ESP171 Urban and Regional Planning
Class 9: Encouraging Growth within the Boundaries 2
Economic Development
Economic development: “A process by which local governments seek to use planning
to guide private investment and business activity toward the goals it wants to achieve.”
Pg. 242
Two situations:
- Community is not growing: encourage growth
- Community is growing: encourage upward not outward
Approaches:
- Targeted public improvements: e.g. repair streets
- Location of public facilities: e.g. government agency office building
- Subsidies for individual businesses and developers: e.g. build infrastructure or
provide land
- Tax credits and regulatory streamlining – but NOT CEQA
“Fiscalization of land use”: land use decisions in pursuit of tax revenue…
Increase “base” for sales tax by encouraging businesses that bring sales tax in:
e.g. shopping centers, auto dealers
Increase “base” for property tax by encouraging more valuable development –
redevelopment!
Redevelopment
Economic rationale, traditionally
Growth management rationale, more recently
Redevelopment law: Enacted in 1945 to eliminate “urban blight” conditions created by
decades of depression, war, and neglect
Confers two main powers on local government:
- Power to acquire property by eminent domain, even if private development
projects planned for site: power to rearrange private land ownership patterns
- Power to create “tax-increment financing” districts, to sell bonds backed by future
property tax increases in redevelopment area: financial resources to subsidize
private development projects deemed to be in public interest
Eminent Domain:
Power of government to appropriate private property for its own use without owner’s
consent, based on Fifth Amendment:
– “Just compensation” – fair market value
– “Public use” – subject of Kelo vs. New London
Same techniques –
how to encourage
growth where it
doesn’t want to go
