Cities around the world seem to be stretching out physically and consuming land at a rate that exceeds population growth. As populations double, land use triples.

When city growth comes up in public discourse, the conversation almost invariably focuses on population. We speak of “booming” cities that have grown from, say, 2 to 5 million in just a few decades or declining cities that are hollowing out and losing residents at a rapid rate.

The common unit of understanding and measurement, in other words, is almost always the number of people. Measures of land use are often missing from the picture, despite the fact that cities grew much more in land use than in population between 1990 and 2015, according to data from the UN-Habitat Global Urban Observatory. In developed countries, urban population grew 12 percent, while urban land use increased by 80 percent. And in developing countries, population expanded by 100 percent while urban land use rose 350 percent.

Land use issues will become more critical as the world population exceeds 9 billion and 2.5 billion persons migrate to cities by 2050, according to the United Nations’ projections. Configuring urban areas and their available resources to support this massive inflow will be critical to sustaining human life on the planet, says George W. “Mac” McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute.

It’s a profound area of concern: How exactly are these rising urban populations changing global maps? Further, can we observe regular, even predictable, patterns? And are these trend lines, such as they are, sustainable over time?

To date, there has been little scientific understanding of broad global patterns related to how city borders, systems, and land-use patterns are changing. But the newly revised, second edition of the online Atlas of Urban Expansion, first published in 2012, aims to fill this crucial gap in knowledge. Produced through a partnership among UN-Habitat, the New York University Urban Expansion Program, and the Lincoln Institute, the new Atlas performs very precise analysis of satellite imagery, coupled with population figures and other data, to study the changing nature of cities observed from 1990 to the present. The full report and data are set to be unveiled this October at the Habitat III global cities summit in Quito, Ecuador, as part of the implementation of the UN’s New Urban Agenda.

The new Atlas analyzes 200 cities (up from 120 in the 2012 sample), rigorously selected from among the 4,231 cities in the world with populations greater than 100,000 (as of 2010) that constitute a representative sample of large urban areas. The 200 cities in question make up about 70 percent of the world’s urban population.

The United Nations statistics division has now accepted and adopted this “UN Sample of Cities” as a way to conduct ongoing analysis of urbanization trends. “Cities, how they form, and the effects of urbanization on the quality of human life must now be treated as a science,” says Joan Clos, executive director of UN-Habitat, during the launch at UN headquarters in New York in June 2016: “The unprecedented confluence of climate change, population boom, and the rush to live in cities means that our critical human development will take place in cities.”

With unplanned settlement fluidly redefining many urban boundaries, it is crucial, experts and planners say, to produce a consistent method for studying cities as contiguous spatial units, not just administrative jurisdictions. The UN Sample of Cities also enables transition from an urban agenda based on country-level data to one predicated on city-based data collection and analysis.

Studying such a sample allows us to infer some generalizable rules about large urban areas, notes Atlas coauthor Shlomo “Solly” Angel, a professor and senior research scholar at New York University. “The sample accurately represents that universe,” he says of cities with populations of 100,000 persons or more, “so you can actually make statements about that universe given information about the sample. That’s the more scientific contribution of this Atlas.”

Land Consumption and “De-densification”

What, then, can be said of the world’s large cities, now that such representative data have finally been collected and crunched?

One reliably observed pattern is that cities around the world seem to be stretching out physically and consuming land at a rate that exceeds population growth. This tendency corroborates the findings of the first-edition Atlas, which indicates “falling density.” In the past, this was termed “sprawl,” and some refer to it now as “de-densification.” In any case, for a planet increasingly concerned with sustainability, energy efficiency, climate change, and resource scarcity, this is not a good trend: Density generally allows for greener and more sustainable living patterns.

Angel notes that there is a kind of rough statistical rule that emerges from the new Atlas work: As populations double, land use triples. “Even though people would like to see densification increase or at least stay the same, it doesn’t,” he adds.

Many policy makers have been unable, or unwilling, to see this reality unfolding in recent decades. Don Chen, director of Equitable Development at The Ford Foundation, says that the issue of sustainable growth is “very uneven in terms of planning officials’ awareness.” In many countries, he adds, “various orthodoxies are battling it out,” and frequently the “cards are stacked against us” in terms of changing norms and official attitudes: “For many, many decades, and in some countries for centuries, there have been incentives [for] building on virgin land.”

And even where there is political will for change, there are “multiple dimensions of capability to build upward, such as in-ground infrastructure,” Chen notes. Wider complex systems must be coordinated from a policy perspective in order to achieve greater density and land conservation.

In any case, the data analysis effort undertaken in the Atlas—which at root is intended to help define a new “science of cities”—may serve as a wake-up call. Angel says the Atlas can be a “tool for convincing policy makers that the expansion they must prepare for is considerably larger than their own little back-of-the-envelope calculations, or what their planners have in their master plans.”

Increasing density again will necessitate sacrifice and modification of existing norms for living standards in many places: It will require people to live in smaller apartments and homes, in multifamily housing, and in higher buildings. It also will frequently require redevelopment of low-density areas in cities.

McCarthy acknowledges that the data are “a little bit chilling,” as they reveal a pervasive pattern that signals huge trouble ahead. “It’s something that we have to stop—whether we call it ‘sprawl’ or ‘de-densification’ or something else,” he says. “We can’t continue to consume all of our best land with urban development. We still have to feed ourselves. We still need to collect water.”

He also notes many ill-fated attempts to build large housing units far outside denser urban areas, leaving millions of units across the world largely empty. This has happened in many countries, from Mexico and Brazil to South Africa and China. “Why is it that we continue to build these developments in the middle of nowhere and expect people to live there?” McCarthy says, noting that it is vital to link jobs and industrial activity with housing.

Clearly, smarter, more proactive planning is required for growth across the world, the project’s researchers say. That means finding the right ways to channel city growth spatially and to create the infrastructure—transportation, water, sewer, and other necessities—so the new settlements and housing units are serviced appropriately.

Moreover, it is also necessary, Atlas researchers say, for many of the big cities around the world—from Lagos, Nigeria, to Mexico City to Zhengzhou, China—to adopt more next-generation thinking about so-called “polycentric” cities. That will require moving beyond the traditional paradigm of hulking, monocentric cities with a huge urban core and instead creating polycentric networked hubs, whereby a metropolitan area will have many interlinked urban centers.

Signatures of Unplanned Settlement

The satellite imagery analyzed in the Atlas also highlights other key patterns that are both drivers and/or symbols of the overall de-densification trend worldwide.

One very granular mark is the lack of four-way intersections, a clear sign that roads are being laid out haphazardly, in a largely unplanned way. Such informality and unplanned development have been increasing over time across the world. The pattern, however, is strongly correlated with lower GDP per capita, and therefore is more pronounced in the developing world and global South. Linked to this observed pattern is an increase in urban block size, as shantytowns and unplanned settlements of many kinds grow without regard to transportation needs.

Indeed, the Atlas also suggests a pervasive lack of orderly connections to arterial roads, which are key to facilitating transportation to employment and economic networks. Built-up areas within walking distance of wide arterial roads are less frequent than they were in the 1990s, according to data from that decade. And more generally, there is simply not enough land being allocated for roads.

In addition, low-density tracts and small dwellings are unnecessarily consuming precious urban open space—parks and green spaces that can make dense urban areas more livable.

Angel says planners need to get ahead of the coming wave of urban migration and secure land for transportation, affordable housing, arterial roads, and open space. That needs to be done before settlement happens, when land prices subsequently soar and the logistics of moving populations become trickier. “This can be done at a relatively small cost,” Angel notes. He suggests that planners begin to “make some minimal preparations for it.”

Even in countries where there is a high degree of central planning, the data contained in the Atlas may prove helpful for diverse land management challenges.

“Compared to most cities in the developing world, Chinese cities are better managed,” says Zhi Liu, director of the Lincoln Institute’s China program. “The Atlas is still useful for China, as it provides accurate, visual urban expansion data and analytics to planners that could strengthen their understanding of the scale and patterns of urban expansion in their cities.”

The Atlas Data Challenge

Behind the new analytical insights produced by the Atlas, an intriguing and important backstory of data collection and analysis highlights future challenges for urban theory and monitoring of global cities, especially in developing nations.

Alejandro “Alex” Blei, a research scholar in the urban expansion program of New York University’s Marron Institute for Urban Management, said that assembling the 200 cities for the representative sample was no easy task, as there is no universally accepted definition for a metropolitan area. Researchers had to account for variables such as regional location, growth rate, and population size in order to ensure the sample was representative, and they had to create a careful and defensible methodology.

NASA’s Landsat database, a satellite imagery program running since the 1970s, was the basis for the spatial analysis. While that methodical, scientific dataset is of exceedingly high quality, the underlying population data, which was key for establishing migration- and settlement-related patterns, was frequently less than perfect.

