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This article reviews the Western State Planning Leadership Retreat, in which state planners from 13 western states have participated. The retreats provide a forum for state-level planners to compare their experiences, learn from each other’s successes and failures, and build a common base of experience for land use planning in their states and across the region. Rather than promote a particular approach to land use planning and growth management, the retreats encourage planners to explore a range of land use planning strategies for responding to growth and land use issues in the West. This article summarizes what we learned during the first two retreats in 2000 and 2001.
Forces and trends of land use planning. The West is changing and there are many differences in the states’ approach to land use planning. New forces and trends are redefining the region’s quality of life, communities, and landscapes—directly influencing how we approach land use planning and growth management. Within these trends, western state planners recognize a variety of common challenges—pockets of explosive population growth, sprawl, drought, out-of-date legislation, a lack of funding, and a lack of public and political support for planning, and changing the way development occurs.
Major themes related to land use planning and growth in the West;
Why plan? How can we build public and political support for planning? Historically, land use planning was motivated by a concern to promote orderly development of the landscape, preserve some open spaces, and provide consistency among developments. These continue to be important objectives, but they are insufficient for building public and political support.
What is the role of state government? State programs should support local land use planning efforts, and should try to engage the “big players,” such as transportation departments, to work with local jurisdictions and maintain their state’s economic competitiveness by encouraging local communities to improve their quality of life through infill, redevelopment, and preserving the natural environment.
How can regional approaches to land use planning complement state actions? Regionalism allows multiple jurisdictions to share common resources and manage joint services, such as water treatment facilities and roads. Regional approaches are gaining momentum, but they also create new challenges.
Foster effective planning and growth management through collaboration. Collaboration can be defined many ways, but most planners agree with the premise that if you bring together the right people with good information they will create effective, sustainable solutions to their shared problems. Collaboration, when done correctly, allows the people most affected by land use planning decisions to drive the decisions.
How do we measure success? In 1998, the Arizona legislature passed the Growing Smarter Act, which was amended in 2000, and created a Growing Smarter Commission. The act reformed land use planning and zoning policies and required more public participation in local land use planning. This brings us full circle to our first theme—Why are we planning?
The Three Cs of Planning—three recommendations emerge from the western state planners’ retreats that can be implemented throughout the country. First, identify the most compelling reason to plan in your community; second, rely on collaborative approaches; third, foster regional connections.
“This [the West] is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”
Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water (Penguin Books 1980, 38)
During the past two years, state planners in 13 western states have met in the Western State Planning Leadership Retreat, an annual event sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Western Consensus Council. Cosponsors include the Western Governors’ Association, the Council of State Governments–WEST, and the Western Planners’ Association. The retreats provide a forum for state-level planners to compare their experiences, learn from each other’s successes and failures, and build a common base of experience for planning in their states and across the region. Rather than promote a particular approach to planning and growth management, the retreats encourage planners to explore a range of strategies for responding to growth and land use issues in the West. This article summarizes what we have learned during the first two retreats in 2000 and 2001.
Forces and Trends
The West is changing. New forces and trends are redefining the region’s quality of life, communities and landscapes, directly influencing how we approach land use planning and growth management. One force that sets the West apart from other regions of the country is the overwhelming presence of the landscape. The West has more land and fewer people than any other region, yet is also very urbanized. More people live in urban centers than in rural communities.
The dominance of land in the politics and public policy of the West is due in part to the large amount of land governed by federal and tribal entities (see Figure 1). More than 90 percent of all federal land in the U.S. lies in Alaska and the 11 westernmost contiguous states. The U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manage most of the West’s geography and significantly influence the politics of land use decisions. Indian tribes govern one-fifth of the interior West and are key players in managing water, fish and wildlife.
The West is also the fastest growing region of the country (see Figure 2). The five fastest-growing states of the 1990s were Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Idaho. Between 1990 and 1998, the region’s cities grew by 25 percent and its rural areas by 18 percent, both significantly higher rates than elsewhere in the U.S. As western demographics diversify, the political geography has grown remarkably homogeneous. Following the 2000 elections, Republicans held three-quarters of the congressional districts in the interior West (see Figure 3) and all governorships except the coastal states of California, Oregon and Washington.
