Muchas áreas suburbanas de los Estados Unidos están mostrando signos de deterioro, con propiedades abandonadas, centros comerciales vacantes y espacios subutilizados. Estos paisajes han venido a caracterizar la expansión descontrolada: lugares construidos para el automóvil y a los que sólo se puede acceder por automóvil. Pero estos suburbios también tienen enormes oportunidades de reinvención creativa. Varias comunidades a lo largo del país están rediseñando la escala de sus suburbios para convertirlos en lugares animados y accesibles a peatones, construidos para la gente.

Los barrios suburbanos reorientados para peatones pueden prosperar y diversificarse para brindar un mayor respaldo a las economías locales, elevar los indicadores de calidad de vida, y mejorar las condiciones medioambientales locales y regionales. Incluso los suburbios deteriorados, plagados de estructuras en desuso y otras zonas muertas, tienen el potencial para generar nueva infraestructura de vivienda, acceso al transporte público, espacios abiertos y tiendas.

La Universidad de Utah estima que hay 1,1 millones de hectáreas de lotes de estacionamiento y otras áreas grises que están listas para ser revitalizadas, y medio millón de hectáreas están disponibles en áreas comerciales subutilizadas, como centros comerciales abiertos y tiendas vacantes (Dunham Jones y Williamson 2009). La transformación de estos paisajes va a ser una prioridad de planificación y desarrollo en los Estados Unidos en el siglo XXI.

Muchas ciudades están revitalizándose constantemente y capitalizando las recientes tendencias demográficas que respaldan dichos esfuerzos, pero las regiones económicamente robustas también necesitan comunidades suburbanas florecientes. Encuestas recientes realizadas por la Asociación Nacional de Corredores de Bienes Raíces y la Asociación Americana de Planificación han revelado que una mayoría de compradores potenciales prefiere vivir en barrios peatonales, con diversidad de tipos de vivienda y una mezcla de opciones residenciales, empresariales y comerciales. A medida que los “baby boomers” envejecen y la mayor parte de la generación del milenio ingresa en la adultez, una creciente cantidad de estadounidenses está dejando sus automóviles para vivir en entornos más céntricos y peatonales. En 2012, aproximadamente la mitad de la población prefería casas más pequeñas en barrios bien conectados con lugares para vivir, trabajar, hacer las compras y jugar (Asociación Nacional de Corredores de Bienes Raíces, 2011, Asociación Americana de Planificación, 2014).

A pesar de la creciente evidencia en favor de la revitalización urbana, muchos líderes locales no saben a ciencia cierta cómo empezar. Este artículo explora 10 maneras en que las comunidades de todo el país han reducido la escala de partes significativas de sus suburbios de expansión descontrolada para convertirlos en centros sociales florecientes.

1. Compartir una visión y elaborar un plan

Muchas comunidades comienzan por imaginar cómo quieren crecer y después elaboran un plan para concretar esa visión. ¿Los residentes quieren más viviendas, un centro de entretenimiento peatonal, un nuevo distrito de artes o una zona de agricultura urbana? ¿Es más importante aumentar la base gravable, reducir las víctimas mortales de peatones y de ciclistas, o aumentar el acceso a comida fresca? Las metas específicas ayudan a dirigir los esfuerzos de revitalización.

Los planes regionales y barriales hacen participar a los miembros de la comunidad en un diálogo sobre cómo aplicar las inversiones de infraestructura y aprovechar las oportunidades de revitalización a medida que aparecen. Los gobiernos locales pueden comenzar con un sitio pequeño —como un lote vacante o un edificio municipal— y, después de que dicho proyecto haya sido exitoso, continuar con más obras, generando el impulso necesario para rediseñar un barrio o corredor urbano entero, o incluso un sitio contaminado una vez que se haya limpiado. Un propósito compartido acerca de un lugar puede ser un incentivo poderoso para guiar el cambio en el futuro.

Considérese Midvale Slag y Sharon Steel, dos sitios contaminados adyacentes ubicados aproximadamente a 16 kilómetros al sur de Salt Lake City en Midvale, Utah. Ambos fueron descontaminados aproximadamente al mismo tiempo, pero sólo uno está prosperando.

En 2000, el Concejo Municipal de Midvale adoptó la “Evaluación de Reutilización y Plan de Ordenamiento de Bingham Junction” para el sitio de Midvale Slag, de 180 hectáreas de superficie. Los funcionarios municipales trabajaron con residentes, autoridades de la Agencia de Protección Ambiental (EPA) y otras partes interesadas para crear una estrategia de revitalización del sitio y convertirlo en un área de uso mixto comercial, residencial y recreativa. Ahora próspero, Bingham Junction creó aproximadamente 600 puestos de trabajo, 1,5 millones de dólares en ingresos anuales por el impuesto sobre la propiedad, y un aumento de 131 millones de dólares en el valor de las propiedades (EPA 2011). Las familias se han mudado a nuevos condominios, y se piensa construir 2.500 unidades residenciales más. También se han construido edificios de oficinas, un supermercado y otros almacenes, y la comunidad piensa desarro-llar hasta 200 mil metros cuadrados de oficinas comerciales y tiendas.

En contraste, el sitio de Sharon Steel, de 100 hectáreas, que no tenía un plan de revitalización ni una visión para el futuro, permanece vacante. Sin embargo, gracias al éxito de Bingham Junction, los funcionarios municipales han comenzado el proceso de planificación y construcción de visión en ese sitio.

2. Identificar activos

A muchos gobiernos locales les cuesta determinar dónde concentrar sus esfuerzos iniciales de planificación y construcción de visión. Los siguientes tipos de preguntas pueden ayudar a identificar qué tipos de activos aprovechar.

1. ¿Hay transporte público disponible? En caso afirmativo, ¿hay áreas subutilizadas cerca o inmediatamente adyacentes a paraderos de transporte que se podrían revitalizar para mejorar el acceso?

2. ¿En qué se invertirá el dinero de infraestructura existente? Por ejemplo, ¿en caminos, agua, alcantarillado, escuelas, estructuras cívicas, parques?

3. ¿Hay lotes de estacionamiento, edificios o centros comerciales vacantes o subutilizados cerca de estas inversiones de infraestructura?

4. ¿Cuáles de estas áreas tienen planes de revitalización o respaldo barrial para nuevos emprendimientos?

5. ¿Cuáles de estas áreas están cerca o adyacentes a otros activos públicos, como escuelas, biblio-tecas, parques o espacios abiertos?

6. ¿Algunos de estos sitios se pueden alinear con áreas de empleo existentes o emergentes?

7. ¿Algunas de estas propiedades están disponibles para ser revitalizadas? Es decir, ¿hay algún dueño dispuesto a colaborar con los objetivos y planes de revitalización de la comunidad?

Esta evaluación de propuestas no es un proceso lineal, paso por paso. A veces un sitio puede dejar de estar accesible de improviso, o se puede recibir un subsidio federal para convertir una carretera en una ruta principal. En otras situaciones, un dueño quizás no tenga voluntad para cooperar, o un sitio puede considerarse no apto. De todas maneras, una evaluación de las condiciones existentes puede ayudar a identificar sitios potenciales o barrios prioritarios.

3. Aprovechar las inversiones en infraestructura

Para atraer inversiones privadas y nuevos emprendimientos, los gobiernos locales pueden realizar inversiones públicas significativas, ya sea modernizando la infraestructura existente o invirtiendo en infraestructura nueva. Muchas ciudades y pueblos aprovechan la oportunidad para realizar inversiones de infraestructura en barrios que quieren revitalizar. Las investigaciones han demostrado que al aprovechar las inversiones públicas, las comunidades pueden aumentar el valor del suelo de un 70 a un 300 por ciento, estimulando al mismo tiempo las inversiones privadas, el capital social, el turismo y la actividad comercial un promedio del 30 por ciento (Litman 2010). También pueden alcanzar objetivos de planeación y revitalización reformando espacios públicos comunitarios para aumentar su valor compartido.

Norman, Oklahoma, ubicada aproximadamente 40 kilómetros al sur de Oklahoma City, es una obra interesante en curso. El pueblo tenía 27 millones de dólares para mejorar el flujo de tráfico y aumentar la seguridad en un segmento de siete cuadras de una calle que cruzaba la típica línea de tiendas de un distrito, con grandes lotes de estacionamiento a ambos lados de la calle. El pueblo se unió para ver cómo utilizar este dinero para realizar mejoras de mayor alcance en el paisaje vial, junto con las mejoras de seguridad necesarias. Empresarios, funcionarios universitarios y líderes locales se unieron para participar en planes estratégicos de ecología urbana y ver cómo se podría crear un área comercial peatonal.

Las municipalidades también pueden aprovechar las inversiones de capital para alcanzar otros objetivos comunitarios. Con recursos cada vez más escasos, los gobiernos locales no pueden ya darse el lujo de invertir en infraestructura con un objetivo único. Por ejemplo, la ciudad de Lenexa, Kansas (un suburbio de Kansas City), se propuso ser una comunidad más sostenible y vivible, y usó proyectos de infraestructura verde para alcanzar esta meta. Usando fondos de la Ley de Recuperación y Reinversión Americana, los funcionarios municipales implementaron una serie de mejoras en las bocas del alcantarillado a nivel vial que satisficieron objetivos claves de planeación y revitalización urbana, como la creación de espacios abiertos y el fomento de actividad peatonal, al mismo tiempo que resolvían los problemas del desagüe de la aguas pluviales.

4. Alinear códigos y ordenanzas

Algunos de los mayores impedimentos para el rediseño de los entornos suburbanos son los códigos y ordenanzas anticuadas e incoherentes. Estas regulaciones para el desarrollo del suelo —desde ordenanzas de zonificación a normas viales, requisitos de estacionamiento, cobertura de predios y límites de altura— son con frecuencia responsables de los patrones existentes de transporte y uso del suelo, y conforman la estructura legal por defecto de todos los emprendimientos nuevos. La consecuencia es que la construcción de un barrio peatonal de uso mixto es frecuentemente ilegal, y el emprendedor tiene que solicitar exenciones o permisos especiales, que pueden generar incertidumbre y demoras en el proceso de desarrollo o desalentar por completo los proyectos de revitalización.

Los estudios han demostrado que el respaldo gubernamental al desarrollo en las áreas de interés es el mejor predictor de inversiones privadas (Hook et al. 2013). Una de las maneras más fáciles de apoyar un crecimiento nuevo es cambiar los códigos y ordenanzas para legalizar los emprendimientos con acceso peatonal. Los nuevos códigos se pueden incorporar a una zona de actividad superpuesta o un plan barrial, para permitir el tipo de construcción necesario para transformar un área.

Hay una serie de recursos disponibles para ayudar a los gobiernos locales a determinar dónde y cómo cambiar sus códigos, como SmartCode (www.smartcodecentral.org), códigos basados en formularios (http://formbasedcodes.org), los códigos inteligentes de la Asociación Americana de Planificación: Regulación de desarrollo modelo de suelo (https://www.planning.org/research/smartgrowth), o la serie Essential Fixes (Correcciones esenciales) de la EPA (www.epa.gov/dced/essential_fixes.htm).

Por ejemplo, Columbia Pike en Arlington, Virginia, un corredor urbano de 5 kilómetros de longitud al que se llega cruzando el río Potomac desde el centro de Washington, DC, fue revitali-zado a escala peatonal después de que el condado modificó los códigos y ordenanzas de desarrollo subyacentes. En Columbia Pike, ubicada en un condado urbano que creció de forma explosiva en décadas recientes, el desarrollo y la inversión habían sido, por el contrario, mínimas en los últimos 30 años. A finales de la década de 1990, los líderes del condado crearon un código basado en formularios para fomentar una revitalización del corredor orientada al transporte público y el tránsito peatonal. El código es un código optativo (también conocido como código paralelo); la zonificación subyacente permanece activa, pero su uso es alentado por procedimientos de revisión y aprobación rápida. Desde la adopción del código en 2003, se han construido en la zona de Columbia Pike 1.000 unidades de vivienda nuevas y 22.297 metros cuadrados de edificación comercial, y se han aprobado 600 unidades de vivienda nuevas y 2016 metros cuadrados de edificación comercial.