“Some countries have very well-established data programs,” Blei said. But in other cases the data are very “coarse,” and large cities, particularly in the developing world, have only broad census zones. It is therefore difficult, at times, to make fine-grained insights about population changes in connection with land use shifts, as the researchers had to assume equal density over large tracts of the metropolitan area in question.

Scanning the NASA pictures, the researchers had to analyze pixels to assess whether there was impervious coverage surface or soils. They performed this task with powerful software according to well-established methods, but correlating it with population data was not always smooth. “Unfortunately, there’s not very much we can do if the data are not very good, but we did the best we could under the circumstances,” Blei says.

Evidence suggests the need for less variation in population data collection and synthesis across countries, in order to derive more actionable insights for policy makers in every country. And more global consensus is needed around the definition of cities. The U.S. Census Bureau defines them very precisely as “urbanized areas,” or “metropolitan statistical areas,” but they are frequently defined in more scattered ways by other countries’ data collection agencies. Asia and Africa—home of many of the fastest-growing cities, both in terms of population and geographic extent—suffer from a lack of granular city population data that speak to neighborhood-level change.

Global Nuances and Uncertain Futures

The publication of the new Atlas will, of course, join a long debate in policy and academic circles about how to measure sprawl, both high- and low-density, and the best models for addressing related issues. The new Atlas also speaks to a long research literature on the consumption of resources and quality of life in urban contexts.

Enrique R. Silva, a senior research associate at the Lincoln Institute who has specialized in Latin American planning and governance issues, notes that the Atlas research will continue to help advance understanding of government planning and rule-making, as well as residential pricing. The 2016 Atlas project includes surveys conducted with various stakeholders in cities that might yield insights on planning policies and markets, among other issues.

“It’s definitely an effort that is needed,” Silva says. “It’s a first-mover type of project. The measure of success will be the extent to which other researchers, whether through critique or support of the initial idea, can improve upon it and contribute to our understanding of how cities are growing, or even contracting.”

It will also help ground-level understanding for those studying or making policy in particular cities. Silva points to a place like Buenos Aires, which he calls a “classic case” where the expansion of territory is occurring faster than the population growth—and where many people are being displaced outward from the denser city core. Silva says that research by his Lincoln Institute colleague Cynthia Goytia has shown how lax land use regulation affects settlement patterns. Land markets and their regulations affect affordability, and this can result in unplanned settlements, her research suggests.

Neema Kudva, an associate professor at Cornell University who is an expert in growth patterns in India and South Asia, also praises the “very careful work” performed in the Atlas effort. But she worries that smaller cities—those under 100,000 and therefore excluded from the analysis—may see different dynamics that are subject to more variable patterns and experiences.

In trying to create “one science of cities,” she says, we may miss significant differences between small and big metropolitan areas, limiting our ability to imagine creative interventions. “The difference between small and big can be the ability to influence political processes, the ability to garner funds, to organize, to intervene,” Kudva says. “For a person like me who is interested in smaller places, things like the Atlas provide important suggestions, important points of reference, important counterpoints, but they are not always useful.”

Kudva also wonders if large-scale, emerging changes related to energy systems, global warming, sea-level rise, and political upheaval may alter worldwide land use patterns, compared to those observed in the past. The issue of falling density is potentially reversible, she believes. “That trend could change,” she says. “We need to play a more interventionist role.”

Still, better data and a more detailed picture of settlement patterns can substantially help address challenges common to cities of many different sizes. Chen, of the Ford Foundation, notes that research like the Atlas is necessary to combat issues such as unequal access to opportunity. “We need baseline data, and we need to understand the relationship between how we use land and other things.”

The issue of global inequality, which McCarthy calls the biggest “unassailable challenge” of cities, looms in all of the data. Beyond the layers of the Atlas’s global maps are stubborn facts and dilemmas that researchers and policy makers are only beginning to understand and address. “The biggest one is the absolute concentration of poverty and geographic isolation of large segments of the population,” McCarthy says, noting that sometimes 30 to 50 percent of residents in many large cities live in “deplorable conditions.”

Decent affordable housing that is meaningfully integrated into the economic network and flow of cities has to be a priority. Yet many national efforts to date have failed to achieve that goal. “That’s the thing that I find most vexing,” McCarthy says.

As the new Atlas is rolled out in October at the UN-Habitat III conference in Quito, that issue—and many others affecting the world’s fast-growing cities—is sure to be framed even more precisely and powerfully by the new, comprehensive data.

John Wihbey is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Northeastern University. His writing and research focus on issues of technology, climate change, and sustainability.

Image by New York University Urban Expansion Program

The Chesapeake Bay is a cultural icon, a national treasure, and a natural resource protected by hundreds of agencies, nonprofit organizations, and institutions. Now with unprecedented accuracy, a new ultra-high-resolution digital mapping technology, developed by the Chesapeake Conservancy and supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, is pinpointing pollution and other threats to the ecosystem health of the bay and its watershed, which spans 64,000 square miles, 10,000 miles of shoreline, and 150 major rivers and streams. At one-meter-by-one-meter resolution, the “precision conservation” mapping technology is gaining the attention of a wide range of agencies and institutions that see potential applications for a variety of planning purposes, for use throughout the United States and the world. This new land cover dataset, created by the Conservancy’s Conservation Innovation Center (CIC), has 900 times more information than previous datasets, and provides vastly greater detail about the watershed’s natural systems and environmental threats—the most persistent and pressing of which is pollution of the bay’s waters, which impacts everything from the health of people, plants, and wildlife to the fishing industry to tourism and recreation.

“The U.S. government is putting more than $70 million a year into cleaning up the Chesapeake but doesn’t know which interventions are making a difference,” says George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute. “With this technology, we can determine whether interventions can interrupt a surface flow of nutrients that is causing algae blooms in the bay. We can see where the flows enter the Chesapeake. We’ll see what we’re getting for our money, and we can start to redirect the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Agriculture, and multiple agencies that might plan strategically but not talk to each other.”

The nonprofit Chesapeake Conservancy is putting finishing touches on a high-resolution map of the entire watershed for the Chesapeake Bay Program. Both organizations are located in Annapolis, Maryland, the epicenter of bay conservation efforts. The program serves the Chesapeake Bay Partnership, the EPA, the Chesapeake Bay Commission, and the six watershed states of Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia—along with 90 other partners including nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, and government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS), and the U.S. Department of Defense.

On behalf of this partnership, EPA in 2016 invested $1.3 million in state and federal funding in the Conservancy’s high-resolution land cover project, which is being developed with the University of Vermont. Information gleaned from several precision mapping pilot programs is already helping local governments and river partners make more efficient and cost-effective land-management decisions.

“There are a lot of actors in the Chesapeake Bay watershed,” says Joel Dunn, president and CEO of the Chesapeake Conservancy. “We’ve been working on a very complicated conservation problem as a community over the last 40 years, and the result has been layers and layers and many institutions built to solve this problem.”

“Now it’s not a collective will problem but an action problem, and the whole community needs to be partnering in more innovative ways to take restoration of the watershed’s natural resources to the next level,” he adds.

“Conservation technology is evolving quickly and may be cresting now,” Dunn says, “and we want to ride that wave.” The project is an example of the Conservancy’s efforts to take its work to new heights. By bringing “big data” into the world of environmental planning, he says, the Conservancy is poised to further innovate as “conservation entrepreneurs.”

What Is Precision Mapping Technology?

Land use and land cover (LULC) data from images taken by satellites or airplanes is critical to environmental management. It is used for everything from ecological habitat mapping to tracking development trends. The industry standard is the USGS’s 30-by-30-meter-resolution National Land Cover Database (NLCD), which provides images encompassing 900 square meters, or almost one-quarter acre. This scale works well for large swaths of land. It is not accurate, however, at a small-project scale, because everything at one-quarter acre or less is lumped together into one type of land classification. A parcel might be classified as a forest, for example, when that quarter-acre might contain a stream and wetlands as well. To maximize improvements to water quality and critical habitats, higher resolution imaging is needed to inform field-scale decisions about where to concentrate efforts.

Using publicly available aerial imagery from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), combined with LIDAR (or Light Detection and Ranging) land elevation data, the Conservancy has created three-dimensional land classification datasets with 900 times more information and close to a 90 percent accuracy level, compared to a 78 percent accuracy level for the NLCD. This new tool provides a much more detailed picture of what’s happening on the ground by showing points where pollution is entering streams and rivers, the height of slopes, and the effectiveness of best management practices (BMPs) such as bioswales, rain gardens, and forested buffers.

“We’re able to translate raw imagery to a classified landscape, and we’re training the computer to look at what humans see at eye level,” and even to identify individual plants, says Jeff Allenby, director of conservation technology, who was hired in 2012 to leverage technology to study, conserve, and restore the watershed. In 2013, a $25,000 grant from the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) allowed Allenby to buy two powerful computers and begin working on the digital map. With support from the Chesapeake Bay Program, his geographic information system (GIS)-savvy team of eight has created a classification system for the Chesapeake watershed with 12 categories of land cover, including impervious surfaces, wetlands, low vegetation, and water. It is also incorporating zoning information about land uses from the Chesapeake Bay Program.