Within these trends, western state planners recognize a variety of common challenges—pockets of explosive population growth, sprawl, drought, out-of-date legislation, a lack of funding, and a lack of public and political support for planning and changing the way development occurs in the West. They also point out many differences in their states’ approaches to planning. Oregon and Hawaii have long-standing statewide land use planning efforts, but planning in Nevada is a recent phenomenon, limited mainly to the Las Vegas and Reno areas. Vast federal holdings in Nevada, Idaho and Utah dictate land use management more than in other states, and Arizona and New Mexico share planning responsibilities with many sovereign tribal governments. Alaska and Wyoming—with small populations and little or no growth—do very little planning.
Major Themes
Based on the first two retreats, we have identified six major themes related to planning and growth in the West.
Why plan? How can we build public and political support for planning? Historically, planning was motivated by a concern to promote orderly development of the landscape, preserve some open spaces, and provide consistency among developments. These continue to be important objectives, but they are insufficient for building public and political support. Particularly during economic recession, planning takes a back seat—the public can focus on only so many problems at once. Today, the most compelling argument for planning is that it can be a vehicle to promote economic development and sustain the quality of life. People move to the West and create jobs because they like the quality of life in the region, and planners need to tap into this motivation.
In Utah, for example, quality of life is an economic imperative, so state planners tie their work to enhancing quality of life rather than to limiting or directing growth. It is used to integrate economic vitality and environmental protection. Several years ago, business leaders and others created Envision Utah, a private-public partnership. Participants use visualization techniques and aerial photos, mapping growth as it might occur without planning, and then again under planned cluster developments with greenbelts and community centers. These “alternative futures” scenarios help citizens picture the changes that are coming and the alternatives for guiding those changes in their communities. As Utah’s state planner says, “Growth will happen, and our job is to preserve quality. That way, when growth slows, we will still have a high quality of life.”
Kent Briggs, executive director for the Council of State Governments–WEST (a regional association for state legislators), and Jim Souby, executive director of the Western Governors’ Association, acknowledge the difficulty of nurturing public and political support for growth management in the West. They agree that political power shifts quickly from one party to the other, and yet is a lagging indicator of cultural, demographic and economic change. Governors and legislators might be more convinced to support land use planning, they say, by using visualization techniques to help them understand the costs of existing patterns of development, and to picture the desired future of our communities and landscapes.
How much planning is enough, and who should be in the driver’s seat? Arizona and Colorado have smart growth programs designed to help communities plan for growth and preserve open space. In the November 2000 elections, citizen initiatives in both states introduced some of the nation’s most stringent planning requirements, but both initiatives failed by a 70 to 30 percent vote, suggesting that citizens want to maintain flexibility and freedom—and local control—when it comes to planning and growth management. The story is similar in Hawaii, where business profitability—not zoning maps—directs land use. In May 2001, Hawaii’s governor vetoed a smart growth initiative because it was perceived as being too environmental and would limit developers’ ability to convert agricultural lands.
This emphasis on home rule or local control is supported by a recent survey of citizens in Montana, conducted by the Montana Association of Realtors. In the survey, 67 percent of respondents said that city or county governments should have the power to make land use decisions, while 60 percent opposed increasing state involvement in managing growth-related problems.
In Oregon, citizens narrowly passed Measure 7, an initiative requiring state and local governments to pay private property owners for any regulations that restrict the use or reduce the value of real property. While the impacts and constitutionality of this initiative are still being debated, it sends a strong message to planners in a state that has had one of the most progressive land use and growth management programs for 25 years. The message, according to Oregon’s state planner, is to not rest on your successes, and to keep citizens and communities engaged in an ongoing discussion about the effectiveness of land use planning. He also stressed the need to balance preservation with appropriate development, emphasizing that “good planning doesn’t just place limits on growth and development.”
What is the role of state government? Douglas Porter, keynote speaker at the first retreat and a nationally known consultant on land use and growth policy, says that one of the most important state roles is to offset the lack of will to plan at the local level. He says that state programs should support local planning efforts, and should try to engage the “big players,” such as transportation departments, to work with local jurisdictions. Porter also suggests that state governments can maintain their state’s economic competitiveness by encouraging local communities to improve their quality of life through infill, redevelopment, and preserving the natural environment.
