Decoding Corruption in Urban Economic Development

The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

Several years ago, news broke of a major FBI sting in Tallahassee, Florida. Federal agents had gone undercover to infiltrate city government, posing as real estate developers, and successfully bribed local economic development officials to win votes and contracts.

Kerry Fang, who was teaching at Florida State University in Tallahassee at the time, watched as multiple arrests and convictions followed. And in the treasure trove of email correspondence, meeting records, and other subpoenaed evidence that became public, Fang—now an associate professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—saw a valuable research opportunity.

“I was able to obtain all that material, which is especially rich and rare to find, and to look at, when it’s a corrupt project, are there specific patterns of communication going on? Can we see some clues of corruption from their email exchanges?” Fang says. “I’m now working on a book looking into corruption in economic development projects as a whole, because, unfortunately, it’s actually more common than we think.”

The title of the book? “The working title is The Most F—d Up Place: An Anatomy of Corruption in Urban Economic Development,” Fang says. The profanity comes from an FBI agent’s colorful description of Tallahassee.

Fang says her students at the time were by turns appalled, dismayed, and motivated by the corruption scandal. “I’m really proud of some of my former students at Florida State, because they listened to me talk about this in class, and they got pissed,” she says. “One of my former students ran for the seat of the city commissioner in Tallahassee, and she is now proudly a city commissioner.”

In 2020, Fang was awarded an International Fellowship from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s China program to study the impacts of land tenure on children’s health in rural China. Research from her resulting working paper was published last year in the peer-reviewed journal Feminist Economics.

In this conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Fang shares more insights from her research, why planners need to learn to navigate local politics, and why she’s found action and research to be antidotes to despair.

JON GOREY: What is the general focus of your research, and how did your Lincoln Institute fellowship support that work?

KERRY FANG: My research is primarily focused on land use policy and its impact on equity and sustainability, as well as economic development policy. Both of these fields are very, very important pillars of urban planning, and they are also closely connected to each other.

The Lincoln fellowship helped me tremendously. As somebody who was brought up in China [where, prior to 2003, collective land rights in rural villages were typically allocated by household size and periodically adjusted], the particular question I was interested in was, does the ban on land adjustments, which was aimed at ending instability for rural households, have unintended consequences by denying land rights to women and children who came into a village after the ban? Would that affect their standing inside the family, and does that affect how the family distributes resources?

A lot of the prior research was focusing on the family as a whole—as though, if you benefit the family, everybody benefits. We all know that’s not the case. Who is the head of the family, who is really in charge of the resources of the family? Especially in the context of rural China, the man of the house is the one who will have the resources, and now he may also be the only one who is entitled to land rights. So what does that mean?

I was fascinated by the question, and with the Lincoln fellowship, I was able to do the survey and ask explicitly, who has land rights within this household, and look into how that affects the resource distribution, how that affects children’s health—which is becoming more of an issue in China. I found that when you deny children their land rights, their health deteriorates, and they are more likely to be obese. If the wife, the mother, has land rights, it’s more likely the family will have better health coverage. And if a girl has land rights, it’s more likely the father will spend some time with his daughter.

JG: What are you working on now, or hoping to work on next?

KF: On the land use front, I’ve always been looking into transfer of development rights. [While at Florida State University], I started to collaborate with other scholars who are really interested in coastal adaptation, and I started to look into using transfer of development rights as a tool to facilitate coastal adaptation. Because theoretically, it is the tool that can transfer development rights from high-risk areas to lower-risk areas. So it makes sense theoretically, but the practical applications are really lacking.

There are only a handful of programs with applications in the US. So far, there have only been either theoretical studies or individual case studies that have not systematically tracked their performance or the various challenges they have encountered. So that’s why I’ve started this work, to really look into these existing applications of using TDR for coastal adaptation, and to systematically track their performance.

On the other front of economic development, I’ve looked into how planners communicate with politicians, and whether the communication will shape the politicians’ decisions. I’m also collaborating right now with some computer scientists to do some text mining into the email exchanges from the Tallahassee case, to try to see, can we see some clues of corruption from their email exchanges? Is it possible to detect corruption from those materials?