The Technology’s Potential

Precision mapping “has the potential to transform the way we look at and analyze land and water systems in the United States,” says James N. Levitt, manager of land conservation programs for the department of planning and urban form at the Lincoln Institute, which is supporting the Conservancy’s development of the technology with $50,000. “It will help us maintain water quality and critical habitats, and locate the areas where restoration activities will have the greatest impact on improving water quality.” Levitt says the technology enables transferring “nonpoint,” or diffuse and undetermined, sources of pollution into specific identifiable “point” sources on the landscape. And it offers great potential for use in other watersheds, such as the Ohio and Mississippi river systems, which, like the Chesapeake watershed, also have large loads of polluted stormwater runoff from agriculture.

It’s a propitious time to be ramping up conservation technology in the Chesapeake region. In February 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to consider a challenge to the Chesapeake Bay Partnership’s plan to fully restore the bay and its tidal rivers as swimmable and fishable waterways by 2025. The high court’s action let stand a ruling by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the clean water plan and reinforced restrictions on the total maximum daily load, or the permissible limit of pollution from substances like nitrogen and phosphorus. These nutrients, found in agricultural fertilizers, are the two major pollutants of the bay, and are addressed under federal water quality standards established by the Clean Water Act. The ruling also allows EPA and state agencies to fine polluters for violating regulations.

The Chesapeake Bay’s water quality has improved from its most polluted phase in the 1980s. Upgrades and more efficient operations at wastewater treatment plants have reduced nitrogen going into the bay by 57 percent and phosphorus by 75 percent. But the watershed states are still in violation of clean water regulations, and increasing urban development calls for constant assessment and pollution reduction in water and critical habitats.

Pilot Project No. 1: Chester River

Backed by funding from ITIC’s Digital Energy and Sustainability Solutions Campaigns, the Conservancy completed a high-resolution land classification and stormwater runoff flow analysis for the entire Chester River watershed on Maryland’s eastern shore. Isabel Hardesty is the river keeper for the 60-mile-long Chester River and works with the Chester River Association, based in Chestertown, Maryland. (“River keeper” is an official title for 250 individuals worldwide who serve as the “eyes, ears, and voice” for a body of water.) The Conservancy’s analysis helped Hardesty and her staff understand where water flows across the land, where BMPs would be most effective, and which degraded streams would be best to restore.

Two-thirds of the Chester River watershed’s land cover is row crops. Row-crop farmers often apply fertilizer uniformly to a field, and the fertilizer runs off with stormwater from all over the site. This is considered nonpoint pollution, which makes it harder to pinpoint the exact source of contaminants flowing into a river—compared to, say, a pile of manure. The Conservancy’s team mapped the entire Chester watershed, noting where rain fell on the landscape and then where it flowed.

“With the naked eye, you can look at a field and see where the water is flowing, but their analysis is much more scientific,” says Hardesty. The map showed flow paths across the whole watershed, in red, yellow, and green. Red indicates higher potential for carrying pollutants, such as flow paths over impervious surfaces. Green means water is filtered, such as when it flows through a wetlands or a forested buffer, making it less likely to carry pollution. Yellow is intermediary, meaning it could go either way. The analysis has to be “ground-truthed,” says Hardesty, meaning the team uses the GIS analysis and drills down to an individual farm level to confirm what’s happening on a specific field.

“We are a small organization and have relationships with most of the farmers in the area,” says Hardesty. “We can look at a parcel of land, and we know the practices that farmers use. We’ve reached out to our landowners and worked with them on their sites and know where pollution may be entering streams. When we know a particular farmer wants to put a wetland on his farm, this land use and water flow analysis helps us determine what kind of BMP we should use and where it should be located.” The value of precision mapping for the Chester River Association, says Hardesty, has been “realizing that the best place to put a water intercept solution is where it’s best for the farmer. This is usually a fairly unproductive part of the farm.” She says farmers generally are happy to work with them to solve the problem.

The Chester River Association is also deploying the technology to use resources more strategically. The organization has a water monitoring program with years of watershed data, which the Conservancy team analyzed to rank streams according to water quality. The association now has GIS analysis that shows the flow paths for all stream subwatersheds, and is creating a strategic plan to guide future efforts for streams with the worst water quality.

Pilot Project No. 2: York County Stormwater Consortium BMP Reporting Tool

In 2013, the Conservancy and other core partners launched Envision the Susquehanna to improve the ecological and cultural integrity of the landscape and the quality of life along the Susquehanna River, from its headwaters in Cooperstown, New York, to where it merges with the Chesapeake Bay in Havre de Grace, Maryland. In 2015, the Conservancy selected the program to pilot its data project in York County, Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania has struggled to demonstrate progress in reducing nitrogen and sediment runoff, especially in places where urban stormwater enters rivers and streams. In 2015, EPA announced that it would withhold $2.9 million in federal funding until the state could articulate a plan to meet its targets. In response, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection released the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Strategy to increase funding for local stormwater projects, verify the impacts and benefits of local BMPs, and improve accounting and data collection to monitor their effectiveness.

York County created the York County–Chesapeake Bay Pollution Reduction Program to coordinate reporting on clean-up projects. The Conservancy’s precision mapping technology offered a perfect pilot opportunity: In spring 2015, the York County Planning Commission and the Conservancy began working together to improve the process for selecting BMP projects for urban stormwater runoff, which, combined with increased development, is the fastest growing threat to the Chesapeake Bay.

The planning commission targeted the annual BMP proposal process for the 49 of 72 municipalities that are regulated as “municipal separate storm sewer systems,” or MS4s. These are stormwater systems required by the federal Clean Water Act that collect polluted runoff that would otherwise make its way into local waterways. The commission’s goal was to standardize the project submittal and review processes. The county had found that calculated load reductions often were inconsistent among municipalities because many lacked the staff to collect and analyze the data or used a variety of different data sources. This made it difficult for the commission to identify, compare, and develop priorities for the most effective and cost-efficient projects to achieve water-quality goals.

How to Use the York County Stormwater Consortium BMP Reporting Tool

To use the online tool, users select a proposed project area, and the tool automatically generates a high-resolution land cover analysis for all of the land area draining through the project footprint. High-resolution data is integrated into the tool, allowing users to assess how their project would interact with the landscape. Users also can compare potential projects quickly and easily, and then review and submit proposals for projects with the best potential to improve water quality. Users then input their project information into a nutrient/sediment load reduction model called the Bay Facility Assessment Scenario Tool, or BayFAST. Users enter additional project information, and the tool fills in the geographic data. The result is a simple, one-page pdf report that outlines the estimated project costs per pound of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment reduction. See the tool at: http://chesapeakeconservancy.org/apps/yorkdrainage/.

The Conservancy and planning commission collaborated to develop the user-friendly, web-based York County Stormwater Consortium BMP Reporting Tool (above), which allows different land use changes and restoration approaches to be compared and analyzed before being put into place. The Conservancy, commission, and municipal staff members collaborated on a uniform template for the proposals and data collection, and they streamlined the process with the same data sets. The Conservancy then trained a few of the local GIS professionals to provide technical assistance to other municipalities.

“It’s easy and quick to use,” explains Gary Milbrand, CFM, York Township’s GIS engineer and chief information officer, who is a project technical assistant for other municipalities. In the past, he says, municipalities typically spent between $500 and $1,000 on consultants to analyze their data and create proposals and reports. The reporting tool, he says, “saves us time and money.”

The commission required all regulated municipalities to submit BMP proposals using the new technology by July 1, 2016, and proposals will be selected for funding by late fall. Partners say the municipalities are more involved in the process of describing how their projects are working in the environment, and they hope to see more competitive projects in the future.

“For the first time, we can compare projects ‘apples to apples,’” says Carly Dean, Envision the Susquehanna project manager. “Just being able to visualize the data helps municipal staffs analyze how their projects interact with the landscape, and why their work is so important.” Dean adds, “We’re only just beginning to scratch the surface. It will take a while before we grasp all of the potential applications.”

Integrating Land Cover and Land Use Parcel Data

The Conservancy team is also working to overlay land cover data with parcel-level county data to provide more information on how land is being used. Combining high-resolution satellite imagery and county land use parcel data is unprecedented. Counties throughout the United States collect and maintain parcel-level databases with information such as tax records and property ownership. About 3,000 out of 3,200 counties have digitized these public records. But even in many of these counties, records haven’t been organized and standardized for public use, says McCarthy.