5. Diseñar bien las calles

Para cualquier esfuerzo de revitalización, la red vial de la comunidad es fundamental. Los suburbios típicos tienen carriles anchos y de alta velocidad, diseñados para que los automóviles se puedan desplazar eficientemente por la zona. Pero el interés principal de todo esfuerzo de rediseño urbano debería ser el de posibilitar el desplazamiento a la gente y no los automóviles por un área. Este objetivo se puede lograr construyendo aceras anchas y atractivas, instalando carriles y estacionamiento para bicicletas, creando zonas de aislamiento entre la gente y el tránsito vehicular; desarrollando lugares atractivos para caminar; y diseñando cruces viales seguros. Las calles bien concebidas también pueden desencadenar inversiones y el proceso de revitalización. Sin embargo, en muchas comunidades suburbanas, que tienden a ser menos competitivas, el sector público quizás tenga que catalizar el crecimiento con inversiones iniciales de respaldo de infraestructura y equipamiento para atraer fondos privados.

Por ejemplo, Lancaster, California, una ciudad de tamaño mediano a 100 kilómetros al norte de Los Ángeles, transformó una arteria de cinco carriles en una calle comercial invirtiendo en una serie de mejoras viales. Estrecharon y redujeron la cantidad de carriles de tránsito, y agregaron estacionamiento en la calle y vegetación vial, lo cual redujo el tráfico de 60 kilómetros por hora a 25 kilómetros por hora. La inversión de 11,5 millones de dólares de la ciudad atrajo más de 300 millones de dólares en inversiones privadas.

6. Diseñar bien el estacionamiento

El estacionamiento es un problema para cualquier emprendimiento, pero es particularmente problemático en áreas suburbanas donde la comunidad está tratando de eliminar su dependencia del automóvil. La creencia popular es que el estacionamiento es esencial para la supervivencia de las tiendas; por lo tanto, muchas áreas suburbanas tienen un exceso de oferta de estacionamiento, debido a los distintos requisitos de código, diseño o financiamiento. Pero todo esfuerzo exitoso para rediseñar un suburbio requiere que los planifica-dores sopesen las necesidades de estacionamiento actuales con una visión creativa para un futuro menos dependiente del automóvil.

Las comunidades pueden evaluar cuánto estacionamiento es necesario y explorar modos alternativos de satisfacerlo colocando lugares de estacionamiento en la calle, permitiendo el estacionamiento compartido, o desvinculando los espacios de estacionamiento de las unidades de vivienda (EPA 2006). Para promover un entorno vial atrac-tivo para los peatones, es fundamental eliminar o reducir el estacionamiento de superficie, o colocarlo detrás de las áreas de tiendas. Los proyectos de revitalización más grandes quizás requieran un garaje de estacionamiento, pero debería estar ubicado en la parte trasera del sitio y no inmediatamente adyacente a otras oportunidades de tránsito. Es cada vez más común “envolver” el garaje de estacionamiento con unidades de viviendas más pequeñas u oficinas, para poder proporcionar estacionamiento sin interrumpir el paisaje vial.

A medida que el barrio reduce su dependencia del automóvil, puede reconvertir los garajes de estacionamiento incorporando jardines comunitarios en los pisos superiores o creando espacio de alquiler económico para empresas nacientes en los pisos inferiores. Una comunidad de Albany, Nueva York, transformó un viejo garaje de estacionamiento y concesionaria de automóviles en condominios de lujo.

Al planificar para usos futuros, un barrio puede mantener los espacios de estacionamiento que necesita ahora y permitir que el área evolucione, sin perder las inversiones iniciales efectuadas durante el proceso de revitalización. Los gobiernos locales también pueden modificar los códigos de zonificación y edificación para demandar que los constructores de garajes cumplan con requisitos mínimos de adaptabilidad (Jaffe 2013).

7. Agregar más zonas verdes

Los paisajes suburbanos se han descrito como “hostiles” o “insalubres” debido a sus amplias zonas subutilizadas, dominadas por superficies pavimentadas. Pero muchas comunidades están recuperando la naturaleza en estos entornos edificados, y transformando las calles y los pasajes que se encuentran entre un edificio y otro en zonas peatonales atractivas y florecientes.

Los árboles, las plantas, los espacios verdes abiertos y caminos recreativos ofrecen un descanso a la gente, proporcionan áreas de reunión social, mejoran las condiciones medioambientales y crean paisajes viales más habitables (Benfield 2014). Los sitios suburbanos pueden facilitar la integración de espacios verdes en nuevos proyectos de desarrollo porque frecuentemente tienen más acceso al suelo y flexibilidad que las áreas urbanas. Como inversión pública, el espacio verde también puede atraer iniciativas de desarrollo privado.

Los espacios verdes se pueden incorporar a tres niveles: en una región, en un barrio o en cada sitio individual. A escala de sitio, las municipalidades están comenzando a usar infraestructura verde para controlar las aguas lluvias, absorbiéndola en el suelo o captándola para usarla más adelante. Estas estrategias crean lugares más bellos, aumentan la seguridad peatonal, reducen la velocidad del tráfico, controlan los caudales de agua y generan apoyo popular para crear un sistema de gestión de aguas pluviales más efectivo. (Al igual que los baches, una alcantarilla visiblemente tapada al nivel de la calle probablemente genere más llamadas al municipio que una fuga en una tubería subterránea invisible). Las soluciones a nivel de sitio también pueden crear el impulso para una transformación suburbana de mayor escala, creando al mismo tiempo espacios públicos bulliciosos en antiguos lotes de estacionamiento, pasajes, edificios, áreas apaisajadas, techos o calles. Imagínense, por ejemplo, un mar de vegetación en cascada descendiendo del techo de un garaje de estacionamiento, o una plaza peatonal con macetas, árboles, mesas y sillas en una sección de un antiguo lote de estacionamiento.

A nivel regional y de barrio, los espacios verdes pueden conectar áreas naturales con tierras de cultivo y al mismo tiempo ofrecer funciones ecológicas críticas. Además, estas conexiones pueden dar soporte a caminos y senderos de uso múltiple, corredores de hábitats y otros “dedos verdes” integrados en la región. Los enfoques regionales se concentran en el movimiento de vida silvestre, gente y recursos naturales, como el agua. Las estrategias barriales se enfocan en conexiones con redes regionales más grandes, creando lugares interconectados de reunión pública, espacios abiertos, caminos coordinados de uso múltiple, y una red de infraestructura para bicicletas.

La revitalización del aeropuerto Stapleton en las afueras de Denver, Colorado, incorporó espacios verdes a nivel regional y barrial. Aproximadamente un tercio de sus 2.000 hectáreas se ha destinado a nuevos parques y espacios abiertos para las 12.000 unidades residenciales del proyecto. Cada casa se encuentra a 10 minutos de caminata de un espacio abierto. Los componentes centrales son el Central Park de 32 hectáreas y el corredor Westerly Creek de 34 hectáreas. Se han plantado más de 27.000 árboles, y los 6 millones de toneladas de hormigón que anteriormente formaban parte de las pistas de aterrizaje del aeropuerto se han incorporado ahora a los nuevos parques que se crearon. Este proyecto de revitalización no sólo convirtió el aeropuerto en un próspero entorno peatonal, sino que también genera anualmente 22 millones de dólares en impuestos sobre la propiedad y 13 millones de dólares en ingresos por impuesto a las ventas (Swetlik 2013).

8. Cambiar el uso del suelo

Muchas áreas suburbanas están repletas de grandes almacenes abandonados o subutilizados, y centros comerciales anticuados. Al volver a utilizar estos edificios como bibliotecas, escuelas, viviendas y hasta iglesias, las comunidades pueden reactivar una zona muerta y crear demanda en ese lugar. También pueden prevenir o retrasar el patrón de expansión descontrolada, reduciendo la necesidad de construir nuevas grandes tiendas departamentales en parcelas sin desarrollar. Sin una estrategia de revitalización más amplia, sin embargo, el reúso de grandes tiendas departamentales no modificará el paisaje físico para permitir una actividad peatonal significativa.

Los emprendedores urbanos frecuentemente tienen que consolidar parcelas y negociar con múltiples dueños, especialmente en corredores con múltiples centros comerciales y tiendas minoristas de uso único. En consecuencia, muchos emprendedores prefieren los viejos centros comerciales, que en general tienen una superficie significativa, un solo dueño, caminos existentes, servicio de agua y alcantarillado y viviendas residenciales adyacentes. La megaestructura existente quizás se tenga que demoler y reemplazar por edificios de densidad moderada, una cuadrícula vial tradicional y una mezcla de uso comercial y residencial. Por ejemplo, el proyecto de revitalización de las 40 hectáreas del Belmar Mall en Lakewood, Colorado, reconectó la cuadrícula vial. Estas calles atractivas para el tránsito peatonal ahora tienen 1.300 viviendas nuevas, cien mil metros cuadrados de espacio comercial y 63.000 metros cuadrados de espacios de oficina. Este método ha creado un centro en muchas comunidades suburbanas, o una revitalización similar de gran escala en dichos sitios.

El proceso de transformación de un paisaje suburbano en un barrio floreciente y peatonal toma tiempo y puede requerir inversiones en infraestructura pública. Reconociendo esto, algunas municipalidades piensan realizar un proceso de revitalización por etapas en varias décadas, pero proporcionando fondos en forma inmediata para infraestructura que será aprovechada por las inversiones futuras. Un componente crítico de un desarrollo por etapas exitoso es un proceso de planificación y zonificación compatible por parte del gobierno local. Se pueden diseñar acuerdos de largo plazo para aumentar la densidad o realizar actividades de revitalización en gran escala en un período de tiempo en particular, permitiendo que se vaya construyendo la oferta y demanda en el mercado.

Un ejemplo de un desarrollo por etapas exitoso es Potomac Yards en Alexandria, Virginia. Este antiguo sitio industrial fue descontaminado en 1997 y desarrollado de acuerdo a la zonificación en vigor en ese momento, creando un centro comercial abierto tradicional. Los inquilinos firmaron contratos de alquiler por 15 años, un plazo normal en ese momento y lugar. En los años siguientes, los funcionarios municipales obtuvieron financiamiento para construir una nueva estación del metro en la parte trasera del centro comercial, y se construyeron también varios edificios residenciales de uso mixto y alta densidad. Como resultado, el valor del suelo en Potomac Yards aumentó significativamente. En 2010, el concejo municipal aprobó un plan de revitalización, que comenzará en 2017 y se sincronizará con la apertura de la parada del metro. El centro comercial abierto será demolido para dar lugar a un nuevo barrio peatonal de uso mixto con 650.000 metros cuadrados destinados a oficina, comercio y residencias.

9. Proporcionar un liderazgo catalizador

El rediseño de barrios suburbanos para uso peatonal requiere la coordinación y cooperación entre departamentos municipales que normalmente operan en forma independiente. Los departamentos de transporte administran los sistemas viales, los departamentos de vivienda se encargan de viviendas de interés social, y los departamentos de obras públicas construyen sistemas de alcantarillado. Pero no hay un único departamento que pueda implementar la compleja gama de estrategias y cambios físicos necesarios para transformar una subdivisión residencial de uso único o distrito comercial en un barrio peatonal de uso mixto.