For so many years I studied economics from more of a rational perspective. We are rational planners trying to come up with what’s best for the city, we do cost benefit analyses for public projects to determine what’s right for the city. But is that really what’s going on? A lot of these things are heavily shaped by politics, and power dynamics, and sometimes outright corruption. In almost every big city in the US, if you search ‘corruption in land development’ or economic development, chances are you’ll find something.

And the major projects that require so much public subsidy, they get passed anyway, despite overwhelming empirical evidence telling us mega projects mostly do not pay off. They still go through. So my book project is really going to explicitly address that issue, showing that this is what’s happening, this is the power dynamic and power imbalance that infiltrates urban economic development projects, and here are some of the clues to look for, to see it happening throughout every stage of the development, and warning signs so you may be able to catch it.

JG: What’s something that has surprised you in your research?

KF: The corruption piece definitely surprised me. I mean, I’m not naive, I know there’s corruption. I had not realized how deeply infiltrated it is to our lives, and how widespread it is, because we don’t talk about it that often, especially in the United States. In the literature, it’s treated like a developing country issue.

A lot of it happens exactly in the realm of my studies—in land development, economic development—because that’s where the money is, that’s where the power is. And we, trained as planners, in these government institutions, we more likely function as technician types. We have technical expertise, but we’re really not very good at navigating the political landscape.

JG: What’s something you wish more people understood about urban planning, land use, or economic development?

KF: That they are connected together, and that’s really important. I feel like we are a little bit over specialized in things, and we silo ourselves into different categories of things.

A lot of what I do is try to make connections. So my work in land use and environmental planning is trying to make a connection of using land use to promote environmental planning and coastal adaptation, which also supports economic development and broader social sustainability and equity. And my work in corruption and economic development is really connecting economic development and land development with urban politics, urban governance.

You can’t just look from one perspective without looking at the others. The urban system is a whole system.

JG: I was intrigued by one of the classes you teach, called Urban Informatics. Can you talk about that term, and some of the data journalism your students have done?

KF: This is an undergrad class that I’ve only taught once so far, but we are trying to make our students able to effectively use data to solve urban planning issues. The class has three modules. The first one is statistical methods as well as mapping and spatial analysis, and that’s really important for planning. The second module, I’m focusing on data visualization and data journalism, because effective communication [is so important]—as planners, not only do you have to be able to use data, but how do you communicate the data to your audience, and to different types of audiences? That means you have to effectively visualize your data, map your data, and tell a story with your data.

And the last module, I’m taking my students to the forefront of machine learning methods like web scraping, POI (point-of-interest), text mining, and interactive graphing. All the new stuff that as an urban planner, more and more, you will be exposed to—new data, new methods, real-time data that will be really important in the management of cities.

My students in last year’s class looked into different neighborhoods in Chicago, looking at the different demographic and economic characteristics. And as we all know—it’s not particularly shocking, but it’s still really amazing to see the students pull the data and to visualize it, and it’s just sharply being laid out how much spatial disparity there is in Chicago. They integrated a lot of good visualization techniques that they learned from the class to make really good maps of that. And they were able to tell a really good story about the driving forces of all these phenomena, all the sharp distinctions you’re seeing—what are some of the policies behind that, the social forces behind that, and what planners can do to address those issues.

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

KF: Both the political power thing and the climate issue. Both of these are the crises of our time, and on a dark day, I will feel like we’re hopeless on both fronts. The political power, they’re very powerful out there, and sometimes I feel like, how am I going to counter that? The climate issue is such a big issue that really needs a lot of global collaboration, but everybody is looking out for themselves. So that’s what’s keeping me up at night.

For me, what’s empowering is if I can do something. I think that’s part of why I’m studying using land use policy to help facilitate coastal adaptation to climate issues, and studying the power dynamics and the political process in urban economic development. Both of these are ways to keep my sanity and make me feel like I am doing something. I’m actively publishing these things to, first of all, raise awareness on these issues. Even if I cannot, myself, necessarily change things, if more people know about them, maybe I’m able to mobilize more people to action, like the actions my students have taken. That’s something I’m really proud of.

Especially for coastal adaptation, I felt like there are concrete, practical implications that can come out of my work that can directly factor into practice. As I am talking to the planners who are in charge of these TDR programs, I can really help them to run their programs better. And if that’s the case, I can help some of these communities cope with the climate change issue a little bit better, and that makes me feel empowered and more hopeful for the future.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Kerry Fang, associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Credit: Courtesy photo.