EPA and a USGS team in Annapolis have been combining the one-meter-resolution land cover data with land use data for the six Chesapeake states to provide a broad watershed-wide view that at the same time shows highly detailed information about developed and rural land. This fall, the team will incorporate every city and county’s land use and land cover data and determine adjustments to make sure the high-resolution map data matches local-scale data.

The updated land use and cover data then will be loaded into the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Model, a computer model now in its third of four beta versions of production and review. State and municipal partners, conservation districts, and other watershed partners have reviewed each version and suggested changes based on their experience in stormwater mitigation, water treatment upgrades, and other BMPs. Data will detail, for example, mixed-use development; different agricultural land uses for crops, hay, and pasture; and measures such as how much land produces fruit or vegetable crops. That’s where the conversion from land cover to land use comes in to help specify the pollution load rates.

“We want a very transparent process,” says EPA’s Rich Batiuk, associate director for science, analysis, and implementation for the Chesapeake Bay Program, noting that the combined land cover and land use data will be available online, at no cost. “We want thousands of eyes on land use and cover data. We want to help state and local partners with data on how we’re dealing with forests, flood plains, streams, and rivers. And we want an improved product that becomes the model for simulations of pollution control policies across the watershed.”

Scaling Up and Other Applications

As the technology is refined and used more widely by watershed partners, the Conservancy hopes to provide other data sets, scale up the work to other applications, and conduct annual or biannual updates so the maps reflect current conditions. “This data is important as a baseline, and we’ll be looking at the best way to be able to assess change over time,” says Allenby.

Watershed partners are discussing additional applications for one-meter-resolution data, from updating Emergency-911 maps, to protecting endangered species, to developing easements and purchasing land for conservation organizations. Beyond the Chesapeake, precision mapping could help conduct continental-scale projects. It offers the conservation parallel to precision agriculture, which helps determine, for example, where a bit of fertilizer in a specific place would do the most good for plants; the two combined could increase food production and reduce agriculture’s environmental impact. The technology could also help with more sustainable development practices, sea level rise, and resiliency.

Many people said it wasn’t feasible for a small nonprofit to do this kind of analysis, says Allenby, but his team was able to do it for a tenth of the cost of estimates. The bigger picture includes making land use and cover data available to the public for free. But that’s an expensive proposition at this point: The data needs backup, security, and a huge amount of storage space. Working with Esri, a Redlands, California-based company that sells GIS mapping tools, as well as Microsoft Research and Hexagon Geospatial, the Conservancy team is transferring the data. The process now runs linearly one square meter at a time. On a cloud-based system, it will run one square kilometer at a time and distribute to 1,000 different servers at once. Allenby says this could allow parcel-level mapping of the entire 8.8 million square kilometers of land in the United States in one month. Without this technology, 100 people would have to work for more than a year, at much greater cost, to produce the same dataset.

Precision mapping could bring greater depth to State of the Nation’s Land, an annual online journal of databases on land use and ownership that the Lincoln Institute is producing with PolicyMap. McCarthy suggests the technology might answer questions such as: Who owns America? How are we using land? How does ownership affect how land is used? How is it changing over time? What are the impacts of roads environmentally, economically, and socially? What changes after you build a road? How much prime agricultural land has been buried under suburban development? When does that begin to matter? How much land are we despoiling? What is happening to our water supply?

“Can it solve big social problems?” queries McCarthy. One of biggest outcomes of precision mapping technology would be to develop better ways to inform land use practices, he says, especially at the interface between people and land, and water and land. Land records are needed to use this technology most effectively, which might be challenging in some places because these records don’t exist or are inconsistent. But it’s a methology and technology that can be used in other countries, he says. “It‘s a game changer, allowing us to overlay land use data with land cover data, which could be hugely valuable to rapidly urbanizing places like China and Africa, where patterns and changes will be seen over the land and over time. It’s hard to exaggerate the impact.”

“Our goal is the world, to use this technology for transparency and accountability,” says McCarthy. “The more information planners have access to, the better stewards we can be for the planet.” The tool should be shared with “people who want to use it for the right purposes, so we’re making the value proposition that this is a public good that we all need to maintain,” he says, similar to the way USGS developed GIS.

“We need the right public-private arrangement, something like a regulated public utility with public oversight and support that will maintain it as a public good.”

Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications, LLC, lives and works in Boulder, Colorado, and writes frequently about sustainable, healthy, and resilient communities.

Image by The Chesapeake Conservancy

Land readjustment is a vital but difficult and time-consuming process: formulating a sort of retroactive version of planning in neighborhoods that developed informally, with unsanctioned dwellings chaotically built in ways that leave some with no access to streets and paths. According to UN-Habitat, 863 million people around the world lived in such settings as of 2014, and the number could rise to 3 billion by 2050. The agreed draft of the New Urban Agenda for the Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador, notes that the “rising number of slum and informal settlement dwellers” contributes to intense challenges that exacerbate global poverty and its risks, from a lack of municipal services to increased health threats.

But evolving technology may facilitate revision of these organic layouts in ways that lead to minimal displacement and speed the absorption of such neighborhoods into a city’s formal structure, thus providing residents basic services—from sanitation and drainage systems to access for fire and medical emergencies. One of the more promising tools is Open Reblock, a platform currently in a pilot phase in areas around Cape Town, South Africa, and Mumbai, India. The project stems from a collaboration among Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI, is a network of urban-poor communities in 33 countries), the Santa Fe Institute (SFI, a nonprofit research and education organization), and Arizona State University. 

SDI has long been involved in grassroots “reblocking”—essentially another way of characterizing the land-readjustment process. Luís Bettencourt, a professor of complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute, explains that his group, which focuses on “cities as systems,” began working with SDI a few years ago. There was a useful convergence in the high-level, statistics-and-data thinking of the SFI group with the on-the-ground “census” efforts SDI used in its work with informal-settlement communities. 

SDI’s reblocking efforts could be painstaking. Residents led the process of mapping a neighborhood—on paper. Then they gathered at community meetings, arranged cutouts representing every local structure over that map, and began shifting them around to devise new paths and roadways. While this active collaboration was profoundly beneficial, the analog methodology wasn’t exactly speedy. 

Ever-more-accessible digital technology has in recent years eased the process, says SDI Programme Officer: Data Management Anni Beukes. The group now uses a geographic information system (GIS) tool to map settlement boundaries and services available, and then relies on a separate tool for detailed household-level surveys and precise measurements of every structure. Given the wide availability of mobile devices, the process is open to—and indeed dependent on—direct resident participation. 

Enrique R. Silva, research fellow and senior research associate at the Lincoln Institute, notes that similar tech-mapping tools are impacting such efforts around the world. “You can map something almost immediately,” he says, and involve community members in that process. He points to efforts, backed by the Lincoln Institute and others, that rely on “cheap and universal” devices and crowd-sourcing tools to reach similar goals across Latin America.

A master map that is available in digital form also creates new possibilities. Open Reblock is an example. It deploys a custom algorithm to read a digital map of an informal settlement and propose what it sees as the optimal strategy for reblocking it. (The algorithm is written to prioritize existing roadways and structures, echoing the traditional goal of minimizing displacement.) This process takes just minutes, at most. 

“When I first showed it to our communities, they said, ‘You’re taking our paper cutouts away’!” Beukes says with a laugh. They weren’t wrong—and they weren’t actually protesting. (“At least the younger ones weren’t; some older participants,” she adds, “can be hesitant in their uptake of new technology.”)

But what Open Reblock produces is not meant to be a strict directive or an end point—community members can still tweak the results based on their direct knowledge and concerns. Indeed, Open Reblock depends on such participation—“creating a shared reality where people can play and create this future reality,” Bettencourt says. “It’s basically a town-planning tool, at the level of a neighborhood.” And by offering “a proof of principle and a starting point” for negotiations, he adds, it radically speeds up one of the toughest steps in the process. 

Beukes says participants in the pilot programs have reacted with enthusiasm toward the new possibilities of this system. It means that a final plan will exist in a form that city officials can respond to more easily, and it ensures that all parties are considering the same geospatial data and planning scheme. “It’s a template for discussion,” Bettencourt adds, one that “puts everyone literally on the same map.” 

With a grant from Open Ideo, Bettencourt’s team and SDI are working to improve the design of Open Reblock’s interface, with feedback from community participants in Cape Town and Mumbai. The entire project is being created in open-source code (available on Github), both to encourage improvements from anyone who wants to be involved and to make it easier to scale up future versions for widespread use anywhere. 

The project is, of course, not a magic solution. Land readjustment can be contentious, and Silva points out that important issues around the value of any given settlement dweller’s property must still be worked out on a more individual, human level. Bettencourt and Beukes agree that Open Reblock is a supplement to, not a substitute for, existing processes.

Still, Bettencourt points to UN-Habitat numbers to speculate that there may be a million neighborhoods around the world in need of reblocking. “That’s a scary number,” he says. And it adds to the sense among some observers that there’s just something impossible about the effort—particularly when, on a case-by-case basis, the process gets bogged down over time. 

