Abstract
How does municipal land use planning affect the organization of cities? The mantra of planning is that planners fix problems created by the private market; many of these problems are characterized in general as “sprawl“ . This chapter considers a linear program model—a simplified version of Schlager (1965) —in which planners allocate uses (demand for land fixed in quantity for each use) to zones (land supply fixed in each zone ) within a city to be efficient. Schlager then imagines the planner’s problem as allocating, by types of land use, the amount of each land use in each zone. Presumably, a zone is an area within which the unit cost of developing land for a particular use is everywhere the same. The planner’s problem is to find a design that minimizes this total cost subject to two sets of constraints. First, the land use allocation for any zone must not exceed the amount of available land there. Second, the aggregate amount of land needed for each use must be supplied. Each constraint generates a shadow price : the opportunity cost of supplying the marginal unit of land use demanded or of the last unit of land supplied in a zone. The dual to this model tells us that planners allocate uses to zones in a way that mimics the operation of a competitive market for land and therefore gives us a baseline (foil) for thinking about the impact of other planning actions. In this model, I show the equivalence between a planned city and a city in which all land use allocation is through a competitive market in land.
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Notes
- 1.
Schlager’s paper has been reprinted in Sweet (1972) and Schwirian (1974). A similar approach is used in Laidlaw (1972) .
- 2.
Nuisance is a thorny legal issue. Aronovici (1931, pp. 151–152) argues that the law of nuisance does not draw a clear distinction between nonconformity and nuisance. As well, Bell and Parchamovsky (2005, p. 540) notes that use and enjoyment is but one of the rights held by a property owner and that losses arising in other rights are excluded.
- 3.
Where costs (transactions costs) and barriers to negotiation are low, Coase (1960) argues that bargaining between the parties will ensure efficiency: the party with the higher valuation will prevail.
- 4.
Colby (1933, p. 4) argues that avoiding nuisance suits was an important reason why industry began to leave American central city areas in the early 20th century.
- 5.
Porter (1997 , p. 20) cites a 1915 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld, as a proper exercise of its police power, a city's ordinance prohibiting the continuance of brick manufacturing within designated areas as a nuisance to nearby residents.
- 6.
Tilton (1931) discusses the control of nuisances in the counties surrounding large cities in the suburban expansion in America in the early twentieth century. Rosenthal (2007) discusses the problem of sewage disposal in Birmingham (UK) in the 19th century and a famous legal case involving nuisance.
- 7.
Hurd (1903 , p. 78) argues that it was the promise of the absence of nuisance that, above all else, attracted wealthier homeowners to such developments. McKenzie (1921 , p. 149) lists absence of nuisance first in his list of factors affecting neighborhood property values. Hughes and Turnbull (1996) argues that restrictive covenants are best seen as reducing this risk of a bad outcome for home purchasers.
- 8.
Plan of subdivision.
- 9.
See Milner (1963 , pp. 400-412).
- 10.
See, for example, Dear (1992) and Schively (2007) .
- 11.
Private planning and public planning are not simply equivalents. There is a lively literature on whether public planning is better or worse than private planning. See Turvey (1954) , Davies (2002) and Moroni (2007) .
- 12.
On this, see Nelson (1977) and Mills (1979, p. 4).
- 13.
See, for example, Judge et al. (1995) .
- 14.
See Judge (1995) .
- 15.
See for example Hayward and Watson (1975).
- 16.
On the relationship between planning and politics, see Altshuler (1965), Rabinovitz (1969) , Hayward and Watson (1975), Sandercock (1975) , Johnson (1989) , Judge et al. (1995) , Lauria (1997) , Flyvbjerg (1998), and Hall and Hubbard (1998).
- 17.
There is no need here for regulation so demanded to be efficient. Bastiat (1851) ridicules the excesses of regulation.
- 18.
Nelson (1977, pp. 11–15) discusses shifts over time in the Supreme Court's interpretation of the municipal policing power.
- 19.
With some similarities to Schlager, Bammi and Bammi (1979) describe an application of mathematical programming to a regional land use plan for Du Page County IL. Among the numerous papers that cite Schlager in passing are Batty (1972), Brill et al. (1982), and Cao et al. (2011) .
- 20.
For overviews of optimization methods, see Bellman and Dreyfus (1962), Scott (1971), and Catanese (1972 , Chap. 28).
- 21.
See also Laidllaw (1972) and Killen (1983) .
- 22.
In what follows, I do not assume the reader is aware of Linear Programming. I apologize to those readers who are already expert in this area. My aim here is to encourage readers without such a background to see the value of this approach.
- 23.
Also known as a lot levy, a fee associated with any aspect of development of a piece of land.
- 24.
See Miron (2010 , p. 70) for further discussion on the origins of the Simplex Algorithm.
- 25.
Numerical process (sequence of steps) whose repeated application gives solution to a mathematical problem.
- 26.
The two classics on estimating development costs are Stone (1973) for England and Real Estate Research Corporation (1974) for America.
- 27.
For an introductory statement. see Catanese (1972, Chap. 7).
- 28.
See Hadley (1962 , Chap. 8) for further information on the construction of the dual from a primal.
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Miron, J.R. (2017). A Simple Model of Land Use Planning in the Urban Economy. In: The Organization of Cities . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50100-0_15
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