Growth Management by Land Use Regimes and Development Permitting

This research seeks to uncover why communities adopt and policies that influence growth by affecting the cost and timing of new development. It also seeks to account for variation across specific development decisions that result from differences in how land use policies are implemented. In order to provide a more integrative approach of land use policy, I advance the concept of Land-Use Regimes (LUR). LUR identifies multiple policies, ordinances and mandates chosen and implemented by local governments based on their impact on land development costs as well as their effect on uncertainty and delay in development process. I explain why different LUR configurations occur. Land Use Regimes are institutional arrangements formed by multiple individual policies, mandates and codes intended to shape individual's behavior. The understanding of the particular institutional and social environment that lead to the adoption of such policies, can help public mangers to understand the extent to which political institutions may lead to problems such as affordable housing, formation of exclusionary communities, decline of quality of life and degradation of the environment, among other urban issues associated with growth. This research shows that existing theories on land use regulation, do not explain why communities adopt a LUR that imposes high levels of delay to new developments, as well as the extent to which such delays complement or substitute other policies that encourages developers to behave in a particular form. Despite the possible inefficiency of land use policy based on delay, its adoption may be an objective for some political actors. Antigrowth groups such as some environmentalist groups or homeowners associations seeking exclusion and urban containment may prefer a high level of delay because it functions de facto as a growth control. In addition, local authorities, such as planning officials may prefer regulations that generate high levels of potential delay because they can use discretion to shorten or lengthen the timing of the review process. This research finds that by using their discretion to impose delay, local public officials can manage growth based on their own values and principles. In highly regulated regimes, planners increase their power to negotiate with developers in order to impose the values of the community or the set of values shared by their professional community. Therefore, a regulatory regime that imposes high levels of delay to new developments creates conditions for reviewers or public officials to become the "de-facto" regulators, because by defining the delay of a regime they decide what kind of projects are viable depending upon the financial costs that delays have on new developments.