El liderazgo catalizador se basa por partes iguales en mediación, facilitación y liderazgo. Se basa en respetar la metodología tradicional de cada departamento, reconociendo al mismo tiempo que no hay un departamento en particular que tenga todas las respuestas o datos para resolver ciertos problemas. El liderazgo catalizador puede generar la confianza y el respeto necesarios para promover enfoques más colaborativos e innovadores para superar los desafíos presentados por la construcción de espacios suburbanos. Es esencial para orquestar estos esfuerzos, mediar entre partes con distintas agendas, y alcanzar las metas deseadas a tiempo y dentro del presupuesto.

La revitalización exitosa del centro de Silver Spring, Maryland, se benefició de este tipo de liderazgo. El área había sido un centro de comercio minorista dinámico en los años de posguerra. Pero como muchos centros suburbanos, perdió gran parte de su vitalidad cuando aparecieron los centros comerciales cerrados en la década de 1970, y los intentos posteriores de recuperar la base comercial fracasaron. En 1996, el condado decidió revitalizar el área creando una comunidad orientada a los peatones, de uso mixto y con acceso a transporte público. El administrador del condado sabía que la lentitud del proceso de otorgamiento de permisos podría afectar el proyecto, así que creó un programa de reducción burocrática, recogiendo la opinión del personal local responsable de hacer cumplir los códigos de edificación y del sitio (construcción, electricidad, incendio, mecánica, accesibilidad, zonificación, carteles, gestión de sedimentos y aguas pluviales, revisión del plan de subdivisión, y códigos y normas de inspección). Los participantes, reunidos en mesas redondas, identificaron y resolvieron problemas interdepartamentales para los proyectos propuestos en la zona de revitalización. Al reunirse en un mismo lugar, los representantes de todos los departamentos pudieron superar las barreras de diseño, zonificación y códigos de manera más eficiente. Como resultado, Silver Spring ha transformado su paisaje suburbano en una comunidad floreciente, con más de 70.000 metros cuadrados de superficie comercial y de esparcimiento, 46.000 metros cuadrados de espacio de oficinas y casi 2.000 residencias.

10. Anticipar lo que viene

El proceso de rediseño de comunidades suburbanas puede ser largo y difícil, pero hay una serie de puntos de partida posibles, desde la creación de una visión y planes, hasta la realización de inversiones de infraestructura y la construcción del primer proyecto. Al comenzar este proceso, los líderes municipales deberían considerar varios temas:

• Determinar cómo medir el éxito. Tener un objetivo claro y mensurable para la revitalización de un corredor o de un centro comercial abierto puede ser crítico para asegurar que el proyecto siga su curso. ¿El objetivo es aumentar las ventas minoristas, la cantidad de pasajeros que usan el transporte público o la cantidad de viviendas de interés social? En el curso de un proyecto, las comisiones municipales y las juntas de planificación, zonificación y transporte tendrán que tomar decisiones aparentemente menores —como, por ejemplo, aumentar o disminuir la cantidad de plazas de estacionamiento— que pueden tener efectos potencialmente con-siderables. Es más probable que las municipalidades alcancen sus objetivos de largo plazo si articulan y definen claramente las medidas del éxito desde el comienzo.
• Gestionar los lugares revitalizados para todos los grupos de ingreso y edad. Muchas ciudades y pueblos están aprovechando la expansión de las líneas de transporte público para transformar sus paisajes suburbanos, lo cual atraerá a más minorías, residentes de bajos ingresos y jóvenes que quieren vivir en barrios peatonales. Las municipalidades tienen que planificar de acuerdo a ello, y adaptarse a estas nuevas demografías proporcionando viviendas de interés social, oportunidades de empleo y opciones de comercio minorista.
• Respetar y celebrar las originalidades locales y regionales. Esencialmente, los barrios atractivos tienen un gran sentido de lugar, con paisajes viales, estilos arquitectónicos o arte pública singulares. A medida que las comunidades transforman sus paisajes suburbanos, los líderes pueden permitir que los barrios crezcan orgánica y auténticamente, y evitar que centros comerciales genéricos se reemplacen por centros municipales genéricos que a largo plazo no se desempeñen mucho mejor.

La evolución de los paisajes suburbanos en los Estados Unidos representa oportunidades enormes para repensar de forma creativa los entornos edificados y naturales del país. El rediseño de estos lugares para peatones puede ayudar a restaurar la actividad en las calles y crear lugares vitales y prósperos para vivir y trabajar.

Sobre la autora

Lynn Richards, próxima presidente y directora ejecutiva del Congreso para el Nuevo Urbanismo, fue fellow Lincoln/Loeb de 2013 en la Escuela de Posgrado de Diseño de la Universidad de Harvard y el Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Previamente, a lo largo de 13 años, ocupó varios puestos de liderazgo en la Agencia de Protección Ambiental de los EE.UU. (EPA), entre ellos, directora en ejercicio y directora de políticas de la Oficina de Comunidades Sostenibles.

Recursos

American Planning Association (APA). 2014. Investing in Place: Two Generations’ View on the Future of Communities: Millennials, Boomers, and New Directions for Planning and Economic Development. APA, May. https://www.planning.org/policy/polls/investing/pdf/pollinvesting report.pdf.

Benfield, Kaid. 2014. People Habitat: 25 Ways to Think about Greener, Healthier Cities. Island Press.

Dunham Jones, Ellen, and June Williamson. 2009. Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. Wiley and Sons.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 2011. Cleanup and Mixed-Use Revitalization on the Wasatch Front: The Midvale Slag Superfund Site and Midvale City, Utah. Mayo.

EPA. 2006. Community Spaces, Parking Places: Finding the Balance through Smart Growth Solutions. EPA 231-K-06-001.

Hook, Walter, Stephanie Lotshaw, and Annie Weinstock. 2013. More Development for Your Transit Dollar: An Analysis of 21 North American Transit Corridors. Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.

Jaffe, Eric. 2013. “We Need to Design Parking Garages with a Car-less Future in Mind.” Atlantic Cities, 14 noviembre.

Litman, Todd. 2010. Evaluating Non-Motorized Transport Benefits and Costs. Victoria Transport Policy Institute. www.vtpi.org/nmt-tdm.pdf.

Lukez, Paul. 2007. Suburban Transformations. Princeton Architectural Press.

National Association of Realtors (NAR). 2011. The 2011 Community Preference Survey: What Americans Are Looking for When Deciding Where to Live. NAR, March. http://www.realtor.org/sites/default/files/smart-growth-comm-survey-results-2011.pdf.

Swetlik, Deana. 2012. “The Many Uses Blooming at Denver’s Old Airport: Stapleton.” Urban Land, 11 octubre, 2012.

We are inaugurating our fourteenth volume year of Land Lines with a new look and feel—more color, more articles, more news about our faculty, and more announcements about our courses, publications and special projects.

In the past five years our educational programs have expanded to reach policy makers and practitioners in federal, state and local government throughout the United States and in many countries of Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Our faculty has developed a broad range of introductory and advanced professional development courses that explore both the theory and practice of land and tax policy.

The Institute’s Department of Valuation and Taxation, chaired by Joan Youngman, has three major goals: improving public and scholarly debate on the taxation of land value; addressing the economic impact, feasibility, political acceptability, and appropriate use of value-based taxes; and contributing to a better understanding of the valuation process for tax purposes. The local property tax, as the primary value-based tax in the United States, is a major focus of the Institute’s work, but we analyze a variety of revenue instruments, particularly with regard to their treatment of land value increments attributable to public investment.

The Department of Planning and Development, cochaired by Rosalind Greenstein and Armando Carbonell, links interests in the theory and practice of planning with an understanding of how land markets operate. Our concerns focus on urban and regional planning and design, land conservation, urban redevelopment, and the behavior of land markets. We are particularly interested in the integration of urban and environmental systems; the planning process and its outcomes; the interplay of public and private roles in decisions involving land policy and land use; the effect of land markets and the institutions that support them on the city and its residents; and the role of land and real estate in the larger economy and in poverty alleviation.

Building on our experiences in Latin America since 1993, Martim Smolka directs the Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean in developing activities oriented toward both scholars and practitioners, including legislative and executive policy officials and upper-level technical staff. Programs focus on five priority topics: value capture policies and implementation of instruments to mobilize land value increments; property taxation systems that can meet the needs of rapid urbanization; regulatory environments supporting large-scale urban intervention; security of tenure, regularization and urban upgrading programs; and urban land market forces, including spatial and social segregation, speculation, vacant land and related issues.

Each issue of Land Lines will continue to feature articles by faculty who share the ideas discussed and lessons learned in Institute-sponsored courses. In addition, we will announce upcoming courses, lectures and other programs that are open to a general audience, and we will keep you informed about new publications, web-based programs and other resources that address our work in land and tax policy.

For more than a century, California’s Great Central Valley has been recognized as one of the world’s foremost agricultural regions. A giant basin 450 miles long and averaging 50 miles wide, the Valley encompasses some 19,000 square miles. With only one-half of one percent of the nation’s farmland, the Valley accounts for 8 percent of the nation’s farm output-including 15 percent of America’s vegetable production and 38 percent of fruit production.

Today, large parts of the Valley are making a transition to an urban economy. Led by such emerging metropolitan areas as Sacramento, Fresno and Bakersfield, the Central Valley already has more than 5 million residents. State demographers predict growth to reach almost 9 million people by 2020 and more than 11 million by 2040.

Given this scale of urban growth, what are the key issues facing the Valley? With the assistance of the Lincoln Institute, the Great Valley Center-a non-governmental organization supporting the economic, social and environmental well-being of California’s Central Valley-has undertaken an effort to try to frame this basic question. Which issues are purely local, and which ones require a more regional approach? What are the constraints the Valley faces in the decades ahead? And, finally, what are the choices? How might the Valley approach the question of accommodating urban growth while still retaining an agricultural base, a vibrant economy, a good quality of life and an enhanced natural environment?

Perhaps the biggest question is simply whether the Central Valley can accommodate such a vast quantity of urban growth and still maintain its distinctive identity. For decades, the Valley’s regional environment consisted mostly of three elements intertwined on the landscape-vestiges of nature, a panoply of crops and compact agricultural towns. The development of agriculture created a rural landscape, but one in which nature was often sacrificed for agricultural production. A distinctive urban form evolved that was far different from the rest of California. The Valley’s older towns, often sited on railroad lines, are typically compact but not dense, with wide, shady streets stretching out along the flat expanse from an old commercial downtown.

Regional and Sub-Regional Growth Dynamics

In determining urban development options for the Central Valley, it is important to understand the context of growth dynamics that affect the entire region as well as important sub-regions. Although the geographical size of the Central Valley is very large-far larger than many states, for example-in many ways it should be viewed as one region with a common set of characteristics and problems. These include:

Air quality: The Central Valley consists of one air basin, and so pollutants emitted in one part of the Valley can have an impact hundreds of miles away.

Water supply and distribution: Although many parts of the Central Valley depend heavily on groundwater, almost every community in the region is at least partly dependent on one water source: The drainage that flows into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and then through the Sacramento Delta. This water source is also used in many different ways by both state and federal water projects. Transportation links: The Central Valley is connected internally and to other regions by a series of transportation links. Most obvious are the major freeway corridors, including Highway 99, Interstate 5, and Interstate 80, along with rail lines, which generally follow the Highway 99 corridor.

Land supply and cost: In virtually all parts of the Central Valley, land is cheaper and in more abundant supply than it is in coastal areas. This is one of the main reasons why population growth has shifted from the coast to the Central Valley.

At the same time, the Valley can be viewed as a group of five sub-regions, each with its own growth dynamic. These include:

North Valley: Seven counties in the northern portion of the Sacramento Valley remain rural and experience relatively little urban growth pressure compared to the rest of the Valley.