But all this may be less intimidating from a technologist perspective. Think of the mapping and data-collection tools that have emerged in recent years as an early step that builds on the long-existing work of SDI and others. Open Reblock is just one more iteration of that trajectory. “I think we have all the ingredients, but we have to start doing,” Bettencourt says. “If there’s a system to capture the data and run proposals on top of it, that’s a big step. It doesn’t create the change, but it helps.”

Rob Walker (robwalker.net) is a contributor to Design Observer and The New York Times.

Leaflet | Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA, Imagery © Mapbo

The government of China has been concerned about its ability to continue feeding its growing population since the mid-1990s. It has targeted conversion of farmland to industrial and residential uses, especially in the most productive agricultural regions, as the chief threat to the nation’s continued capacity to produce adequate levels of staple cereal crops. China is land poor. Only about one-third of its total land area, which is roughly equal to that of the United States, can be utilized productively for agriculture. Several measures have been introduced with the aim of protecting farmland, especially farmland with the greatest production potential. For example, current regulations require each province to keep 80 percent of its land currently designated as primary farmland under cultivation. Other policies require each province to take measures to ensure self-sufficiency in grain production and to draw up farmland protection plans.

Cultivated Land versus Farmland

Most attention has been focused on “cultivated” land, that is, land used to grow major food grains, feed grains, soybeans, and tubers. Not included is land used for horticultural crops and aquaculture, which would be categorized as farmland in most countries. Roughly 20 to 25 percent of the observed reduction in cultivated land in China in recent years was due to its conversion to orchards and fish ponds (Smil 1999; Ministry of Land and Resources 2003).

Reallocation of cultivated land from cereals and tubers to fruits, vegetables, and fish is a natural accommodation to changing consumer demand and increased income rather than a sign of an inability to maintain staple food production. Urban Chinese households consume much less grain than rural households (Gale 2002). Thus, changes in diets caused by rural-to-urban migration have resulted in less consumption of grains in China between 1995 and 2002, even though total population increased by about one-eighth during that period.

Farmland and Food Security

Even after correcting for reallocations of cultivated land to other food products, China has lost a significant amount of cropland, although the exact amount is difficult to determine because of the poor quality of historical statistics. Estimates of gross cropland losses between 1987 and 1995 have ranged from 3 to 5 million hectares out of a total estimate of 125 to 145 million hectares. Some of that loss consisted of land that was marginal in terms of agricultural productivity, but was highly vulnerable to erosion, desertification, and other forms of land degradation; much of this land was subsequently allowed to revert to more sustainable uses, such as pasture, grassland, and forest. Because the productivity of this land was quite low, its removal from cultivation represents little reduction in agricultural production capacity.

Most observers believe that China can remain largely self-sufficient in food production because of its ability to increase the agricultural productivity of land. For example, China’s agricultural research system has been quite successful in developing and promulgating new crop varieties and cultivation methods that have increased potential grain yields an average of 1.5 to 2.5 percent annually (Jin et al. 2002). A study conducted under the auspices of the International Food Policy Research Institute indicates that China’s ability to remain self-sufficient in food production depends more on investment in irrigation, flood control, and agricultural research infrastructure than on farmland preservation (Huang, Rozelle, and Rosegrant 1999).

Water is likely to be more of a bottleneck than land. Many farming regions face shortages of water for irrigation, so farmers who rely on groundwater have been pumping at unsustainably high rates, causing water tables to fall rapidly. Even regions with abundant water resources have shortages because of poor maintenance and operation of irrigation systems. Improved flood control is also sorely needed to prevent natural disasters that affect cropland losses.

Impacts of Urbanization

Even if the loss of cultivated land does not threaten China’s food security, there are substantial inefficiencies in land allocation generally, and in the conversion of farmland to urbanizing areas in particular. The most worrisome aspect is that farmland conversion has been concentrated in the most productive farming areas of the country, notably the coastal and central provinces that have both fertile soils and climates that allow multiple crops and harvests. Net losses of cropland in these provinces alone between 1985 and 1995 were on the order of 2 to 4 million hectares. Urbanization, industrialization, infrastructure, and other nonagricultural uses have been the primary cause of farmland loss in these rapidly industrializing provinces.

The two sites selected for a recent Lincoln Institute/Ministry of Land and Resources farmland protection study illustrate the scope of this problem. Most of the land around Pinghu City, located halfway between Hangzhou and Shanghai in Zhejiang Province, is prime agricultural land that can be harvested two or three times a year. Cultivated land and orchards account for about two-thirds of the total land area, and little land is left unused. Land taken for construction increased eightfold between 1998 and 2001. The local government has used consolidation of plots to meet its “no net loss” requirements, but the scope for further gains from consolidation is quite limited. Recorded conversion of farmland to urban uses during this period of rapid growth amounted to almost 2 percent of Pinghu City’s 1998 farmland.

Jingzhou City, located in the Yangtze River basin west of Wuhan in Hubei Province, shows the limited impact of urbanization outside of the rapidly growing coastal provinces. Cultivated land and orchards together account for about half of the total land area. Between 1997 and 2003, cultivated land in Jingzhou also decreased by almost 2 percent, but only a tenth of that loss was due to transportation infrastructure and other urban uses. Over half of the loss was due to an increase in areas covered by water caused by flooding and new aquaculture facilities. The remainder was largely due to abandonment of marginal land brought under cultivation prior to 1978, which was either allowed to revert to forest or was simply left unused.

Institutional Impediments

The greatest impediments to China’s ability to maintain adequate levels of food production are not physical but institutional. Inefficient uses of existing farmland arise from policies that affect income generation from farming, including the lack of tenure security, water shortages and poor irrigation management institutions, and the lack of adequate marketing infrastructure.

Tenure Security: Economists have long argued that secure tenure is essential for efficient land use, including appropriate levels of investment in maintaining and enhancing land productivity as well as allocating land to the most efficient uses and/or users. Rural and suburban land in China belongs to village collectives and is administered by the village committee or economic organization, subject to oversight by township, provincial, and in some cases state entities. Rural collectives have the authority to allocate land to alternative uses.

Farmland is leased to households under contractual arrangements in which the household pays a fee to the collective in return for a residual claim on the products of the land. The contract may contain other stipulations as well (for example, requirements that the land be farmed and maintained in good condition). The size of each household’s allocation is based on the size and composition of the household, and may be altered as those factors change. Tenure insecurity has been documented as a deterrent to investing in agricultural improvements (Jacoby, Li, and Rozelle 2002; Deininger and Jin 2003).

Concerns over adverse effects of insecure tenure on long-term investment in land productivity have led the Chinese government to experiment with lengthening the duration of farmland contracts. In 1984 collectives were urged by the state to contract with member households for a period of 15 years, and in 1993 the state urged an extension of standard contracts to 30 years. Revisions to the Land Management Law in 1998 explicitly required that all farmland contracts be written and be effective for a term of 30 years with few or no adjustments allowed.

Farmers also have acquired some ability to alter land allocations by exchanges or subcontracting Exchanges of land among villagers to consolidate holdings were declared legal in 1986, and subcontracting of land to outsiders, subject to approval of two-thirds of the village membership, was declared legal in 1998. Fully implementing these enhanced tenure security and transferability measures remains difficult, however, because they run contrary to longstanding practices and principles of administration in China. For example, they limit the power of the village leadership, and may also result in less equitable land allocations by ruling out reallocations to accommodate demographic or other changes in circumstances.

Ensuring that farmland reforms take hold and preventing abandonment of productive farmland are likely to be increasingly important for maintaining agricultural productivity, especially in areas experiencing rapid urban growth. Urban employment opportunities for working-age men are widely available in fast-growing coastal areas, leaving the farm labor force to be composed primarily of women and the elderly. As many as 80 percent of the young men in the environs of Pinghu City (and 20 percent in Jingzhou) worked in industrial jobs in nearby cities. Lack of urban residency rights keeps farm-based families tied to the land, but since their main source of income is now nonagricultural, they have little incentive to invest in maintaining and enhancing land productivity. Moreover, limitations on labor time and capacity may induce them to leave some land uncultivated.

Such flows of labor out of farming can be accommodated by consolidating plots into larger operational units to exploit economies of scale, thereby lowering land productivity investment costs and increasing farming income sufficiently to make such investments worthwhile. But secure, transferable use rights are essential to accomplish these goals. In areas like Pinghu, for example, wages in urban employment are so much higher than income from farming that farmers have little incentive to invest in the maintenance and enhancement of land productivity by applying organic fertilizer or keeping irrigation and drainage systems in good repair.

Secure tenure rights can also serve as a check on the arbitrary exercise of authority by village leaders who have been known to expropriate land from farmers in order to lease it to rural enterprises or sell it to local governments, often without paying compensation and in many cases pocketing the returns themselves. Illegal land development of this kind has become a national scandal in China, and millions of farmers are known to have lost land as a result. According to the Ministry of Land and Resources (2003), farmers were owed at least $1.2 billion in compensation and relocation fees.

