Most Americans today do not live in discrete cities and towns, but rather in an aggregation of cities and suburbs that forms one basic economic, multi-cultural, environmental and civic entity. These “regional cities” have the potential to significantly improve the quality of our lives--to provide interconnected and diverse economic centers, transportation choices, and a variety of human-scale communities. In The Regional City, two of the most innovative thinkers in the field of land use planning and design offer a detailed look at this new metropolitan form and explain how regional-scale planning and design can help direct growth wisely and reverse current trends in land use. The authors:
Are rent controls and zoning regulations unconstitutional? Should the Supreme Court strike down the Endangered Species Act when its administration interferes with the use of private property? These questions are currently debated under the doctrine of regulatory takings, and William Fischel’s book offers a new perspective on the issue.
Regulatory Takings argues that the issue is not so much about the details of property law as it is about the fairness of politics. The book employs jurisprudential theories, economic analysis, historical investigation, and political science to show why local land use regulations, such as zoning and rent control, deserve a higher degree of judicial scrutiny than national regulations. Unlike other books on this topic, Regulatory Takings goes beyond case law to buttress its arguments. Its reality checks range from reviews of statistical evidence to local inquiries about famous takings cases such as Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon and Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission. The gap between legal theory and on-the-ground practice is one reason that Fischel investigates alternative means of protecting property rights.
Local governments are often deterred from unfairly regulating portable assets by their owners’ threat of “exit” from the jurisdiction. State and federal government regulations are disciplined by property-owner coalitions whose “voice” is clearly audible in the statehouses and in Congress.
Constitutional courts need to preserve their resources for use in areas in which politics is loaded against the property owner. Regulatory Takings advances an economic standard to decide when a local regulation crosses the border from legitimate police power to a taking that requires just compensation for owners who are adversely affected.
The opposing forces of conservation and development have shaped and will continue to shape the natural environment and scenic beauty of the American West. Perhaps nowhere are their opposite effects more visible than in the neighboring states of Colorado and Utah, so alike in their spectacular mountain environments, yet so different in their approaches to land conservation. This study explores why Colorado has over twenty-five land trusts, while Utah has only one.
John Wright traces the success of voluntary land conservation in Colorado to the state’s history as a region of secular commerce. As environmental consciousness has grown in Colorado, people there have embraced the businesslike approach of land trusts as simply a new, more responsible way of conducting the real estate business.
In Utah, by contrast, Wright finds that Mormon millennialism and the belief that growth equals success have created a public climate opposed to the formation of land trusts. As Wright puts it, "environmentalism seems to thrive in the Centennial state within the spiritual vacuum which is filled by Mormonism in Utah." These findings remind conservationists of the power of underlying cultural values that affect their efforts to preserve private lands.
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