Sacramento Metro: Six counties around Sacramento have the highest rates of educational attainment and the highest wage scales anywhere in the Valley, largely because of the state capital, the University of California at Davis, and proximity to the Bay Area. This has become a popular location for high-tech employers.

Stockton-Modesto-Merced: Traditionally a major ranching and agricultural area, these centrally located counties are now experiencing tremendous urban growth pressure because of Bay Area commuting, though they are not adding jobs as rapidly as Sacramento Metro.

Greater Fresno: Four counties near Fresno remain the agricultural heartland of the Central Valley. Though population growth rates are high due to immigration and high birth rates, especially in the metropolitan Fresno area, the economy is only beginning to diversify and remains heavily focused on agriculture and related industries. As with other parts of the Valley, much of Greater Fresno’s population growth has come from immigration and high birth rates.

Bakersfield-Kern County: Somewhat separate geographically from the rest of the San Joaquin Valley, this area remains a center of both agriculture and extractive industries, especially oil. This region is experiencing rapid population growth and is the only part of the Valley that appears to be directly influenced by spillover growth from Greater Los Angeles.

Underlying Issues

With so much urban growth on the horizon, the Central Valley’s twenty-first-century landscape will be shaped by the interplay among several different issues:

Agriculture: Agriculture is likely to consume less land and less water in the future than it has used in the past, but it is still likely to be the sector that most determines the Valley’s urban growth patterns. The critical issues are: What kind of agricultural base will the Valley have in the next century, and how much land and water will that agricultural base require? Recent trends have moved the Valley toward ever-higher-value crops, and competition with foreign markets is expected to be fierce.

Socioeconomic issues: The Valley has traditionally lagged behind the rest of California in social and economic indicators. Unemployment and teenage pregnancy are high, while household income and educational attainment is low. Like the rest of California, the Valley is rapidly evolving a unique mix of racial diversity. Although the Valley will soon get a boost from the creation of a new University of California campus in Merced County, the region’s overall economic competitiveness may not be able to match its urban population growth.

Natural resources: In the rush to create one of the world’s great agricultural regions, the Central Valley’s leaders often overlooked the wonderland of natural resources that lay at their feet. For example, the Valley’s vast system of wetlands, once one of the largest and most important in the world, has almost completely disappeared, much to the detriment of the migratory bird population. In the future, there will be increasing pressure to restore and enhance these natural resources even as the Valley continues to urbanize. The entire San Francisco Bay-Sacramento Delta ecosystem has emerged as the focal point of a massive state and federal effort to improve water quality and restore biodiversity.

Infrastructure and infrastructure financing: When California’s coastal metropolitan areas were created, mostly in the postwar era,- the state and federal governments contributed greatly to their success by picking up the tab for most of the infrastructure they required. In the last two decades, however, all this has changed. In the Central Valley, the urban infrastructure is underdeveloped, and the financial ability of developers and new homebuyers to bear the full cost of community infrastructure is questionable.

Governmental structure and regional/sub-regional cooperation: In the Valley as elsewhere, a wide range of local, regional, state and federal agencies make decisions that create the emerging landscape. But there is little history of cooperation among these agencies, and especially among local governments. If all these entities can work together well, they can effectively increase the region’s “capacity” to create an urban environment that works for its users while protecting agricultural land, natural resources and other non-urban values. But if these entities do not establish a pattern of working together, the result could be a haphazard pattern of urban growth that does not serve any goal well.

Possible Strategies

Given these background conditions, the Central Valley could adopt any one of a number of strategies for shaping urban growth, or different parts of the Valley could “mix and match” from a variety of possibilities, which include the following:

Concentrate urban growth in existing urban centers. The Central Valley’s urban centers are well established and well served by existing infrastructure. They contain most of the current job centers and community support services and amenities required for urban or suburban living. This strategy would concentrate urban growth in and near these centers through a combination of infill development and compact growth in new areas.

Adopt a “metroplex” strategy. This strategy would recognize that population growth in the Valley will be concentrated in a few large metropolitan areas. Urban growth needs, including urban centers, bedroom communities, parks and greenbelts, should be dealt with at the metropolitan level in a small number of distinct “urban metropolitan regions.”

Create a “string of pearls” along Highway 99. For most of this century, Highway 99 has been the Central Valley’s “main drag.” Virtually all of the Valley’s older urban centers are located along this corridor. One possible strategy would be to concentrate future urban development up and down Highway 99, creating a string of urban and suburban pearls. In point of fact, the string of pearls is already emerging in some places. New development districts are being created along the corridor to the north and south of existing cities and towns because of access to this major transportation artery.

Encourage the creation of new towns in the foothills on the west side of the Valley. The so-called “Foothill Strategy” has been discussed for several years in some parts of the Valley. Foothill new towns would place commuters closer to Bay Area jobs and protect prime farmland on the Valley floor. However, water and infrastructure finance issues make this strategy very difficult to achieve.

Permit the emergence of an urban ladder. A final possibility is to permit the development of what might be called an urban ladder: a network of urban and suburban areas that run up and down the Valley along Highway 99 and Interstate 5, and then run across the Valley on a series of east-west rungs along smaller roads that connect the two freeway corridors. In many ways, the urban ladder is the most likely possibility, simply because it connects existing cities and towns with probable new areas for urban growth by using the available transportation corridors. At the same time, however, it holds the potential to create more “suburban sprawl” than any other option.

Many of these options are already emerging as an actual urban pattern in certain parts of the Valley, and it is unlikely that there is a “one-size fits all” answer for the entire Valley. But, unless the civic leaders of the Valley confront the issue of urban growth head-on, it is likely that the Valley will adopt the sprawling and inefficient land use patterns that characterize Los Angeles and California’s other coastal metropolitan areas.

There is still time to shape a different outcome in the Valley, if civic leaders work together in a conscious attempt to design a set of workable urban development patterns that will operate efficiently and effectively for urban dwellers, for employers, for agriculturalists, and for the natural environment.

William Fulton is editor of California Planning and Development Report, contributing editor of Planning magazine, and correspondent for Governing magazine. For more information about the Great Valley Center, see www.greatvalley.org.

The recent fiscal crisis in Asia has affected systems of taxation and land use regulation throughout the region. The situation in Korea is typical. A series of collapses of large conglomerates led to a severe economic crisis, with 5.5 percent of total loans in default by the end of 1997. Currency and stock indexes fell to one-half their value within a year. Major measures to control the crisis, undertaken in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), include cutting government expenses by 10 percent and initiating a series of tax reforms to raise revenues.

In this context, a recent seminar on the taxation of real property in Asia provided a valuable and timely forum for the exchange of ideas. The seminar was hosted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Government of Korea at the Korea-OECD Multilateral Tax Center in Chonon in early March. Tax administrators from China, Korea, Singapore and Vietnam attended the two-part program, which included a four-day seminar on property taxation and a one-day workshop hosted by the Korea Ministry of Finance. My fellow instructors in the seminar were Michael Engelschalk of OECD’s Fiscal Division in Paris and Anders Muller of Denmark’s Ministry of Taxation.

Seminar Themes

The seminar addressed three major issues concerning local government systems for property taxation:

Local Revenues and Fiscal Decentralization:

Anticipating increased political and fiscal decentralization in many Asian countries, the seminar explored the role of local government within the national tax structure. These fundamental issues are particularly of interest to China, which is just beginning to develop a property tax system, and Korea, which is beginning to exercise stronger local autonomy.

Market Economy and Property Valuation:

For Vietnam and China, which are moving toward a market-based economy, establishing reliable sales information on property markets and developing effective valuation techniques are major challenges. Korea and Singapore, with their more advanced property tax systems, must be able to respond to a dynamic property market. Singapore’s annual value rating method and Korea’s market capitalization approach are very different systems, and the issue of improving valuation models remained a hotly debated subject during the seminar.

Taxation Administration and Enforcement:

Computerization, a collection process and legal procedures need to be developed and implemented in all governments to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of management and enforcement procedures. Political issues such as assignment of local and central government functions, determining ability to pay and the role of wealth taxation were also discussed extensively by the participants.

Tax Policy Issues in Asian Countries

Although China at present does not permit private ownership of land, three categories of taxes are applied to use rights:

taxes on land use (land use tax, land occupation tax and agricultural tax):

taxes on ownership of buildings (house tax and real estate tax); and

taxes on transactions (land appreciation tax, business tax, stamp duty and deed tax.)

Property tax reform in China is needed for two reasons: redundancy and out-of-date regulations. Even after the economic reforms of the 1980s, foreign investment in real property has been regulated and taxed according to a 1951 law. The central government has decided to reform and simplify property taxes by consolidating the domestic house tax with the land use tax for local people, consolidating domestic and foreign house taxes for foreigners, and possibly eliminating the deed tax.

Korea proposed a land value increment tax several years ago to capture the capital gains from land transactions, but the proposal was defeated. To capture land value increments and avoid speculation, Korea instead implemented a capital gains tax system that covers both real property and other asset transactions. To discourage land speculation, the tax rate will be fixed at 50 percent for property sales within two years of purchase, but owners who hold properties for more than two years will have a lower capital gains tax rate.

Korea’s GNP is expected to grow less than one percent in 1998 and tax revenues are projected to decline by US$4.4 billion. In response, the government designed a package to raise tax revenues by US$2.4 billion and to cut government expenditures by US$5.6 billion. In the tax reform package, minimum tax levels will generally be raised but capital gains taxes on land sales and value-added tax exemptions will be reduced.

Vietnam began reforming its tax system in 1990 with the introduction of uniform tax laws and ordinances across the country. Some examples are the 1994 Law on Agricultural Land Use Taxes, the 1992 Ordinance on Land and Housing Taxes, and the 1994 Law on Taxes on Land Use Right Transfer. Although Vietnam endorses a market economy, these central government regulations set the standard for all taxation administration. Property valuation (use value) is also defined by national law, although the taxable price is determined by the People’s Committee of the province or city, which is directly under central government power. In other words, the valuation is based on market value but must be approved by the People’s Committee.

In Singapore property owners pay an annual tax of 12 percent on the annual value of the property. The annual value for buildings is based on the estimated market rent per annum. The value for vacant land or land under development is derived from five percent of its estimated market value. The total annual tax in 1996-97 constituted six percent of the government’s operating revenue. Other property-related taxes include transfer taxes, inheritance taxes and development charges. Given the dynamic urban real property market and high land prices, the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS), which oversees the taxation system, is continuously developing new valuation and collection methodologies.

In summary, the demand for research on tax policies is critical in Asia. This seminar offered an educational environment where instructors and participants could share basic principles on the taxation of real property and learn from each others’ experiences.

Alven Lam is a fellow of the Lincoln Institute and academic dean of the Land Reform Training Institute in Taiwan.

Mexico is beginning to create an enabling environment to use land value increments for development purposes. Recent constitutional and legal reforms have authorized the clarification of land titling as well as the commercialization of land. Real estate markets are gradually superseding the immobile land tenure arrangements that gave rise to informal markets characterized by confusing and often arbitrary arrangements and high transaction costs. The private sector is moving into the areas of low-income housing and public-private arrangements for balanced and sustainable land developments.

The State of Mexico has launched a comprehensive program, known as PRORIENTE, to promote government, business and community interaction for joint management and financing of urban development in the eastern part of the territory. PRORIENTE’s vision is one of “new cities” surrounding the Mexico City megalopolis, characterized by balanced growth between demographic densification, income-generating activities and environmental protection. The creation of employment in and around the new settlements is an overriding social and economic goal of the program.