Water Management: The second type of institutional impediment to agriculture relates to water shortages, notably (1) lack of clearly delineated and enforced use-rights for water; (2) inadequate financing of water delivery infrastructure; and (3) failure to price water at its opportunity cost. The lack of clear use-right assignments results in upstream users taking too large a share of the water available, leaving inadequate supplies for downstream users—a phenomenon that applies at both the provincial level, where upstream provinces divert excessive quantities of stream flow, and the farm level, where farmers with land at the heads of delivery canals take excessive amounts, leaving little or nothing for those at the tails of those canals.

Funding for construction, maintenance, and operation of irrigation systems has been inadequate because these activities have no dedicated funding source, and maintenance varies with the overall status of government finances. According to local officials in Pinghu and Jingzhou, for instance, maintenance of irrigation and drainage systems virtually ceased around 1980. Recent attempts to remedy the neglect by investing in repair and upgrades of irrigation systems are hampered by lack of funds. In Jingzhou, for instance, officials estimate that at current funding levels it will take 50 years to repair all irrigation systems currently in need. Many systems that have been repaired recently are likely to require further maintenance before systems currently in need of repair have been upgraded.

Additional inefficiencies in water use arise in China because water prices are set below opportunity costs, leading to overuse. Many farmers are charged for water according to the amount of land farmed rather than the amount of water used. Charges may be set to raise revenue for the township or provincial treasury rather than to induce economically efficient water use. Experiments with water pricing indicate that farmers’ use of water conservation methods is quite price-responsive, so that water price reform has a significant potential to alleviate water shortages.

Marketing Institutions: Inadequate marketing infrastructure and institutions are the third major impediment to realizing potential gains from regional specialization as well as a deterrent to investment in agriculture in many localities. China has a long tradition of promoting self-sufficiency at the local and provincial levels, yet this self-reliance can become an impediment to economic growth by limiting the scope for gains from specialization. China has been moving away from this traditional stance. Grain trading, for example, has been partially liberalized and grain traders are creating more integrated national markets.

Greater market liberalization could contribute to farmland preservation and the maintenance of food production capacity generally. More closely integrated national markets should increase average prices and decrease price volatility, making farming more attractive relative to other forms of employment. Greater market integration should be especially beneficial in poorer inland areas where incentives to migrate toward fast-growing coastal cities have been especially strong.

This market liberalization will require significant investment in infrastructure, however. China’s transportation network has not expanded fast enough to keep pace with the growth of trade volume, and the country lacks sufficient warehouse and cold storage facilities. China has sufficient cold storage capacity to accommodate only 20 to 30 percent of demand, resulting in spoilage losses of perishable freight on the order of one-third (Gale 2002). Increases in such capacity could increase food availability substantially by reducing both spoilage losses and price volatility, giving farmers an incentive to increase their production of vegetables and other perishable products. Expanded provision of electricity could further increase the effective food supply by allowing consumers to reduce spoilage losses by refrigerating produce.

Urban Policies on Farmland Conversion

The current urban policy structure encourages municipal and regional governments to convert farmland, even in areas where the central government has made farmland preservation a top priority. Policies influencing government finance, residential construction, and urban land transactions combine to create a high demand for land. Policies governing payment for land also make farmland conversion the most attractive means of meeting that demand.

Urban land is allocated by a combination of administrative and market mechanisms that create substantial arbitrage opportunities for private enterprises and government entities. Private enterprises can lease land from municipal governments in return for payment of a conveyance fee. Local governments can acquire land by paying a compensation package set according to administrative formulas based on agricultural income, which is typically far lower than the conveyance fee. Revenue from land transactions is a major source of funding for local governments; according to some estimates, it can account for between a quarter and a half of all municipal revenue. As a result, local governments have strong incentives to expand into rural areas in order to finance their ongoing obligations in the areas of infrastructure and housing.

Current regulations also make it more attractive for local governments to provide housing for growing populations by expanding into rural areas rather than increasing density within existing urban boundaries. Redevelopment of existing municipal land requires governments to pay compensation to current tenants and to cover resettlement expenses. Compensation paid to current residents is much higher than that paid to rural inhabitants. In Beijing, for example, land costs (primarily compensation) make up as much as 60 percent of the redevelopment cost of existing urban areas compared to 30 to 40 percent of the cost of developing converted rural land. Tenants may also resist displacement tenaciously, which at the very least creates significant delays. In addition, it is more expensive to provide infrastructure to areas already densely developed.

Industrial development is widely seen as the key to economic growth and a rising standard of living for municipalities. Low land costs have encouraged local governments to acquire and set aside land for industrial development speculatively, in the hope of attracting industrial investment. Much of that land has remained idle as hoped-for investment failed to materialize. By 1996, there were roughly 116,000 hectares of idle, undeveloped land in economic development zones, over half of which was converted farmland that could no longer be converted back.

Low administratively set compensation levels for rural land also create incentives for illegal land transactions that allow rural collectives, rather than urban governments, to profit from conversion, thereby undermining the state’s control over land use. These low compensation levels also create incentives for other types of illegal land transactions, notably forcible takeovers by local officials of land whose owners are unwilling to sell.

Conclusion

The central government’s attempts to limit farmland conversion by administrative measures are likely to continue to be ineffectual as long as local governments and rural collectives continue to have such strong incentives to convert farmland. Institutional reform is thus critical for improving farmland preservation efforts and increasing land use efficiency in general. Reform efforts are also hampered by fragmentation of authority. The Ministry of Land and Resources has jurisdiction over land but not residential construction, industrial development, or local government finance; the latter are overseen by various ministries, each of which has its own distinct set of interests and concerns. Reform requires a cooperative effort that takes these diverse interests into account.

Erik Lichtenberg is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Chengri Ding is an associate professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is director of the Chinese Land Policy and Urban Management Program cosponsored by the University of Maryland and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

This article summarizes their 2004 Lincoln Institute working paper, Farmland Preservation in China: Status and Issues for Further Research, which is available here.

References

Deininger, K., and S. Jin. 2003. The impact of property rights on households’ investment, risk coping, and policy preferences: Evidence from China. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 851–882.

Gale, F., ed. 2002. China’s food and agriculture: Issues for the 21st century. Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 775, Economic Research Service, US Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC (April).

Ho, S.P.S., and G.C.S. Lin. 2004. Converting land to nonagricultural use in China’s coastal province. Modern China 30: 81–112.

Huang, J., S. Rozelle, and M.W. Rosegrant. 1999. China’s food economy to the twenty-first century: Supply, demand, and trade. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 737–766.

Jacoby, H. G., G. Li, and S. Rozelle. 2002. Hazards of expropriation: Tenure insecurity and investment in rural China. American Economic Review 92: 1420–1447.

Jin, S., J. Huang, R. Hu, and S. Rozelle. 2002. The creation and spread of technology and total factor productivity in China’s agriculture. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 84: 916–930.

Ministry of Land and Resources. 2003. Communique on Land and Resources of China, 2002. Beijing.

Smil, V. 1999. China’s agricultural land. The China Quarterly, 414–429.

In June the Lincoln Institute convened a roundtable of experts from around the country to examine how and why property ownership and title problems exacerbate abandonment. The group debated the merits of public policy intervention, identified policies with the greatest potential for success, and outlined anticipated complications and issues in remedying abandonment. This article reports on that discussion.

The prevalence of vacant and abandoned property in U.S. cities has reached crisis proportions despite efforts to foster reuse of these sites. A mix of macroeconomic and demographic trends, such as deindustrialization, population shifts from urban and rural to suburban communities, and the shrinking urban middle class, have precipitated the decline in real estate demand that can lead to property abandonment in certain neighborhoods.

These trends, along with other factors, have resulted in various abandonment “triggers” (Mallach 2004) depending on the property type: inadequate cash flow; multiple liens; liens that exceed market value; fraudulent transactions; predatory lending; and uncertainties regarding environmental, legal, and financial liability. These triggers often prolong abandonment or relegate a property to permanent disuse, particularly in markets characterized by widespread disinvestment. Many of these triggers also “cloud” the property title and interfere with a potential new owner’s efforts to acquire property title or obtain site control in order to make improvements or commence reuse activities.

Comparable data on vacancy and abandonment across cities are difficult to obtain and vary widely due to different definitions and gaps in data sources, particularly in commercial and industrial land uses. Estimates of the amount of abandoned housing stock range from 4 to 6 percent in “declining” cities to 10 percent or more in “seriously distressed” cities (Mallach 2002). The following city statistics from Census 2000 data and city records only suggest the scope of the problem.