Oregon’s state government attracted $20 million in federal funding to help communities overhaul zoning ordinances and remove obstacles to mixed uses. Colorado created an Office of Smart Growth to provide technical assistance on comprehensive planning; document best practices for planning and development; maintain a list of qualified mediators for land use disputes; and provide grants for regional efforts in high growth areas. In Arizona, Montana and New Mexico, state planning offices provide a range of technical services to assist communities, such as clarifying state laws, promoting public participation, and fostering intergovernmental coordination.
Jim Souby suggests that one of the most effective roles of state government is to promote market-based strategies and tax incentives. “Tax what you don’t like, subsidize what you do like,” Souby says. Other incentives might include cost sharing and state investment strategies—similar to Maryland and Oregon—to drive development in a positive direction.
How can regional approaches to land use planning complement state actions? Regionalism allows multiple jurisdictions to share common resources and manage joint services, such as water treatment facilities and roads. In Washington, citizens recently rejected the top-down smart growth model popularized in Florida due to concerns over home rule and private property rights. In response, the state legislature approved a system of regional planning boards that instill some statewide consistency while allowing for regional and local differences.
Nevada, despite double-digit growth in the Las Vegas and Reno areas, does not have a state planning office. However, the legislature mandated Washoe County (home of Reno and Sparks) to create a regional planning commission to address growth issues jointly rather than in a piecemeal manner. Key municipal and county officials in Clark County (Las Vegas) formed their planning coalition voluntarily—compelled to cooperate by the highest growth rate in the nation. This coalition recently presented the state legislature with a regional plan that emphasizes resolving growth issues locally rather than at the state level.
In New Mexico, the city and county of Santa Fe each recently updated their comprehensive land use plans. The plans were fine, except that they were stand-alones prepared with no coordination. Citizens demanded better integration of planning efforts and pushed for a new regional planning authority. Within 18 months, citizens and officials developed a joint land use plan for the five-mile zone around the city, and the regional authority is now developing zoning districts and an annexation plan. In Idaho, city and county officials in Boise voluntarily created the Treasure Valley Partnership as a forum to discuss policies for controlling sprawl, and to coordinate the delivery of services. They are also reviewing the possibility of light rail development.
Regional approaches are gaining momentum, but they also create new challenges. For example, the city of Reno has been reluctant to join the neighboring city of Sparks and Washoe County in revising their regional plan. With no enforcement or penalty at the state level, the other jurisdictions can do little to encourage Reno’s involvement. Likewise, New Mexico has no policy framework for regional planning and thus no guidelines on how to share taxing authority, land use decision making and enforcement responsibilities.
Foster effective planning and growth management through collaboration. Collaboration can be defined many ways, but most planners agree with the premise that if you bring together the right people with good information they will create effective, sustainable solutions to their shared problems. Collaborative forums allow local officials to weigh and balance competing viewpoints, and to learn more about the issues at hand. According to Jim Souby, local efforts should incorporate federal land managers because they play such a dominant role in the region’s political geography. Kent Briggs agrees that collaboration, when done correctly, allows the people most affected by land use decisions to drive the decisions. Collaborative processes, when they include all affected interests, can generate enormous political power, even when such efforts do not have any formal authority. While it may be appropriate in some cases to have national or state goals, it is ultimately up to the people who live in the communities and watersheds of the West to determine their future, according to Briggs.
How do we measure success? In 1998, the Arizona legislature passed the Growing Smarter Act, which was amended in 2000, and created a Growing Smarter Commission. The act reformed land use planning and zoning policies and required more public participation in local planning. The commission recommended that the state should monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of land use planning on an ongoing basis. The governor recently appointed an oversight council to continue this work, but council members say that clear benchmarks are needed against which to evaluate the effectiveness of land use planning—a percentage of open space preserved, for example, or a threshold on new development that triggers tighter growth restrictions. Arizona law, however, simply identifies the issues that must be addressed in comprehensive land use plans. It does not set specific standards or expectations, making meaningful evaluation impossible. This brings us full circle to our first theme—Why are we planning?
The Three Cs of Planning
Three recommendations emerge from the western state planners’ retreats that can be implemented throughout the country.
First, identify the most compelling reason to plan in your community. What are you trying to promote, or prevent? Be explicit about the values driving the planning process. Emphasize the link between quality of life, economic development and land use planning as a way to sustain the economy and the environment. Remember that people must have meaningful reasons to participate constructively in the planning process.