Given the intricate pattern of interests involved, PRORIENTE has adopted an intersectorial and interjurisdictional approach. Indeed, PRORIENTE requires that the State of Mexico take the initiative to coordinate land and fiscal policies and instruments among the federal government, the newly elected opposition government of the Federal District, and the many municipalities that are largely controlled by opposition parties.

The challenges for PRORIENTE are formidable:

Population growth in the region between now and the year 2,020 is estimated at five million people.

Deforestation and disorganized urbanization of agricultural areas are leading to further desertification of this region.

Innovative policies and contractual arrangements have yet to be introduced to create effective land markets.

Uncontrolled urbanization has been dominated by private developers who speculate with land prices, ignore urban planning and appropriate huge increases in land values, as well as by settlements of low-income immigrants. New mechanisms for public capture of increases in land values that emanate from new policies and/or administrative decisions will have to overcome serious resistance.

Real estate taxation is largely underdeveloped, and the property tax structure is plagued with many exceptions. Cadasters are often outdated and have only weak connections with the system of transfer and registration of real property.

Public-private partnerships that are accountable to the communities and operate on a transparent basis are practically unknown in a country with a tradition of a strong federal government.

Intergovernmental fiscal relations and interjurisdictional arrangements have been dominated by the will and the overwhelming fiscal power of the federal government, which controls 80 percent of public income compared to four percent for the municipalities and 16 percent for the state. Local and regional governments are just beginning to experiment with political coalitions and multiparty governments capable of surviving the short life span of one administration.

In view of these obstacles and challenges, the leaders of PRORIENTE have adopted a participatory, negotiating approach that is already producing visible results. Businesses have formed large-scale conglomerates capable of funneling much-needed capital and management technologies into the area. The federal government, the Federal District, municipalities and communities are invited to the negotiating table to participate in an ongoing process that nurtures an expanding program rather than a precise policy or institutional goal.

The Lincoln Institute recognizes that this project presents an excellent opportunity to study the complex role of land as a strategic factor for development throughout Latin America. Last April, the Institute coordinated a seminar on urban land markets in the city of Toluca, and is continuing to serve as a sounding board for policymakers of the State of Mexico and other public and private actors involved in PRORIENTE.

In addition, a Lincoln Institute team is cooperating with other institutions and practitioners to share international experiences regarding both the process of policy formation and the operational side of the PRORIENTE program. Special attention is given to the sustainability and replicability of strategies to facilitate the transition from restrictive land tenancy systems, weak property tax administrations and highly centralized fiscal resources to competitive land markets and local land use initiatives to encourage development. The Institute will utilize this experience in Mexico for developing courses in other countries facing similar situations.

Fernando Rojas, a visiting fellow of the Lincoln Institute, is a legal scholar and public policy analyst from Colombia. He was formerly a visiting fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Alfonso Iracheta is technical secretary of PRORIENTE and the director of planning for the State of Mexico.

Despite the long-term and continuing trend away from central business districts and toward suburban development, a number of factors are motivating recent attention to rail transit. These factors include:

concerns about the negative impact of auto-oriented sprawl desires to reduce air pollution and energy consumption interest in rebuilding urban communities need to provide access and mobility to those without autos desires to save the costs and avoid the impacts of new or widened roadways

Many metropolitan areas in the United States are considering the addition or expansion of light rail and commuter rail systems to link employees with business centers. The land use characteristics of the corridors where transit lines operate have been shown to influence transit ridership, but much of the previous work is more than 20 years old and based on data from a limited number of regions.

Our national research project, conducted for the Transit Cooperative Research Program with Jeffrey Zupan, expands and updates earlier research. We analyzed information on 261 stations on 19 light rail lines in 11 cities, including Baltimore, Cleveland and St. Louis, and 550 stations on 47 commuter rail lines in the six city regions of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.

The study shows that light rail and commuter rail serve distinctly different markets and land use patterns. Light rail with its closely spaced stations attracts more riders per station when it is located in denser residential areas. Feeder bus service helps to boost ridership. Light rail can function in regions with a wide range of CBD sizes and employment densities. Commuter rail depends more on park-and-ride lots at stations in low-density, high-income suburban areas farther from the CBDs, which tend to be larger and more dense than those in light rail areas.

Light rail, with its more frequent service, averages about twice as many daily boarders per station as commuter rail, even though light rail is more often found in smaller metropolitan areas. Figure 1 shows that light rail is most effective in attracting passengers close to the CBD. Figure 2 shows that commuter rail attracts the largest number of its riders about 35 miles out from the CBD. In both figures, other factors affecting ridership, except CBD employment density, are held constant.

Because most transit systems emanate from and focus on a region’s CBD, the amount of employment concentrated downtown clearly affects the demand for transit. Figures 1 and 2 also show that ridership increases with CBD density for both light rail and commuter rail. For light rail, the effects of CBD density on ridership are most pronounced for stations within 10 miles of the core, while for commuter rail the larger impacts occur at stations 20 to 50 miles outside the city.

Changes in Employment and Residential Density

CBD employment density (as measured by employment per gross CBD acre) is nearly twice as important for commuter rail ridership as for light rail. Our study shows that a 10 percent increase in CBD employment density produces 7.1 percent more commuter rail riders, but only 4.0 percent more light rail riders. Commuter rail boardings are more strongly influenced by CBD employment density because these systems usually have a single downtown terminal. Higher-density CBDs assure that more jobs are within walking distance of the commuter rail station. Employment density in city centers is less important in light rail regions since they have more stations distributed throughout the CBD.

On the other hand, a 10 percent increase in station area residential density (as measured by number of persons per gross acre within two miles of a station) boosts light rail boardings by 5.9 percent and commuter rail boardings by only 2.5 percent. Throughout the study these effects are measured holding constant transit system characteristics such as parking availability, station distance to the CBD and station area income levels.

Light rail, with its relatively short lines, is most effective in attracting passengers when stations are in higher-density residential areas close to the CBD. Commuter rail ridership rises more slowly with residential density because commuter rail is a high-fare mode, and its higher-income riders tend to live in more expensive, lower-density places. Moreover, the higher speeds and longer distances on commuter rail tend to increase ridership to the CBD from precisely those places outside the city where residential densities tend to be low.

Cost-efficiency and Effectiveness

In this study, cost-efficiency is measured by annual operating costs plus depreciation per vehicle mile. Effectiveness is measured by daily passenger miles per line mile. For light rail, these measures indicate a strong positive relationship with CBD employment size and residential density. A weaker but still significant relationship occurs for CBD employment density and for the line distance from the CBD. This suggests that medium to large cities with higher density corridors work best for light rail. For commuter rail, larger, denser CBDs attract more riders per line mile, but add to the cost per vehicle mile, creating a trade-off between effectiveness and cost-efficiency.

The length of the rail line is important for both light rail and commuter rail. Longer light rail lines are both slightly more cost-efficient and effective, but ridership diminishes beyond 10 miles. Commuter rail lines are much more cost efficient when they are longer, but their effectiveness declines beyond 50 miles.

This summary does not address many other significant factors in rail transit usage and land use patterns, including operating, capital and environmental costs saved as a result of not using other modes of transportation, notably automobiles and buses. Cities considering investment in new or expanded rail systems need to examine carefully all transportation alternatives in a corridor, including site-specific conditions and local preferences. Further, our study makes clear the need to integrate transit planning with land use planning at the earliest possible stage.

___________________________

Judy S. Davis is an urban planner and Samuel Seskin is a senior professional associate with Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade and Douglas in Portland, Oregon. As a faculty associate of the Lincoln Institute, Seskin also develops and teaches courses linking land use and transportation. This article is derived from a report titled Commuter and Light Rail Transit Corridors: The Land Use Connection. It will be published by the Transit Cooperative Research Program in the summer of 1996 as part of Volume 1 of An Examination of the Relationship Between Transit and Urban Form, TCRP Project H-1.

From the earliest days of the Republic, civic boosters have prodded American governments to develop large-scale physical facilities—mega-projects, we label them—ranging from canals and railroads in the nineteenth century to rail transit systems and convention centers today. Until the mid-twentieth century, such projects tended to involve modest public expenditures by contemporary standards and they rarely caused significant disruption of the existing urban fabric.

This pattern altered abruptly in the 1950s and early 1960s. Central city economies had, with rare exceptions, stagnated through the Great Depression and World War II, and they continued to do so in the early postwar years. Local business and political leaders concluded that if central cities—particularly those developed prior to the auto age—were ever to thrive again, they would require major surgery. Specifically, they needed to clear slums to provide large downtown sites for redeveloped office districts; to facilitate high-speed automotive movement between suburban and central city locations; and to provide larger airfields with attractive terminals for the nascent commercial aviation industry.

Recognizing that they could not finance these expensive projects with locally generated funds, urban leaders campaigned aggressively for federal assistance, and they were successful in obtaining considerable amounts of funding. We attribute their success mainly to the following factors: (1) public confidence in government was unusually high in the postwar period; (2) business leaders generally accepted the need for government activism to sustain prosperity; and (3) although cities lacked the political clout to secure expensive programs on their own, they were able to participate in much broader coalitions—most notably, those focused on housing (which expanded to include urban renewal) and highways. Urban aviation advocates were less successful, but as aviation traffic boomed they were able to fund new airports and expand old ones by relying primarily on revenues from landing fees and terminal leases.

During the late 1950s and the 1960s these efforts combined to produce an unprecedented wave of urban public investment. While often successful on their own terms, these projects tended to be highly disruptive as well, destroying in particular vast amounts of low-income housing and urban parkland. Project advocates maintained that the public should accept such impacts to advance the greater good. Robert Moses, New York’s famed master builder, never tired of citing a French proverb: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” (Caro 1974).

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, neighborhood activists allied with those involved in the emerging environmental movement against the full panoply of mega-project programs that had come into being during the 1950s. They succeeded not just in blocking large numbers of planned expressways, renewal schemes and airport projects, but also in securing the adoption of numerous statutes, regulations and judicial doctrines, thus strengthening the hands of critics in urban development controversies. For a time it seemed to most observers that the era of mega-project investment in cities was over.

“Do No Harm” Planning

The forces committed to mega-projects have proven highly resilient and adaptive, however. While the character of such investment has changed dramatically since the 1970s, its volume has remained high. Nevertheless, mega-project advocates have had to work within new constraints; they have had to learn the art of making omelets without leaving a residue of broken eggs. We label this art, as exercised in the domain of urban land use, “do no harm” planning. Its essential components are the selection, siting and design of projects to minimize disruptive side effects, and the aggressive mitigation of any harmful impacts that cannot be avoided entirely. Most obviously, governments have ceased clearing slums and building expressways through developed neighborhoods, and only one major new passenger airport—in Denver—has been constructed since the early 1970s.

Public investment in facilities such as rail transit systems, festival retail markets, sports stadiums and arenas, and convention centers has surged. Within the transportation sector, moreover, investment priorities have shifted toward the reconstruction of existing highways, new construction on suburban fringes and airport terminals rather than runway improvements. The great advantage of such projects is that they are relatively easy to site either at some distance from existing development or in older commercial districts that have few preservationist defenders.

Where cities and states have gone forward with major highway and airport projects, they have taken extraordinary steps to minimize social and environmental impacts. The new Denver airport, for example, is on a previously rural 53-square-mile site 25 miles east of downtown. Its location and scale were determined primarily by two considerations: land assembly without the disruption of existing residential enclaves; and future airport operation without significant noise impacts overflowing the airport boundary. Boston’s $14.6 billion Central Artery/Tunnel project, known colloquially as “The Big Dig,” appears very different, in that it is located in the heart of downtown, but it is virtually identical in its do no harm planning orientation. It is almost entirely underground as it passes close to built-up areas (replacing a previous elevated roadway); it has been threaded into the urban fabric without the taking of a single home; and it will add significantly to the city’s parkland.