• Cleveland counts more than 25,000 vacant and 11,000 abandoned properties (National Vacant Properties Campaign 2005).
• Baltimore has more than 42,000 vacant housing units, constituting 14 percent of its housing stock, and more than 17,000 vacant lots (National Vacant Properties Campaign 2005).
• Philadelphia’s vacant properties total more than 60,000 (27,000 abandoned residential structures, 2,000 abandoned commercial buildings, and 32,000 vacant lots) with nearly 10 percent of the city’s housing described as abandoned (Black 2003).
• St. Louis has one of the highest vacant housing rates in the country, at over 29,000 or nearly 17 percent of total housing units (National Vacant Properties Campaign 2005).

The abandonment problem is even more profound and perhaps less susceptible to reversal in some smaller cities of less than 100,000 that have lost at least 25 percent of their population over the last few decades. The situation in Camden, New Jersey, East St. Louis, Missouri, and other cities with large-scale abandonment suggests a severely weakened market with multiple contributing socioeconomic factors. Where the number of abandoned properties indicates a systemic problem, there may be an inherent limitation on the ability to stimulate market activity.

This problem has ramifications for the quality of our public and private lives, because abandonment can lead to other detrimental social and fiscal impacts: depressed property values of surrounding properties (Temple University 2001); increased criminal activity; health and safety concerns due to environmental hazards; and additional disinvestment. All of these outgrowths of abandonment raise costs for the city, including site cleanup and demolition, provision of legal services, police and fire protection, and legal enforcement.

As urban vacancy and abandonment increase and suburban open space becomes less available or attractive for development, market pressures may improve redevelopment prospects, as in Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta. However, for several reasons we cannot just wait for this to happen everywhere.

First, the market does not always operate perfectly, in part because it is subject to existing laws and regulations (e.g., tax foreclosure statutes and clean title requirements) that impose high transaction costs to taking title and therefore affect market redevelopment. Some level of public policy innovation is needed, whether reform of existing laws or new laws and practices. Second, preserving open space is arguably a public benefit, but that also implies the need for public action to steer new development to previously developed properties. Finally, decisions about whether to spend public money, time, and effort are not made in a vacuum, but require an understanding of the problem, the available tools, and the resources and skills to implement them.

The magnitude of the problem suggests there are no easy answers. Multiple, interconnected market factors and differing state legal frameworks mean that the remedies to abandonment vary. In an effort to better define the public strategies for addressing the problem in different settings, this article sets forth the challenges of overcoming property acquisition barriers to abandonment, outlines a range of remedies, and explores potential next steps.

Neighborhood Redevelopment in New Jersey

Several years ago, Housing and Neighborhood Redevelopment Services, Inc. (HANDS), a nonprofit community development corporation (CDC) in Orange, New Jersey, tried to acquire an abandoned multifamily property. The property was burdened by tax liens that the city had sold to third-party purchasers, a strategy that cities use to raise revenue for other needs. The lien holders included out-of-state investment groups and speculators, and the current property owners did not have the financial ability or desire to redeem the liens. No entity was taking responsibility for property upkeep, so it sat idle and accumulated more tax liens, further elevating the stakes involved in clearing the title and heightening the financial, legal, and psychological barriers to acquisition. HANDS had a plan for neighborhood revitalization and a productive use for the property, but it lacked the funds for acquisition and the tools to clear the legal title.

Over the past few years, however, New Jersey reformed state programs to provide up-front subsidies for property acquisition, removal of liens, and other activities necessary for CDCs to establish site control (Meyer 2005). At the same time, a new state law, the Abandoned Properties Rehabilitation Act (2004), accelerated foreclosure action on vacant property by eliminating the waiting period between the time a potential new owner gives notice of its interest in foreclosing and lien acquisition. In cases where the owner will not rehabilitate a property, the new law allows the municipality to undertake rehabilitation or find a CDC to do so.

In this instance, HANDS took advantage of the new state law and financial incentives to acquire the multifamily property and convert it into housing for first-time homebuyers as part of the CDC’s larger neighborhood revitalization strategy. A few other organizations have begun to use these tools to acquire and redevelop single-family and multifamily homes around the state.

Ownership and Title Issues

Where abandonment or prolonged vacancy occurs due to owner inaction, two options exist for reuse. First, the property may be left abandoned indefinitely, or until the market changes. Alternatively, a new owner (e.g., the municipality, a CDC, or a private developer) may intervene, acquire the property, and carry out rehabilitation or reuse. It is this second alternative and the remedies for implementing it that concern us here. New methods for acquiring abandoned property will help to obtain property control from unwilling, unknown, or incapable owners.

However, the debate between these two alternatives raises significant issues that need further exploration. If the primary objective is to put the property back into productive use, one impetus for intervention is to eliminate the legal barriers to transferring the property to a new owner. Clear title is a critical issue. The multiple tax liens that encumber the title, and often cause the property’s abandonment in the first place, can cloud the title and prevent effective title transfer.

These title complications can be further compounded by the use of certain supposed remedies. For example, forcing title transfer involuntarily, from an unwilling owner or in abandonment cases where ownership is in doubt, can result in a cloudy title that may jeopardize obtaining title insurance—a mandatory precursor to procurement of conventional financing—and thereafter present title problems whenever the property changes hands. Clear title is part of the larger challenge for many states that do not have efficient, workable processes for moving title into the hands of responsible owners.

Remedies: Laws, Practices, and Tools

Municipalities seeking to reduce their stocks of vacant and abandoned property may be inspired by strategies and programs used in other localities, but they should carefully assess their own situations first. Differences in state laws may require a variety of approaches, such as reforming existing laws; improving local practices and implementation; and introducing innovative new tools. Some remedies to facilitate acquisition of vacant and abandoned properties for redevelopment seek to

• tighten code enforcement practices;
• strengthen nuisance abatement laws;
• pass a receivership law or encourage CDCs and municipalities to use existing receivership powers;
• reform tax foreclosure laws;
• use land banks or similar acquisition vehicles; or
• exercise eminent domain powers.

Remedy choice depends on the property’s stage of abandonment, the current land use (e.g., multifamily rental, single-family house, commercial, or industrial), the property’s ownership status, and state statutes and regulations. A property at an early stage of abandonment due to general neglect and code violations, including conditions that adversely affect the health, safety, or well-being of building residents or neighbors, may be turned around with regular inspections and enforcement. These preventive remedies can slow disinvestment and prevent permanent abandonment by forcing a known owner to either renovate the property or transfer it to another entity willing to do so. Effective code enforcement varies widely because it is a function of local practice, but persistent municipal issuance of orders for code violations is critical.

Localities may also enforce state-authorized nuisance abatement laws to address these code violations by requiring an owner to make repairs or improvements, such as trash removal, structural repairs, and building demolition. If an owner refuses, then the municipality can enter the property to undertake these activities and seek to collect the costs from the owner. If that fails, the municipality may place liens on the abandoned property equal to the costs of these actions, enforcing them through foreclosure actions, or in many states by attaching the owner’s assets. The effectiveness of nuisance abatement laws varies across states, depending on the definition of “nuisance,” the prescribed statutory penalties, and how the local authority chooses to carry out nuisance actions (Mallach 2004).

Significant disinvestment generally occurs where property owners fail to undertake property management responsibilities that cause significant disrepair; stop paying back taxes, utilities, or other public services; and/or allow the property to remain vacant for more than a designated period, usually six to twelve months. Some of these complicated cases require innovative, sometimes controversial remedies.

Under Baltimore’s vacant property receivership ordinance, for example, the city or its CDC-designee may petition a court to appoint a receiver for any property with a vacant building violation notice, though it is generally used in the case of severely deteriorated single-family houses. The receiver may collect rents (if the property is still occupied), make repairs, and attach a super-priority lien on the property equal to the expense; or immediately sell the property to a private or nonprofit developer who will conduct the rehabilitation. Advocates argue that the receivership approach is beneficial because it focuses on fixing the property (bringing an action in rem, literally against the “thing”) rather than on punishing the owner (known as an in personam action, or against the person) (Kelly 2004).

In Cuyahoga County (where Cleveland is located), CDCs have used nuisance abatement as a form of receivership. In these cases, the CDC brings such an action in a special housing court to abate a nuisance and have a receiver appointed, and then the CDC collects the incurred improvement costs from the owner or conveys the property to a new owner.

In both Baltimore and Cleveland, the concept is used effectively against speculating investors who buy inexpensive, dilapidated properties and do nothing but pay taxes, hoping that the revitalization work of others in the community will increase their property values. These “free riders” frustrate efforts to identify them as targets in a legal action by creating sham ownership entities or providing the vacant house as the owner’s only mailing address (Kelly 2004).

Nuisance abatement or receivership actions ultimately may not provide secure title for the subject properties, or may cause properties to be more susceptible to unclear title outcomes. Receivership can create an encumbrance on the title that is difficult to extinguish, thus clouding the title and providing an excuse for banks not to lend on the property. The current title system, as adhered to by title companies and financial institutions, works relatively well for tracking and recording straightforward, linear property transactions, but is not set up to handle properties with multiple liens or encumbrances arising from checkerboard-type transactions that are characteristic of vacant and abandoned properties. Nevertheless, these actions constitute an underutilized and powerful tool, when used in the right legal and market circumstances.

