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The plan adopted by Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle and other city officials included the following features in their designated "Platinum Triangle":

• Reliance on private property owners to initiate development
• Use of an overlay zone to permit different kinds of development in the area
• Simplified permits and environmental impact reports
• Housing permits defined by district
• Loosened restrictions on housing permits and inclusionary zoning

Anaheim broke the problem of self-perpetuating regulation and found success with a plan that reduced government regulations and stimulated private-sector investment. Billions of dollars in private investment flowed into the Platinum Triangle once city government got out of the way and trusted the private sector to lead.

Growth is good. Impact fees and adequate public facilites ordinances (APFOs), which are intended to compensate the public for the costs associated with increased growth, don't solve problems with growth; they create them. They essentially double-tax home buyers — directly through property and sales taxes and indirectly through higher housing costs owing to the impact fees and APFOs.

Impact fees and APFOs are often justified by studies that purport to calculate the cost of growth on the communities. The implication is that growth is undesirable, which flies in the face of civic boosterism from time immemorial.

The boosters have been right all along. Those same studies neglect to calculate the benefits of growth, which outweigh (more than pay for) the costs. They include, among other things, additional tax revenues created by the new residents, including property taxes, local sales taxes, utility excise taxes, inspection permit fees, and motor vehicle taxes.

In 2005, North Carolina State University economist Michael Walden studied the economic impact (costs and benefits) of constructing 100 new single-family homes and 100 multi-family homes in the Triangle area. Walden concluded that the benefits in the form of local city and county tax revenues and economic growth outweighed growth-associated costs by nearly $77,000 per year over a ten-year period.

Politics gets in the way. The zoning process should be depoliticized so that only those parties directly affected by property owners' land-use decisions are allowed to comment on them.

The original goal was merely to prevent one landowner's use of his land from directly harming another's, not to force the landowner to uphold the aesthetic and political tastes of attendees at large. In other words, only those landowners who can show a direct and identifiable harm should be granted standing to comment upon land-use decisions.

Furthermore, many city and county land-use regulations give too much discretion to planning staff, planning boards, and elected bodies, creating a time-consuming process that drives up housing costs. Worse, it creates a favorable environment for graft, corruption, and favoritism in making land-use decisions. To avoid this problem, cities and counties must re-establish the rule of law. They need a clear set of simple, flexible written rules such that approval is automatic once a development meets requirements.

Background

Local land use and zoning regulations are, at their core, assertions of authority and control by planning officials over other people's property. The more invasive these regulations — the more complicated and restrictive they are — then the more expensive it becomes to try to be a property or homeowner. Inherently suspicious of growth, the system also becomes more open to gaming and abuse by well-connected insiders.

Forward-thinking leaders and planners would seek to reform land-use and zoning policies in order to restore the benefits of property ownership as well as rights to property owners. By so doing, they would reap for their communities the rewards of greater growth, industry, and diversity.

Analysis

A century's worth of experience in zoning to control land use has produced a self-perpetuating system, creating worse problems to which planners inevitably think the solution must be increased regulation. Land-use patterns that planners find the most objectionable, such as "urban sprawl" and the lack of mixed-use developments, can be traced to earlier zoning practices that strictly separated land parcels according to residential, commercial, and industrial uses.

The planners' vision of zoning is as an objective, professional, and efficient process managing land uses to benefit the entire community. In practice, zoning is an exceedingly politicized process to navigate. As such it is exploitable by well-connected insiders and others in the know to gain advantages at the expense of others, including of course potential newcomers with new ideas.

Many zoning regulations therefore result in the enrichment of existing property and homeowners by reducing the supply of buildable land, increasing the costs of development, driving up home values, and pricing out the poor and minorities.

Those problems should inspire officials to cut back on regulations and restore more control to property owners. Rather than resort to even more artificial impositions, they should trust in what the North Carolina Constitution calls "the genius of a free state" and what the Internet Age calls "crowdsourcing" to recognize and address problems. In other words, when free people strive to better their own situations, they happen upon new and unique ways that, collectively, improve others' lives in the process.

The entire 2014 City & County Issue Guide, is available for download as a 3.6MB Adobe Acrobat file.
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