Common Themes

In addition to do no harm planning, our review of mega-projects built over the past two decades identified the following themes as particularly salient.

Business Support

While insufficient by itself, strong business support has generally been an indispensable condition for mega-project development. Within the business community, leadership has almost invariably come from enterprises with deep local roots, particularly in real estate ownership, development and finance. The strongest supporters of Denver’s new airport, for example, were those who owned property with commercial development potential near the new site; downtown businesses concerned that the city’s existing airport was too small to allow for the region’s continued development; and the banks and financial service firms that had lent money to many of the city’s property owners and developers. Similarly, the most active and effective support group for Boston’s Big Dig has been the Artery Business Committee, a coalition of those who own major buildings adjacent to the artery’s corridor and several major employers with historic roots in downtown Boston.

Public Entrepreneurs

In addition to well-mobilized constituencies, aggressive, deft government officials have been indispensable to the success of recent mega-project proposals. Indeed, it was frequently they who originated project ideas and first sparked the formation of supportive coalitions. Even when others initiated, they commonly took the lead in crafting strategies, tactics and plans; in lobbying for state and federal aid; in securing other types of needed legislation and regulatory approvals; and in dealing with project critics.

Though business groups initiated some projects, they seemed more frequently to “invest” in proposals originated by public entrepreneurs. The business constituents were by no means easy marks, of course. Like venture capitalists in the private sector, they considered a great many ideas brought to them by public entrepreneurs (and others), but invested only in those few that looked particularly good for their enterprises, were to be carried out mainly or entirely at public expense, and had a reasonable chance of securing the myriad approvals required.

Illustratively, Boston’s Big Dig was conceived by Fred Salvucci, a transportation engineer who had become active in battles against planned highway and airport projects during the 1960s and then served as transportation secretary for twelve years under Governor Michael Dukakis. During the first Dukakis administration (1975–1979) the main constituencies for a new harbor tunnel (business) and for depressing the central artery (neighborhood and environmental groups) were at loggerheads. While temporarily out of office from 1979 to 1983, however, Salvucci concluded that the politically feasible strategy might be to marry these projects, while also relocating the tunnel to an alignment far from a neighborhood that it had historically threatened. This strategy in fact resolved the local controversy, and prepared the way for a successful campaign for massive federal aid, led again by Salvucci with critical business support.

Denver Mayor Federico Peña broke a similar type of logjam that had persisted for years over whether to expand Denver’s existing Stapleton Airport or build a new facility on a large site outside the city’s borders. Concluding that the obstacles, both political and environmental, to expanding Stapleton were insuperable, but that city ownership and operation of any new airport remained a critical objective, he negotiated successfully with adjacent Adams County for a massive land annexation. To achieve this objective, he accepted conditions protecting county residents from significant airport noise and guaranteeing Adams County most of the tax benefits that would flow from economic development around the new airport. With local agreements in hand he, like Salvucci, then led a successful campaign for special federal assistance.

Mitigation

Do no harm plans avoid substantial neighborhood and environmental disruption but it is impossible to build a mega-project with no negative side effects. The commitment of do no harm planning is to ameliorate such impacts as much as possible, and to offset them with compensatory benefits when full direct mitigation cannot be achieved. The boundary between mitigating harm and providing net benefits to protesting groups is often indistinct, however, so the norm of mitigation provides leverage as well for skilled activists whose demands are at times tangential to the mega-projects whose budgets they seek to tap. Mega-project champions in turn reflected on the fate of such projects as New York City’s proposed Westway, which failed because of what seemed at first a minor legal challenge. They were deathly afraid of litigation and were frequently willing to make very expensive concessions in return for agreements by critics not to sue.

During permitting for the Big Dig, for example, Boston’s Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), a group whose signature strategy was litigation for environmental purposes, threatened to sue unless the state committed to accompany the highway project with a multi-billion dollar set of rail transit investments, mainly for expansion. CLF’s rationale was that the transit projects would prevent the new road from filling up with traffic, which in turn would generate more air pollution. Modeling done for the project (as well as data from other regions) showed that the Big Dig would not in fact have significant air pollution effects, and that investing in rail transit extensions would be a particularly inefficient way to offset pollution effects if they did occur. Nonetheless, both Democratic and Republican state administrations acquiesced to CLF’s demands because they did not want to risk litigation, which at the very least threatened project delays and might also have imperiled the breadth of local consensus in support of the Big Dig.

Bottom-up Federalism

A naïve observer of American politics might assume that the federal government distributes grants to achieve national goals. In fact, however, the grantor-grantee relationship is usually much more complicated than that. Recipient jurisdictions are typically active participants in the coalitions that bring new programs into being and provide them with critical support each budget season. The programs of aid for mega-project investment that we examined were all distinguished more by their openness to local initiative than their sharp definition of national purpose. If grantee jurisdictions had a great deal of influence collectively on program structure, moreover, they had even more when it came to projects, and they were able to exercise it individually.

Every project we studied was initiated by subnational officials and interest groups, and it was they who took the lead at every stage in the decision process. While limited in their discretion by federal program rules, they were alert as well to opportunities for securing waivers, statutory amendments and add-on funds, with the assistance of their congressional delegations. Stated another way, when federal aims are diffuse and weakly defended, principal-agent theory (as applied to the intergovernmental system) needs to be read bottom-up rather than top-down.

High and Rising Costs

Do no harm designs and related mitigation agreements have tended to produce projects that are vastly more expensive than their historic predecessors. According to Brian Taylor (1995), the average cost per centerline mile of urban freeways rose by more than 600 percent in real terms from the 1960s to the 1980s, and costs were even more extreme in some of the mega-projects we examined. Whereas Taylor found that urban freeways cost on average about $54 million per centerline mile (in 2002 dollars) in the 1980s, for example, the Big Dig cost $1.9 billion per centerline mile. Judith Grant Long (2002) reports in a similar vein that the average cost of new stadiums and arenas more than quadrupled in real terms from the 1950s to the 1990s, and we have calculated that light rail development costs increased by nearly two-fifths from the 1980s to the 1990s.

Both older and more recent projects have been marked by a consistent pattern of substantial cost increases between authorization and completion. The projected cost of Boston’s Big Dig, for example, has roughly tripled in real terms since its approval by Congress as an interstate highway project in 1987. The cost of Denver International Airport more than doubled from the late 1980s, when it received voter approval and its federal funding commitments, to its completion six years later.

While a full study of this issue was beyond the scope of our work, we judge that the consistent pattern of underestimation has two primary causes. First, project advocates have very strong incentives to estimate optimistically as they seek political commitments of support. Second, mega-projects are often so complex—both technically and in terms of the mitigation agreements that will often prove necessary to keep them on track—that early cost estimates are typically little more than guesses within very broad ranges.

Locally Painless Project Funding

The hallmark of successful mega-project financing is that projects should appear costless, or nearly so, to the great majority of local voters. The easiest way to achieve this result is to rely on funding from higher-level governments. Where such aid is unavailable or insufficient, the challenge is to identify other sources of revenue to which local voters are generally insensitive—which means, above all, avoiding local property and income taxes and spreading the burden beyond host city residents.

This challenge became increasingly salient after 1970 with rising antitax sentiment, the end of federal renewal aid, and the surge in capital spending for such facilities as stadiums, arenas and convention centers, for which federal aid was only rarely available. In the growing domain of mass transit, moreover, federal matching ratios have tended to decline since 1980.

The revenue strategies adopted to deal with these challenges have been varied and ingenious. New terminals and runways at major airports have been funded largely by increased landing fees, lease payments, and (since the early 1990s) ticket surcharges authorized by the federal government but imposed locally. Stadiums, arenas and convention centers are commonly funded by taxes that fall mainly on nonresidents, such as taxes on hotel rooms, car rentals and restaurant bills. Where broad-based taxes have been unavoidable, the preferred method has been incremental add-ons to sales taxes, which typically require voter approval. Voters have often said no, but sales tax increases provide large amounts of revenue when they are adopted—and when they are not, project advocates routinely come back with revised plans. In Los Angeles and Seattle, for example, transit advocates responded to referendum defeats by scaling back their rail plans and allocating some of the projected revenue to bus service and local road improvements.

Looking to the Future

Almost two decades ago, when New York City’s ambitious Westway project died even though its backers had helped pioneer the do no harm planning and design paradigm, then-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wondered whether it had become so difficult to build public projects that “Central Park could not conceivably be built today” (Finder 1985). Recent history suggests, however, that the mega-project impulse remains strong. The pertinent question is not whether the U.S. political system can still generate mega-projects but whether the projects that go forward are typically worth their costs to taxpayers.

In general, economists are skeptical about the cost-effectiveness of the most prominent mega-projects, from the Big Dig to the scores of rail transit systems, professional sports facilities and convention centers, built over the past 25 years. Project advocates invariably retort that the economists miss intangible project benefits such as fostering community pride and (in the case of transit, particularly) strengthening the likelihood of smart growth practices in new development. The national coalitions in support of highway and airport improvements, which economists tend to rate more favorably than other types of projects, have argued vociferously that current environmental rules and opportunities for critics to litigate are too onerous and should be relaxed.

There is no easy resolution of these issues because they involve tradeoffs between important, deeply held values. However, our review of a half-century of public works projects in urban areas has left us with three clear impressions. First, states and localities should be required to bear half or more of the cost of projects they undertake, because great windfalls of earmarked money from higher levels of government tend to overwhelm serious local deliberation. Second, strong environmental regulation helps ensure that local pro-growth coalitions do not leave fouled environments or devastated neighborhoods in their wake. Finally, while referenda are in general a flawed instrument of policy making, the evidence seems to suggest that the requirement of voter approval for major local projects tends to have a salutary effect on the bargaining between business groups that stand to benefit financially from the proposed investments and the more general interests of local taxpayers and residents.

_____________________

Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff are the coauthors of Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment. Altshuler is the Stanton Professor of Urban Policy at the Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University, and director of the Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government. Luberoff is the Taubman Center’s associate director and an adjunct lecturer at GSD.

References

Caro, Robert A. 1974. The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Finder, Alan. 1985. Westway: A road that was paved with mixed intentions, losing confidence and opportunities. New York Times, September 22, sec. 4, 6.

Long, Judith Grant. 2002. Full count: The real cost of pubic funding for major league sports facilities and why some cities pay more to play. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University.

Taylor, Brian. 1995. Public perceptions, fiscal realities, and freeway planning: The California case. Journal of the American Planning Association 61 (1): 43–56.

A conservation easement is private land, held by a private nonprofit corporation (typically a land trust) or a government agency. Though conservation easements are perceived as a win-win land protection strategy, there are several downfalls in their design—requiring this fairly new real estate law to come under increased scrutiny.

Conservation easements leave the land in private ownership and often achieve the goals of land protection without regulation or adversity, and usually without any government oversight. There is often concern that the terms of the conservation easement will be honored and that the conservation easement holder will have the capacity and resolve to monitor, enforce and defend the restrictions of the conservation easement in perpetuity, as conservation easements promise.

Because conservation easements are privately held property, most states have no public registry for conservation easements, no particular legal structure and no public review, transparency or accountability concerning their design, monitoring, enforcement, defense or stewardship.

This article identifies issues with the current practices for conservation easements and seeks solutions for the future of the conservation easement. Should their be standards enforced by federal or state governments? Should more responsibility be placed on the land owners? How would new regulations affect the use of the land? If conservation easements are to serve future generations as is their promise, they will have to resolve the issues they face.

