significance of the progress in the ACE Basin to date, Dana Beach, director of the Coastal Conservation League, is emphatic: “It’s real importance is that it has given many people for the first time hope that a place of great importance is not inevitably going to be developed” (Holleman 2008).

Next Steps

The leadership dialogue concluded with general agreement that there is a great deal of work to be done, as well as an historic opportunity to expand on initial progress in the field of large landscape conservation. The discussion of next steps was organized to focus on four types of initiatives.

Policy Dialogues

There is a need for ongoing policy dialogue, both among conservationists in the public, private, nonprofit and academic sectors and between the conservation community and local, state and federal decision makers, regarding the very timely opportunities to realize landscape-scale conservation initiatives across the nation. The dialogue should celebrate existing success stories about both cultural and nature-oriented properties (both being highly valued by the public), consider ongoing regional conservation efforts, and envision new ones.

In the political sphere, these dialogues should connect with conservation caucuses at multiple layers of government (local, county, state, federal, and international). In nonprofit and academic contexts, the dialogue should reach across disciplines and institutional boundaries. Such intersectoral, interdisciplinary discussions are most likely to come up with creative solutions and novel ideas. While the dialogues may be able to take advantage of the socially neutral nature of universities as conveners, they nevertheless need to be responsive to the practical, on-the-ground issues of vital concern to field practitioners and landowners.

Research

Another immediate need is to build on existing maps and inventories (e.g., the Regional Plan Association’s Northeast Landscape Partnership database) to offer a more comprehensive picture of existing public, private, and nonprofit initiatives. A more comprehensive overview of nationwide efforts should be of particular use to groups and networks working to advance the practice of large landscape conservation, including the Large Landscape Practitioners Network, a program of the Lincoln Institute, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs).

Such research efforts should be more regionally relevant and cost-effective if they involve cooperation among a wide assemblage of public and private organizations. They might also serve to augment environmental education initiatives that already are spread thin.

Additional research is also needed to measure the impacts, performance over time, and conservation outcomes of landscape-scale initiatives, and to identify the key factors of success for initiatives that are able to show significant measureable results. Of particular importance is research that is able to identify where, when, and how certain efforts are able to yield measurably improved ecosystem services, such as improved water quality, increased wildlife populations, and enhanced sustainable production of forest products.

Networking

A number of large landscape networks have been created recently or are now emerging, including the Large Landscape Practitioners Network and the LCCs mentioned above. As they evolve, the networks are likely to nest within one another at larger and larger geographic scales, but they will also need to focus on sharing knowledge and building capacity at the local level to yield lasting results. Notwithstanding the need to be grounded in local realities, the networks have an opportunity to reach out to international partners with lessons to share. Within their own territories, large landscape conservation networks need to be linked to diverse constituencies, including philanthropists interested in landscape-scale conservation, university faculty and students, a range of public agencies, and, most importantly, property owners and land managers.

Demonstration and Implementation

Given what are expected to be very tight constraints on new conservation programs at the federal, state, and local levels over the next few years, participants focused much of their attention on the creative use of existing budgets for landscape-scale conservation purposes. One noted the significant role that is already being played by the Department of Defense to conserve (and limit development on) lands adjacent to active military reservations. Such programs are now being used effectively to protect habitats and working lands from development and to limit landscape fragmentation. They also may be used in the future to address water supply protection issues. Another participant noted the potential significance of state and federal transportation budgets that could be used to mitigate the disruptive impact of new roads and highways.

Particularly enthusiastic support came from several participants for public-private-nonprofit partnerships that have a proven track record for protecting and enhancing locally valued natural and cultural resources to form the backbone for a regional green infrastructure. Examples include Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Chattahoochee/Apalachicola basin in Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida; the Crown of the Continent in Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia; and the New Jersey Highlands.

Additional opportunities for funding large landscape conservation initiatives include state incentives for private land protection that can be used to match selected federal programs (e.g., the matching monies required by funds provided by the North American Wetlands Conservation Act); community forest programs that are now gaining momentum around the nation; selected opportunities for foundation Program-Related Investments (PRIs); and emerging ecosystem service markets assisted by federal policy and public-private partnerships, including mitigation banking and statewide markets for carbon credits, such as those in California.

Conclusion

Notwithstanding evident federal budget constraints, myriad opportunities are available to pursue conservation projects that are expansive in scale, extensive in scope, able to achieve measureable conservation outcomes, and enduring. The conference participants themselves offered clear evidence that the concept of large landscape conservation has spread to initiatives across the continent. These individuals and their colleagues at home and abroad are now and will continue to be at the forefront of initiatives that protect nature in the context of human values at a scale commensurate with the conservation challenges they face.

About the Author

James N. Levitt is a fellow in the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and director of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest, Harvard University.

References:

Council on Environmental Quality. 2011. America’s great outdoors: A promise to future generations. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. http://americasgreatoutdoors.gov/report

Foster, D., D. Kittredge, B. Donahue, K. Fallon Lambert, M. Hunter, L. Irland, B. Hall, D. Orwig, A. Ellison, E. Colburn, A. D’Amato, and C. Cogbill. 2009. Wildlands and woodlands: A vision for New England. Harvard Forest Paper 32. Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest.

Henry, Mark, and Leslie Armstrong. 2004. Mapping the future of America’s national parks: Stewardship through geographic information systems. Redlands, CA: ESRI.

Holleman, Joey. 2008. Ace Basin: Protected forever. The State, Local/Metro Section, November 10. http://www.thestate.com/2008/11/10/584599/ace-basin-protected-forever.html#ixzz1W3yQd7KP

Levitt, James N., and Charles N. Chester. 2011. The future of large landscape conservation in America. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/1916_The-Future-of-Large-Landscape-Conservation-in-America

Williams, Jamie. 2011. Scaling up conservation for large landscapes. Land Lines 23(3): 8–13. https://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/dl/1923_1246_LLA_071103.pdf.

Related Resources

Levitt, James N., ed. 2005. From Walden to Wall Street:Frontiers of conservation finance. Washington, DC: Island Press and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

———. 2010. Conservation Capital in the Americas: Exemplary Conservation Finance Initiatives. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in collaboration with Island Press, the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

McKinney Matthew J., and Shawn Johnson. 2009. Working across boundaries: People, nature, and regions. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

McKinney, Matthew J., Lynn Scarlett, and Daniel Kemmis. 2010. Large landscape conservation: A strategic framework for policy and action. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.