Second, rely on collaborative approaches. Engage the full range of stakeholders, and do it in a meaningful way. A good collaborative process generates a broader understanding of the issues—since more people are sharing information and ideas—and also leads to more durable, widely supported decisions. Collaboration may also be the most effective way to accommodate the needs and interests of local citizens within a regional approach and when the state’s role is limited.
Third, foster regional connections. Recognize that planning is an ongoing process, not a product to be produced and placed on a shelf. Link the present to the future using visualization and alternative futures techniques. Build monitoring and evaluation strategies into plan implementation. Encourage regional approaches that build on a common sense of place and address transboundary issues. Emphasize that regionalism can lead to greater efficiencies and economies of scale by coordinating efforts and sharing resources.
Matthew McKinney is executive director of the Western Consensus Council in Helena, Montana, a nonprofit organization that helps citizens and officials shape effective natural resource and other public policy through inclusive, informed and deliberative public processes. Will Harmon is the communications coordinator for the Western Consensus Council and a freelance writer based in Helena.
References
Center for Resource Management. 1999. The Western Charter: Initiating a Regional Conversation. Boulder, CO: Center for Resource Management.
Kwartler, Michael. 1998. Regulating the good you can’t think of. Urban Design International 3(1):13-21.
Steinitz, Carl and Susan McDowell. 2001. Alternative futures for Monroe County, Pennsylvania: A case study in applying ecological principles, in Applying Ecological Principles to Land Management, edited by Virginia H. Dale and Richard A. Haeuber. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 165-189.
Swanson, Larry. 1999. The emerging ‘new economy’ of the Rocky Mountain West: Recent change and future expectation. The Rocky Mountain West’s Changing Landscape 1(1):16-27.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 2000. Environmental Planning for Communities: A Guide to the Environmental Visioning Process Utilizing a Geographic Information System (GIS). (September).
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While the issue of managing suburban growth has long been on the Lincoln Institute’s agenda, “sprawl” is now receiving a great deal of attention from citizens, policy analysts and policymakers, as well as the popular press. However, crafting policies to respond to suburban growth is extremely difficult for a variety of reasons.
First, we lack a public consensus about what sprawl is. Even paraphrasing former US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “. . . but I know it when I see it” does not work in this case. For example, one often hears from anti-sprawl activists that they do not want their community to be “another Los Angeles.” However, Los Angeles is more densely populated today than it was 30 years ago.
Dowell Myers and Alicia Kitsuse report that “the Los Angeles urbanized area (the region excluding mountains and deserts) has the highest gross population densities among the 20 largest metropolitan regions, higher even than New York.”1 Exploring deeper, one finds that “Los Angeles” is code for a variety of social problems that are concentrated in our nation’s cities, such as urban crime, teenage pregnancy, poverty, persistent unemployment, and a variety of other concerns, not the least of which is the organization of uses in metropolitan space.
A second challenge to crafting policies to respond to suburban growth is the threat to anticipated economic gain by some of those who own undeveloped land on the fringes of metropolitan areas. For example, one can imagine the great interest these landowners would have in negotiations to redraw urban growth boundaries. The line on the map can have significant monetary implications for a parcel depending on which side of the line it lands.
A third challenge is the variety of existing policies and laws that have encouraged suburban growth over the past 50 years. In a recent Institute-supported study, Patricia Burgess and Thomas Bier make a strong case that governmental fragmentation on two fronts contributes to a policy environment that supports sprawl.2 Fragmentation between levels of government makes regional planning approaches difficult, while fragmentation across functional agencies impedes comprehensive solutions. In another study, Joseph Gyourko and Richard Voith have argued that the combination of the federal mortgage interest deductions and local-level exclusionary zoning have encouraged low-density residential development in jurisdictions surrounding central cities.3
Finally, there is little agreement about desired future development patterns. Thus, if the forces that create sprawl are based on a combination of federal, state and local policies, if our existing landscape reflects both public and private actions, and if the desired future is unclear, how does one even begin to address the issue? The Lincoln Institute’s mission is to contribute to and improve the quality of debate about land policies. Toward that end, our work on sprawl is multi-dimensional, focusing on educational programs for policy officials at the federal, state and local levels.