Advance page to read full article

No recent happening in land conservation rivals the deployment from coast to coast of conservation easements. Beyond tax and other public subsidies, one of the driving forces favoring this phenomenon is that conservation easements are perceived as a win-win strategy in land protection, by which willing landowners work with private land trusts or government agencies to provide lasting protection for portions of the American landscape. Conservation easements leave land in private ownership, while allowing the easement holder (the land trust or agency) to enforce voluntary, contracted-for, often donated but increasingly paid-for restrictions on future uses of the easement-encumbered property. Conservation easements are often welcomed as achieving the goals of land protection without regulation or adversity, and usually without any government oversight.

At the same time, the rapid increase in the use of conservation easements raises the concern that they may present something of a time bomb that requires preventive action. Most of the laws and conventions concerning conservation easements were created at a time when no one could have foreseen their explosive growth and complexity. These laws and conventions require well-considered approaches to reform, lest we ultimately risk losing the public benefits that we thought conservation easements would secure in the future.

Definitions

A “conservation easement” (in some states referred to as a conservation restriction or similar term) is a set of permanently enforceable rights in real property, held by a private nonprofit corporation (typically a land trust) or a government agency. These rights impose a negative servitude (in other words, a set of promises not to do certain things) on the encumbered land, and they are permanently enforceable by the easement holder. Conservation easements are a relatively recent invention of real estate law and are enabled by statute in virtually every state.

A “land trust” is a loosely defined concept that usually includes at least two basic elements. First, it is a private, nonprofit charitable corporation incorporated under the laws of a state and qualified as tax-exempt and entitled to receive tax-deductible donations under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Second, depending on state law, a land trust’s mission, but not necessarily its exclusive or even primary one, is the conservation of land.

The Public Stake in Conservation Easements

Why should the public, and therefore its government at all levels, care about how conservation easements are created and managed? One reason is that virtually every conservation easement is associated with a significant public subsidy. Although most easements are donated by private landowners to private land trusts, they almost always result in public subsidies in the form of income tax deductions to the easement donors. In many cases a further subsidy comes in the form of reduced real property and estate taxes in the future. Increasingly, conservation easements are being purchased with public money, sometimes on a grand scale involving millions of dollars.

The public should care about how its money is being spent, whether it is being spent for something of long-term public benefit, and whether it is being spent efficiently; that is, the public should be interested in whether it is getting a fair public bang for its buck.

Beyond the public’s financial investment, its interest in conservation easements as a form of charitable trust transcends the interests of the private parties to the transaction. Further, some conservation easements guarantee public access to the property, such as for hiking or scenic enjoyment, giving the public an added stake in the long-term security of the easement. In the case of conservation easements granted by developers as a quid pro quo for regulatory permits, these easements may also comprise a public investment because they are part of the consideration in exchange for the right to proceed with a project that may cause environmental harm. Finally and not least importantly, the public has an abiding concern in the orderly future of legal understandings and the stability of interests in real estate.

In sum, when a conservation easement is created there is a legitimate public interest and concern that the terms of the easement will be honored and that the easement holder will have the capacity and resolve to monitor, enforce and defend the restrictions of the easement in perpetuity, as conservation easements promise. Indeed, the very purpose of state and federal laws that support and subsidize the creation of conservation easements is that the public interest is intended to permanently benefit from them.

Trends and Problems

Rapid growth. The attractiveness of conservation easements is demonstrated by the explosive growth of land trusts established to accept easements. Land trusts have become a big business in America, both for their vast holdings of conservation easements and other properties and for their increasing memberships and finances. Even so, many land trusts have come into existence only during the past 15 years and operate at a local level. While land trust creation continues to increase rapidly, an important policy question is whether the ever-expanding number of small land trusts throughout the nation is something that is good for our (and their) future.

The Land Trust Alliance (LTA), an organization that serves many land trusts nationwide, reported in its national census that between 1998 and 2003 the number of local and regional land trusts increased 26 percent from 1,213 to 1,526; the number of conservation easements held by these land trusts grew from 7,400 to nearly 18,000; and the area covered by these easements expanded from nearly 1.4 million acres to more than 5 million acres (Land Trust Alliance 2004; see Figures 1 and 2). In addition, there are a number of national organizations, such as The Nature Conservancy and the American Farmland Trust, that hold additional thousands of conservation easements. Untold thousands of easements also are held by federal, state and local governments.

Often land trusts and government agencies alike focus on, publicize and celebrate the accumulating numbers of conservation easements in their portfolios, as well as the numbers of acres that they cover, without equivalent regard for the quality of the easements or of the lands they protect. Since conservation easements bring with them long-term and costly responsibilities for the holder in monitoring, stewardship, enforcement and defense, this focus on numbers can be short-term thinking that leads to long-term problems.

Lack of uniformity. The terms of conservation easements are infinitely variable. Calling something a conservation easement tells one nothing about what protections it affords or even what legal boilerplate it includes. Many conservation easement advocates extol the virtues of this flexibility, since it allows the landowner and easement holder to tailor each easement to their mutual interests.

However, this increasing variability of conservation easements inevitably will result in more problems over time for both easement holders and future successions of landowners in understanding, undertaking, monitoring, defending and upholding all of the legal rights and responsibilities of each easement. Heightening this effect is the fact that many conservation easements are increasingly negotiated, nuanced and complex agreements, leaving even legal experts challenged in easement preparation, interpretation, oversight and enforcement.

Valuation issues. The valuation problem for conservation easements arises in two forms: the opportunity for excessive claims of income, estate and property tax deductions or reductions; and uncertainty as to the societal and cost-benefit calculus of each easement. The valuation of donated conservation easements has become a major cause for alarm by the Internal Revenue Service, which says that it will be applying an increasingly watchful eye on the deductions taken for these donations. However, part of the problem may be that the IRS has not been precise enough in stating how conservation easement appraisals should be undertaken.

Even if the IRS adopts a more rigorous approach to easement appraisal in the future, it will never be in a good position to determine whether each easement, for which a charitable deduction is taken, is worthy in terms of conferring a public benefit commensurate with the public subsidy. That task must be undertaken by others, starting with the land trust or other easement holder and embracing some degree of broader public participation.

Lack of legal standards. While conservation easements are intended to be permanent servitudes on privately held property, most states have no public registry for conservation easements, no particular legal structure and no public review, transparency or accountability with respect to their design, monitoring, enforcement, defense or stewardship. Accordingly, there may be a growing disconnect, or perhaps it is a correlation, between the massive deployment of these new interests in real estate, their nearly infinite variability and the multitude of new-born land trusts that hold them on the one hand, and the largely undisciplined laws and conventions that govern them on the other.

In sum, potential legal and other reforms should be considered to respond to many diverse issues related to conservation easements.

This state of affairs, already evident in many thousands of conservation easements, cannot serve future generations well. Under the present laws and conventions, how can we expect holders of these easements and succeeding generations of landowners to understand, no less attend to, the often subtle differences in their terms and to comply with, uphold, defend and enforce conservation easements forever?

Although the nearly exponential trends in the deployment of conservation easements may be heartening to many in the land conservation community, they also pose equivalent challenges that require critical examination and consideration of reform. The evident solution is to create standards for conservation easements and their holders that are more uniform, explicit, publicly transparent and rigorous. Doing so would be in the long-term best interests of those in the conservation easement community and the public at large.

Potential Solutions

Among the general approaches to reform are changes to federal tax laws; greater state oversight of conservation easements and their holders; increased self-regulation by the land trust community; consolidation and networking of land trusts; and greater supervision of conservation easements and their holders by funding sources. The purpose of advancing these reform ideas is to create more predictability and stability in the design and long-term management of conservation easements, so there can be a greater degree of assurance that these new inventions of real estate law will deliver on the promises that they make to future generations.

The most universal approach to reform would be to create more rigorous IRS standards for conservation easements, their appraisals and their holders, so there is greater assurance that their public subsidy will result in conservation easements that are permanently monitored and enforced. A second and complementary approach would be for the National Conference of Commissioners, which gave birth to the Uniform Conservation Easement Act in 1981, to reconvene and consider the issues that went unresolved in its earlier work. A third approach would be for each state to consider amendments to its conservation easement enabling act that respond to these issues. Finally, the Land Trust Alliance is already making efforts to inform and encourage its members to take affirmative but voluntary action to resolve many of these concerns.

Even while considering needed change, these reforms should not impose unreasonable transaction costs on conservation easements. The goal is to select reforms that are efficient in making a difference. At the same time, it is important to consider the tremendous and increasing public subsidies of conservation easements, their opportunity costs and potential effects on government regulatory and land acquisition programs. This scrutiny is not a condemnation of conservation easements, but rather is aimed at articulating issues and possible reforms that can make easements deliver their promises.

Conclusions

This should be an uneasy time for those in the conservation easement community. Because of alleged abuses widely reported by the media, both Congress and the IRS are investigating easement practices by their donors and holders. Congressional proposals are emerging to substantially reduce tax incentives for donations of conservation easements. The time is right to explore potentially useful reforms of all kinds in order to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The principal source of many issues with conservation easements is the laws and conventions that govern these interests in real estate, which were created at a time when no one could have anticipated the explosive growth of easements and land trusts. While national organizations like the Land Trust Alliance have shown outstanding leadership in devising and promoting standards, practices and other assistance for land trusts, these standards are purely voluntary, and land trusts have no legal obligation to follow them. Moreover, in some cases the worst problems with respect to long-term management of conservation easements involve understaffed or inattentive government holders.

How dire is the future of conservation easements? Just as conservation easements are intended to endure, each of the problems reported here will have its day, and some already have. When evaluating the effectiveness of conservation easements under the prevailing legal structure, perhaps the best answer is that the jury will be out for 100 years, but one should be sufficiently concerned about a possibly adverse verdict to consider these issues and ways to resolve them.

If conservation easements are to serve future generations as is their promise, they will have to live up to three essential principles.

1. The value of conservation easements depends upon their being able to effectively and permanently deliver the public benefits they promise.
2. Landowners and conservation easement holders, who receive the benefits of the state and federal laws that provide for and subsidize conservation easement acquisition, should be legally accountable for upholding their part of the bargain, including monitoring and upholding the terms of each easement and assuring that its public benefits are secured in the future.
3. The process by which conservation easements are designed, appraised and managed should be more rigorous, publicly transparent and accountable.

With these principles in mind, there are many approaches to resolving the issues presented by conservation easements. However, to fashion the solutions one must first acknowledge the problems. If ever we are to take action to assure the future of conservation easements, the time to do so may never be better, nor easier, than now.

Jeff Pidot is a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute, on leave from his work as chief of the Natural Resources Division of the Maine Attorney General’s Office, a position he has held since 1990. He has been an active participant in the land trust movement in Maine and has a wealth of experience with conservation easements in both his professional and volunteer work. While at the Lincoln Institute, he is researching and writing about the challenges of conservation easements and reforms that may be considered to meet these challenges.

His working paper, Reinventing Conservation Easements: A Critical Examination and Ideas for Reform, is available on the Institute’s website.

Reference

Land Trust Alliance. 2004. National Land Trust Census. November 18 http://www.lta.org/census/index.shtml

Faculty Profile of Fernanda Furtado

Eduardo Reese, arquitecto que se especializa en planeamiento urbano y regional, es el subadministrador del Instituto de la Vivienda de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. En cargos profesionales anteriores, fue asesor técnico para los planes maestros de más de 20 ciudades en argentina; Secretario de Políticas Socioeconómicas del Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano y Laboral de la Provincia de Buenos Aires; asesor al Consejo de Planeamiento Urbano de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires; y Secretario de Planeamiento en la ciudad de Avellaneda.