Tax foreclosure is the most commonly used property acquisition tool for local government. It involves the taking of title to properties where owners have failed to pay their property taxes or other obligations to a government entity (e.g., a municipality, school district, or county). Third parties, such as CDCs or private developers, can also use tax foreclosure proceedings, as governed by state law, to acquire properties. The tax foreclosure process is based on the principle that a tax lien has priority over private liens, such as mortgages, so when the buyer forecloses on the tax lien, any private liens are extinguished and the property is acquired “free and clear” (Mallach 2004).

The common problems associated with this otherwise powerful tool arise from the lengthy time periods imposed by state statutes on different stages in the foreclosure process (e.g., the time in which the owner has a right to redeem his or her rights to the property); the length of time that taxes must be delinquent before a sale can occur; and whether the state first requires sale of the liens or sale of the property outright. Constitutionality standards also require strict notice requirements to all parties holding a legal interest in the property. Although rewriting state statutes to reduce or eliminate these time requirements may be a politically protracted process, state law reform can occur. For example, the law passed last year in New Jersey substantially reduced the notice periods, and Michigan’s tax foreclosure reform offers faster judicial proceedings to increase the timeliness of property transfer (Mallach 2004).

An increasingly popular tool is the local land bank, a governmental entity that acquires, holds, and manages vacant, abandoned, and tax-delinquent property. The properties are acquired primarily through tax foreclosure, and then the land bank develops or, more likely, holds and manages the properties until a new use or owner is identified. Land banks can provide marketable title to properties previously encumbered with liens and complicated ownership histories. They also provide localities with a way to create an inventory and monitor properties, and assemble properties into larger tracts to improve opportunities for targeted economic development.

Each city’s land bank is organized and operates differently. Some operate within city agencies, while others exist as legally separate corporations (Alexander 2005). The Genesee County, Michigan land bank has pioneered a way to self-finance redevelopment by using the financial returns on the sale of one property to support the costs of holding other properties, an approach that ultimately reduces municipal costs (Kildee 2004).

Exercise of eminent domain powers pursuant to the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is another remedy that transfers real property titles to the government for public use. Targeting blighted properties remains an agreed upon use of eminent domain, although state statutes differ on how it is carried out. Cities are certain to be more wary of using this tool in the wake of the controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision, Susette Kelo et al. v. City of New London, Connecticut, et al. (Kelo), which sanctioned New London’s condemnation of nonblighted private property for economic development purposes. The Kelo ruling has caused state legislatures around the country to consider reevaluating the meaning of public use and limiting the circumstances under which government entities can utilize this powerful remedy.

Without overall market improvements, it is unlikely that these remedies alone can give cities, neighbors, courts, or community nonprofit organizations the tools needed to address the vacant and abandoned property problem. However, anecdotal experience and discussions at the Lincoln Institute roundtable indicate that these tools have been used successfully on a case-by-case basis; whether they affect change on a neighborhood- or city-wide basis and over a period of years is still unclear. Success may depend, in part, on market strength and conditions, but also on localities’ vigilance (for instance, with code enforcement), willingness to take risks and use new tools, and institutional capacity.

Local Impacts of Remedy Implementation

Even where one or more of these tools is legal, available, and effective in eventually converting vacant and abandoned property to productive uses, there are three types of hurdles that may prevent valuable projects from being pursued: local administrative and procedural barriers; unintended and potentially negative consequences; and ancillary local strategies that can enhance or decrease their effectiveness.

Local barriers include costs to cities of administering, managing, and implementing these conversion activities; political opposition, inaction or apathy; and lack of local knowledge or capacity. The up-front costs to cities or nonprofit entities of taking ownership to dilapidated properties and making improvements are not trivial. Also, some tools may require investment in training, innovation, and minor risk-taking by local governments. Studies and experience are beginning to reveal that, for similar reasons, localities are not taking advantage of tools already provided for in some state statutes. One researcher found that local governments in Massachusetts were not utilizing existing mechanisms to address tax delinquent properties (Regan 2000). New Jersey is reportedly experiencing a similar phenomenon, where local entities are underutilizing tools available since adoption of new abandoned property laws and funding programs.

The possibility of unintended consequences fostered by intervention in the market should not be an argument for no intervention, but it is a reminder that any remedy needs to fit market conditions and be used with appropriate reuse restrictions or incentives to avoid new problems. One downside to successful neighborhood revitalization is gentrification, which is the displacement of lower-income residents by new, wealthier residents who can afford the higher prices placed on renovated properties. For instance, in Atlanta and Boston neighborhoods with relatively strong metropolitan-wide real estate markets, carrots and sticks must be used selectively to promote the transfer of abandoned property in some areas. One way to minimize the extent of gentrification is to require that any residential reuse maintain an income mix by preserving a percentage of units as long-term affordable housing. Another model is the nonprofit community land trust (CLT), which generally owns the land and provides affordable housing in perpetuity by leasing it to the building owners (Greenstein and Sungu-Eryilmaz 2005).

Local neighborhood revitalization strategies combined with other appropriate remedies can improve the chances of success as cities and CDCs work to address their redevelopment challenges. These strategies may include documenting and inventorying abandoned properties; targeting pivotal properties in neighborhoods selected for redevelopment; increasing home ownership; forging partnerships with business groups, city hall, hospitals, universities, and other nonprofits; and identifying and reforming significant policies and regulations on tax liens.

Communities must also continue to be innovative and to adapt available tools and remedies to address ever-changing local abandonment triggers. One such challenge is the recent phenomenon of lien securitization, which occurs when one entity buys up multiple liens on multiple properties and bundles or securitizes them for resale. This puts the liens into the hands of investors who presumably have no interest in the local economy or the property’s productive reuse, and can prevent title transfer, especially in weak secondary markets.

Next Steps in Meeting the Abandonment Challenge

Property title and acquisition obstacles are not the only barriers to fostering productive reuse of abandoned property, and removing these obstacles may not overcome the abandonment cycle. However, use of the remedies outlined here is an essential first step, and several next steps could significantly enhance their implementation. First, a pressing need exists to clarify the meaning of “clear title,” possibly by updating title insurance company standards to reflect new practices.

Second, case studies of successful and failed tools and mechanisms in weak and strong urban markets could provide valuable lessons. Possible criteria to evaluate a remedy’s success or failure include the frequency and extent of their use; their applicability to all property uses (residential, commercial, industrial); their effectiveness in fully clearing the title; unexpected consequences; and, if possible, the property’s ultimate reuse and its sustainability.

Third, a study of states where statutory reform has occurred, such as Michigan or New Jersey, would offer an analysis of how such reform has impacted property transfer and reuse. Finally, since local entities play a key role in tool implementation, improving local capacity through education about these tools and their importance in revitalizing urban areas would be another crucial next step in ultimately reducing the numbers of vacant and abandoned properties.

Lavea Brachman, a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2004–2005, continues to research public policy remedies and the roles of local nonprofits and government entities in fostering brownfield and abandoned property reuse. She also directs the Delta Institute’s Ohio office, a nonprofit working on sustainable development solutions to environmental quality and community and economic development challenges.

References

Alexander, Frank. 2005. Land bank authorities: A guide for the creation and operation of local land banks. New York, NY: Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

Black, Karen. 2003. Reclaiming abandoned Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania Low Income Housing Coalition Report, March.

Greenstein, Rosalind, and Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz. 2005. Community land trusts: Leasing land for affordable housing. Land Lines 17(2): 8–10.

Kelly, Jr., James J. 2004. Refreshing the heart of the city: Vacant building receivership as a tool for neighborhood revitalization and community empowerment. 13-WTR J. Affordable Housing & Community Dev. Law 210.

Kildee, Dan. 2004. The Genesee County land bank initiative. Flint, MI: Genesee County Land Bank.

Mallach, Alan. 2002. Abandoned properties, redevelopment and the future of America’s shrinking cities. Working paper. Montclair, NJ: National Housing Institute.

———. 2004. Addressing the problem of urban property abandonment: A guide for policy makers and practitioners. Montclair, NJ: National Housing Institute, April.

Meyer, Wayne T. 2005. High-impact development for long-term sustainable neighborhood change: Acquiring, rehabilitating, and selling problem properties. Orange, NJ: HANDS, Inc.

National Vacant Properties Campaign. 2005. www.vacantproperties.org.

Regan, Charleen. 2000. Back on the roll in Massachusetts: A report on strategies to return tax title properties to productive use. Boston: Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA).

Temple University Center for Public Policy and Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project. 2001. Blight-free Philadelphia: A public-private strategy to create and enhance neighborhood value. Philadelphia, PA, October.