Programs for Federal and State Officials
Land use issues have increased in importance on the federal policy agenda, and the Institute has begun working with Region 1 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), based in Boston, to develop a training course for senior administrators. Many staff at EPA are not schooled in land use planning, but their work in traditional EPA areas such as water or air quality requires that they pay attention to land use issues.
Harvey Jacobs, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, developed and taught a course to two groups of EPA administrators in the fall of 1998. Response to the two-day program, which included the historical and institutional context of land use planning, was so positive that the EPA asked the Institute to offer this program annually as part of EPA’s required orientation for new administrators.
At the state level, the Institute has recently supported programs to facilitate information exchanges among legislators and planning directors. Patricia Salkin of the Government Law Center at the Albany Law School has researched lessons to be learned from states that attempted state-level legislation on growth management, but failed. Among her findings was the lack of in-depth knowledge among state legislators and executive-level policymakers about the causes and consequences of suburban sprawl. In order for any kind of growth management legislation to be passed successfully, sponsorship is needed by the appropriate legislator. Depending on the state, this might be the chair of the Local Affairs Committee or a different committee leader.
In an attempt to respond to this need for better understanding about sprawl on the part of legislators and their staffs, the Lincoln Institute and the Albany Law School cosponsored a briefing session in February 1999, in Albany. It coincided with the legislative session and, fortuitously, was held on the day of a press conference announcing that the bipartisan “Smart Growth Economic Competitiveness Act of 1999” had been filed in both houses of the New York legislature. The bill includes three key provisions:
(1) It charges the Governor to create an inter-agency council to review existing policies related to growth and development.
(2) It creates a task force to study the issue and come up with recommendations.
(3) It asks the Governor to provide grants for regional compact efforts.
National experts on sprawl, state legislators and commissioners, and Mayor William A. Johnson of Rochester and members of his staff exchanged up-to-date information on related state-level efforts, as well as possible resources for their continued work on this issue. The briefing session gave prominence to the issue of growth management at an important juncture in the state’s history. Perhaps most useful to the legislators and other senior-level policymakers was the neutral forum that the briefing provided for frank discussion of the complexities of “smart growth.” While the event was designed with legislators in mind, it is clear that participants from the executive branch who attended the briefing session also benefited.
In another attempt to target our educational programs to key decision makers, the Lincoln Institute, the Regional Plan Association (RPA) and the New Jersey State Planning Commission cosponsored a leadership retreat for state planning directors from ten of the eleven Northeast states. The directors, or in states without a state planning director a representative from the executive branch, met in Princeton in March for a day characterized by peer-to-peer training.
States with nascent state-level efforts were able to learn from those with more institutionalized programs. While Delaware is as different from New York as Connecticut is from Maine, their state officials were able to benefit enormously from stepping outside their individual political, geographic and economic contexts and considering alternative solutions to similar problems. While each state must construct strategies appropriate to its own needs, all states face many common concerns.
The gathering also provided an opportunity to contribute to a larger, region-wide planning effort. Among the initiatives presented by Robert Yaro, executive director of RPA, was Amtrak’s introduction of high-speed rail service between Boston and Washington, DC, which may leverage substantial economic growth for cities along the corridor. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington will clearly benefit from rapid, comfortable transportation between terminals. However, it may be in smaller cities such as Providence, Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, Newark, Trenton and Wilmington where high-speed rail could have a far greater impact. Frequent service to these cities, where airline connections are limited, could bring new investment as well as increased access to other employment centers for their residents.
RPA is drafting a proposal to provide the analysis and preliminary recommendations needed to evaluate the benefits of the Amtrak service. The state planning officers at the Princeton meeting felt that the initiative would be of great interest to their governors and agreed to take the RPA proposal back to their states in an effort to broaden the coalition in support of Amtrak’s high-speed rail service in the Northeast Corridor.