Reese es docente en el Instituto del Conurbano de la Universidad Nacional del General Sarmiento en Buenos Aires. Actualmente es profesor de gestión urbana en el programa de grado en urbanismo en dicha universidad. También enseña desarrollo urbano en programas de maestría de la Faculta de Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Diseño de la Universidad de La Plata, así como en universidades de Mar del Plata y Córdoba. Además, dirige el plan maestro de la cuenca Matanza-Riachuelo en Buenos Aires.

Land Lines: ¿Cómo se involucró usted en el Programa para América Latina del Instituto Lincoln?

Eduardo Reese: Mi relación con el Programa se remonta a 1997, cuando estábamos elaborando el plan de la ciudad de Córdoba, que incluyó la formulación de diferentes proyectos urbanos de gran escala. En ese momento el Instituto colaboró activamente para ampliar el debate de los impactos de estos proyectos sobre el mercado de suelo y, consecuentemente, en la configuración de la ciudad. Posteriormente, me fui integrando en diversas actividades del Instituto, y hace cuatro años asumí la coordinación de los cursos anuales de Gestión del Suelo en Grandes Proyectos Urbanos, a partir del fallecimiento de Mario Lungo, quien había dirigido ese programa desde su inicio.

En el 2004, el Programa y el Instituto del Conurbano de la Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, realizamos en conjunto el curso Mercados de Suelo: Teoría e instrumentos para la gestión de políticas, el cual fue la primera actividad del Programa para América Latina y el Caribe que implicó un programa de formación de siete meses para 50 alumnos argentinos. Esa experiencia educativa ayudó a formar una masa crítica de técnicos y profesionales con una visión innovadora y diferente respecto de la gestión de las políticas de suelo. El impacto de ese curso se ha reflejado en decisiones de políticas urbanas en diferentes municipalidades (tales como San Fernando y Morón en el Gran Buenos Aires); en la constitución en Argentina del Movimiento de Reforma Urbana en 2005; y en cambios académicos en el mismo Instituto del Conurbano.

Land Lines: ¿Qué rol puede jugar un proyecto urbano en la calidad de vida de una ciudad en el contexto latinoamericano?

Eduardo Reese: Las grandes operaciones o proyectos urbanísticos sobre sectores definidos de la ciudad (tanto en áreas centrales como en las periferias) han sido grandes protagonistas del urbanismo contemporáneo en el último cuarto de siglo. En América Latina se cuenta hoy con un amplio muestreo de experiencias y proyectos, aunque todavía se requiere una reflexión teórica más rigurosa. Algunos ejemplos importantes son los proyectos del Portal del Bicentenario en Santiago de Chile; los proyectos urbanos integrales en Medellín, Colombia; las operaciones urbanas en diferentes ciudades de Brasil; y el proyecto de reestructuración en el sector Oeste de San Fernando, Argentina.

Sin embargo, es importante aclarar que las grandes operaciones urbanísticas son un instrumento de intervención en la ciudad que ya tienen muchos años no sólo en los países centrales, sino también en nuestras sociedades. En Buenos Aires, por ejemplo, la apertura de la Avenida de Mayo y de las diagonales, proyectada hacia 1880 y llevada a cabo en las décadas siguientes, implicó importantes impactos, tanto en lo físico-espacial como en lo social, económico y, fundamentalmente, en el campo simbólico. Este enfoque de múltiples impactos permite, sin duda, asimilar la operación de Avenida de Mayo a un gran proyecto urbano contemporáneo, pero también generó un gran debate sobre quién debía financiar la operación y quién se apropiaría de las rentas de suelo generadas. En última instancia, la Corte Suprema falló que la municipalidad no podía financiar las obras con la plusvalía generada, porque las rentas eran enteramente de los terratenientes. Durante muchos años, este caso fue un precedente en relación a la intervención estatal en el proceso de valorización de suelo generado por un gran proyecto público.

Land Lines: Usted tiene una mirada muy crítica del reconocido proyecto de regeneración urbana Puerto Madero, en Buenos Aires. ¿Qué haría de manera diferente en otras grandes áreas de redesarrollo?

Eduardo Reese: Puerto Madero es un caso emblemático de proyectos urbanos que promueven un modelo de planeamiento urbano segregado y que hoy en día se “exporta” a otras ciudades y países como instrumento básico para poder “competir” por las inversiones internacionales. En este proyecto el Estado adoptó una posición de sumisión frente al mercado y permitió la construcción de un barrio exclusivo para sectores de altísimos ingresos. Es un ejemplo notorio de una política pública diseñada explícitamente para privilegiar a los sectores más ricos sin recuperación de las enormes valorizaciones del suelo que fueron producto de esta misma política pública.

Más aún, a fin de garantizar a los inversionistas la sobrevalorización de las propiedades que compraron, el emprendimiento tiene una serie de características que la “recortan” (física y socialmente) del resto de la ciudad, creando con ello rentas aún mayores debido a la segregación. Puerto Madero no tiene un muro explícito, como los condominios cerrados, pero tiene múltiples acciones y mensajes implícitos, explícitos y simbólicos que señalan claramente que ese lugar está fuera del alcance para la mayoría de la sociedad:

• Es el único barrio administrado por una Corporación Estatal que, además, hace 19 años paga sueldos de funcionarios y gerentes para construir y mantener unos pocos metros cuadrados de parque accesibles únicamente a aquel barrio adinerado.
• El proyecto creó una escenografía urbana diseñada y de cuidadosos detalles estéticos que contrasta fuertemente con la pobreza brutal del espacio público en el resto de la ciudad. Los parques e infraestructura son construidos sobre suelo ya privatizado para garantizar las inversiones, pese a utilizar fondos públicos, que benefician únicamente a los propietarios de élites de las torres de vivienda y oficinas que los rodean.
• El sistema se apoya en un sofisticado sistema de cámaras y de seguridad que definen y controlan el acceso a una zona sobreprotegida.
• Todos estos mecanismos están al servicio de garantizar la sobrevalorización de las propiedades como un seguro de que allí solo podrá comprar y habitar la clase social más alta.

En definitiva, Puerto Madero es la clara demostración de urbanismo y política pública de distribución regresiva: un “ghetto” libre de problemas para ricos.

Land Lines: En la medida en que las municipalidades compiten por inversiones externas, ¿es posible reconciliar esto con objetivos alternativos tales como prioridades ambientales y sociales?

Eduardo Reese: El problema de nuestras ciudades no es la falta de planeamiento, sino el actual orden excluyente de las políticas y del urbanismo. No puede haber una ley para la ciudad formal y un conjunto de excepciones para el resto. Es necesario crear un nuevo orden urbanístico y jurídico en América Latina respecto al derecho a la ciudad, la distribución equitativa de los beneficios de la urbanización, y la función social de la tenencia de suelo.

Land Lines: ¿De qué manera la municipalidad de San Fernando, en el Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires, ofrece una alternativa a este enfoque?

Eduardo Reese: San Fernando es un municipio ubicado en la zona norte del Gran Buenos Aires, a 30 km de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, con una superficie continental de 23 km² y una población de 156.000 habitantes. Tiene un frente litoral al Río Luján de 5 km de extensión sobre su desembocadura en el Río de la Plata donde se concentra una gran cantidad de actividades productivas vinculadas con la náutica. Este sector del municipio tiene una ubicación privilegiada, con altos valores inmobiliarios y está dotado de la totalidad de los servicios urbanos.

El plan urbano y el modelo de gestión del suelo se comenzaron a elaborar en el 2003 a través de un convenio entre el municipio y el Instituto del Conurbano de la Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento. En el año 2005, un seminario de capacitación del Instituto Lincoln ayudó a ampliar las ideas tradicionales sobre manejo de suelo que abundaban en los grupos profesionales locales y llevó a una serie de decisiones importantes:

• generar recursos sustentables para reorientar el desarrollo urbano;
• recuperar la cultura de financiamiento de obras públicas con una contribución por mejoras
• recuperar suelo para vivienda social, infraestructura urbana y redes viales
• fortalecer las administraciones urbanas y municipales como actores innovadores en la implementación de políticas públicas; y
• limitar la sobrevaluación del suelo al intervenir en el mercado a través de mecanismos tales como nueva legislación de planeamiento urbano, instrumentos para recuperar la valorización, y una importante oferta de suelo para los sectores de bajos ingresos.

La política urbana en San Fernando se enfocó en una serie de estrategias de acción que incluyeron (1) asegurar el acceso a nuevos espacios públicos sobre el río para fines recreativos, deportivos y comerciales, especialmente para ser aprovechados por los sectores pobres; y (2) la regularización comprehensiva del sector oeste de la municipalidad, donde se concentra los mayores niveles de pobreza.

Para implementar estas estrategias, fue necesario aumentar los recursos fiscales para inversión pública de dos maneras: a través de la apropiación de la rentabilidad del uso del suelo o tierra municipal sobre el río a través de la creación del consorcio Parque Náutico de San Fernando, S.A. (PNSFSA); y con la participación de la municipalidad en la plusvalía a partir de una reforma tributaria municipal. (PNSFSA es una empresa creada por la municipalidad de San Fernando para administrar las tierras del dominio municipal en la costa ribereña del sector este de la ciudad, conocida como Marina Park).

La experiencia de San Fernando se basa en un conjunto de herramientas de gestión orientadas a la redistribución de rentas urbanas para construir una ciudad más equitativa. El suelo se considera como un activo clave dentro de una estrategia más amplia de desarrollo local y, por lo tanto, la gestión depende de una combinación de instrumentos de planeamiento, administrativos, económicos, fiscales y legales orientados a fortalecer el papel del sector público. El eje central de las políticas es la búsqueda de equidad en la distribución de los costos y beneficios de la urbanización, dentro del contexto desafiante de la creciente presión sobre el suelo en toda el área metropolitana de Buenos Aires.

Land Lines: ¿Qué cambios habría que realizar en el sistema educativo para la capacitación de los planificadores urbanos?

Eduardo Reese: Primero, es necesario incorporar una mayor comprensión del funcionamiento de los mercados de suelo en el contexto actual de las ciudades de los países en desarrollo. Segundo, hace falta un análisis más crítico de los instrumentos teóricos, metodológicos y técnicos para llevar a cabo el diagnóstico e intervención en asuntos de suelo urbano. El curso sobre mercados de suelo de 2004 que mencioné antes buscó desarrollar este tipo de materiales para permitir que los estudiantes cubrieran las diferentes escalas y dimensiones del problema.

Land Lines: ¿Qué tensiones existen entre intereses públicos y privados en el planeamiento urbano?

Eduardo Reese: Esta es una pregunta crucial porque toda la historia de la gestión territorial en nuestras ciudades ha tenido un hilo conductor: el derecho de la propiedad privada del suelo juntamente con la estructura de la propiedad han entrado siempre en conflicto con la actividad urbanística que es una responsabilidad pública. En ese sentido siempre habrá una tensión entre intereses públicos y privados en la construcción de la ciudad.

A mi juicio, los proyectos urbanos en América Latina tienen la responsabilidad de contribuir a la creación de nuevos espacios de uso y goce público, a la inclusión social, a la generación de empleo, a la equidad en el acceso a los servicios para todos, a la sostenibilidad ambiental y a la redistribución de las rentas urbanas generadas por el proyecto. Los cuatro casos mencionados antes de Chile, Colombia, Brasil y Argentina muestran que estos beneficios son posibles en muchos países.

Sin embargo, y lamentablemente, en una gran cantidad de casos en América Latina los proyectos urbanos se han justificado como necesarios para atraer inversiones y/o consumidores y asegurar o reforzar las ventajas competitivas dinámicas de la ciudad. Estos insospechados objetivos positivos a veces se usan como un mecanismo para legitimizar intervenciones que profundizan la segregación socioespacial de las ciudades. Estos efectos adversos del mercado no son fatales para las ciudades, sino que son el resultado de elecciones políticas perversas.