Programs for Local Officials and Community-Based Organizations
At the local level, strategies to address suburban sprawl also need to focus on development and redevelopment in the cities, and the Institute is expanding its course offerings to groups long interested in urban policy. Last November, the Institute cosponsored “Breaking Barriers, Building Partnerships: Urban Vacant Land Redevelopment” with the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations. Meeting in Boston, staff from community development corporations and private and non-profit lenders explored strategies for bringing underutilized land back into use. A similar group gathered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in May for a workshop cosponsored by the North Carolina Community Development Initiative and the Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise. The hands-on training was designed to give participants experience in generating alternative financing strategies for urban redevelopment
In another effort in the Southeast, the Lincoln Institute provided support to Spelman College as part of an effort to contribute to the redevelopment of its neighborhood in Atlanta. In June, Spelman and its partners from the Atlantic University Center held a community summit as part of a larger initiative to identify both neighborhood needs and university-community strategies to address those needs.
Our experiences in these programs confirm the complex factors influencing current development patterns: the variety of social, economic, technological and political forces; complex and sometimes conflicting policies at the local, state and federal levels; and the actions of those in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Through this work we have come to understand the need for basic information about the broader issue of land markets. In particular we are interested in how and why land markets operate as they do and the implications of land market activity on various public and private stakeholders. Future curriculum development efforts in this area will concentrate on materials to help policymakers and citizens gain a better appreciation of these markets. In doing so, we will have a fuller understanding of the sprawl issue: what causes sprawl, where interventions will be effective, and the characteristics of successful interventions.
Rosalind Greenstein is a senior fellow and director of the program in land markets at the Lincoln Institute.
Notes
1. Myers, Dowell, and Alicia Kitsuse, “The Debate over Future Density of Development: An Interpretive Review.” Lincoln Institute Working Paper, 1999: 22.
2. Burgess, Patricia, and Thomas Bier, “Public Policy and ‘Rural Sprawl’: Lessons from Northeast Ohio.” Lincoln Institute Working Paper, 1998.
3. Gyourko, Joseph, and Richard Voith, “The Tax Treatment of Housing and Its Effects on Bounded and Unbounded Communities.” Lincoln Institute Working Paper, 1999.
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Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 2 del libro Perspectivas urbanas: Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.
En el área metropolitana de Lima, el acceso a la tierra urbana por parte de los sectores populares presenta un historial de problemas que son resultado de la combinación de una ocupación irregular y espontánea de la tierra con políticas de corto alcance para regularizar la tenencia de las tierras. Estas políticas diseñadas para resolver o mitigar la ocupación irregular, en vez de contribuir a una solución, han aumentado el problema.
El seminario, “Los gobiernos locales y el manejo de la tierra urbana: Perú y América Latina”, llevado a cabo en Lima en febrero, reunió representantes municipales, expertos de América Latina y líderes de la comunidad para responder a la siguiente pregunta: ¿Asegura el actual marco regulatorio el crecimiento ordenado y equitativo de Lima y de las otras ciudades peruanas?. El programa fue organizado por el Instituto Lincoln; el Instituto de Desarrollo Urbano CENCA, una organización no gubernamental que basa su trabaja con las comunidades; la Asociación de Municipalidades del Perú, y la Red de Políticas de Suelo de la Coalición Internacional del Habitat (HIC).
Políticas de Regularización
Por regularización de la tierra se entiende en general el proceso de intervención pública en zonas ocupadas ilegalmente, a fin de proveer mejoras de infraestructura urbana y reconocer títulos de propiedad u otros derechos de ocupación. En muchos países en desarrollo se necesitan políticas de regularización para contrarrestar los patrones irregulares, y a veces ilegales, de desarrollo de la tierra, en que la ocupación del terreno e incluso la construcción de viviendas precede la instalación de obras de infraestructura y la documentación legal.
Desde 1961, el gobierno central de Perú ha apoyado políticas que permitieron que la población de bajos ingresos ocupara las tierras públicas vacantes, consideradas como un recurso natural de “banco de tierras”. La mayor parte de estos terrenos eran arenosos, casi desérticos, ubicados en los alrededores de Lima y de poco valor comercial. Un 34% de la población de Lima vivía en “barriadas” o asentamientos irregulares para 1993.
Ante la ausencia de políticas efectivas para asegurar el acceso legal y organizado a la tenencia de la tierra, la permisividad que llevó al desarrollo irregular de estas áreas periféricas ha llevado a una crisis que domina actualmente la discusión de las políticas relativas a la tierra urbana (Figura 1). Muchos funcionarios gubernamentales y otros observadores reconocen que el sistema en sí mismo fomenta y permite el crecimiento informal e irregular, y que algunas de las políticas diseñadas para regularizar la tierra han contribuido en la práctica a crear más irregularidades.
Problemas del Manejo de la Tierra Urbana
El manejo de las políticas de la tierra urbana en Perú está siendo reexaminado a causa de tensiones entre el gobierno central y el gobierno local. Entre 1981 y 1995, las municipalidades administraron los procedimientos, autorizaciones y políticas relacionados con la regularización de la tierra. En 1996, el gobierno peruano centralizó la administración de los recursos económicos sobre la vivienda y el desarrollo urbano, retomando los temas de regularización. Esta centralización política, administrativa y fiscal ha creado serias ineficacias e ineficiencias, puesto que aún las agencias de los gobiernos locales tienen que responder a las demandas diarias de la población con respecto a tierra y vivienda, y no tiene ya un control integral de esta problemática.
También existen tensiones a causa de las contradicciones entre el marco legal y el mercado informal de las transacciones cotidianas. Esta falta de relación se refleja en la falta de comprensión y desconfianza que existe entre las autoridades y los agentes privados e individuos que operan fuera del marco de las políticas formales.
A pesar de los intentos por parte de municipalidades y organizaciones no gubernamentales por mejorar la coordinación e implementación de las políticas de la tierra que afectan a los mecanismos formales e informales del mercado formal e informal, los líderes políticos todavía toman la decisión final. Esta situación se ve sujeta a la politización de la administración pública, por ejemplo, a través de políticas creadas para satisfacer a los políticos en vez de la comunidad. Al mismo tiempo, esta situación fomenta las perspectivas a corto plazo, puesto que la autoridad gobernante está más interesada en el trabajo inmediato que en el seguimiento detallado de planes de desarrollo que requieren de un plazo más largo para su ejecución. Como resultado, los problemas graves de crecimiento de Lima no reciben una respuesta adecuada por el marco regulador, legal y político actual.
Problemas Comunes
Un resultado importante de este seminario en Perú fue el intercambio de experiencias con otras ciudades latinoamericanas y asiáticas, en las cuales los gobiernos locales pueden utilizar recursos públicos para promover ciudades urbano más ordenadas. Aún cuando los problemas del manejo de la tierra son amplios y complejos, ciertos problemas comunes fueron identificados para ser discutidos en programas futuros:
Julio Calderón, investigador urbano y consultor en programas de desarrollo social, está afiliado a Red Suelo, la red de políticas de la tierra de la Coalición Internacional para el Habitat.
Figura 1: Políticas de Regularización de la Tenencia de la Tierra en Lima
Febrero 1961-1980: Se estableció la Ley 13517, responsabilizando a varias agencias del gobierno central para regularizar los procedimientos de tenencia de la tierra, pero sólo se emitieron 20.000 títulos.
1981-1995: La función de emisión de títulos fue transferida a la Municipalidad de Lima y la entrega de títulos de propiedad de la tierra aumentó a unos 200.000. En los años noventa la capacidad de entrega de títulos disminuyó gradualmente hasta generar una crisis en el mercado de la tierra.
Abril 1996: La Comisión del Estado de Formalización de la Propiedad Informal (COFROPI) asumió las responsabilidades que estaban asignadas a la municipalidad. A partir de la promesa presidencial de incorporar la población de bajos ingresos al proceso del mercado de la tierra, se entregaron cerca de 170.000 títulos de propiedad entre julio de 1996 y julio de 1997. Se espera que 300.000 títulos más sean emitidos para el año 2000. Sin embargo, COFROPI afirma que el 90% de los títulos entregados antes de 1995 presentan problemas de registro, de manera tal que muchos de los títulos entregados desde 1996 son revisión de otros entregados anteriormente. En consecuencia, es difícil reconstruir la cantidad exacta de títulos emitidos bajo cada administración.
Algunas Definiciones
Ilegal – Ocupación de la tierra que contradice expresamente las normas existentes, el código civil y la autorización pública.
Informal – Actividad económica que no se adhiere a las reglas institucionales y que no está protegida por ellas, en oposición a la actividad formal que opera dentro de los procedimientos establecidos.
Irregular – Subdivisión que está aprobada oficialmente pero que no ha sido ejecutada de acuerdo con la ley.
Clandestina – Subdivisión establecida sin reconocimiento oficial.
